I don’t usually write film reviews as I’m a huge believer in “see it and make up your own mind”, but after watching Zack Snyder’s latest visual feast on the ear-shattering, eye-filling 26 metre wide screen at London’s IMAX I felt compelled to put finger to keyboard.
After watching the trailers for Sucker Punch I was, as I’m sure most of you were, pant-wettingly excited about seeing it. Gun-toting, lingerie wearing hotties shooting Dragons from the back of a WW2 Bomber? Steampunk Nazi’s? Giant Samurai Warriors with gatling guns? This was the guy that brought us the amazing 300 and the previously considered unfilmable Watchmen, what could possibly go wrong?
As usual, I stayed clear of any reviews. I had caught wind of some discontent about the apparel choice of the five main protagonists, but put this down to militant feminists upset about the sexual portrayal of women as action heroines. Personally I didn’t care. Short skirts, leather boots, stockings and high-powered machine guns seemed ok to me 🙂
However, what I think this focus on the way the girls were dressed DID do was take away from the main problem with the film in that it was SHIT!
Story, or what there was of it, was confusing and thin at best. Visual elements were laid on SO thick that it was near impossible to absorb yourself into the world of Baby-Doll and her four scantily clad cohorts let alone actually CARE what happened to them. Action sequences were cut together so fast that most of the time it was hard to distinguish good from bad, though the frequent glimpses of thigh flesh and stocking top did help. I wouldn’t consider myself an old man and I am partial to some thumping beats, but even I found myself wishing they would turn the volume down a bit so that I could actually hear what the characters were saying.
The whole thing reminded me of the two Matrix sequels, where it was plainly obvious that after the astronomical success of the first film nobody on-set or at the studio had the balls to say to the Wachowski Brothers… “NO!”… “STOP!”. Where were the voices of reason when Zack was pitching this script? As an idea, a concept, it’s bloody fantastic, albeit written by two pubescent boys masturbating in their bedrooms. It needed the expert hand of a true storyteller. Had it been written by Alan Moore and spaced out into a series of 12 mini-comics it would have been a masterpiece.
If film studios are this desperate for new scripts these days on which to throw heaps of cash, I’ve dusted off the cover of something I was working on in my bedroom several years ago about a group of time-travelling lesbian prostitutes. Does anyone have the email address of someone influential at Warner Brothers?