Sucker Punch

Before I fill the cracks in this move with trinitrotoluene and Nitro-glycerine, in the express intent of fellating it to sexy smithereens – I mean blow, so sorry – let me get it over and done with and say that, dear Ganesh, this movie is many bucket loads of pretty. It can be summarized in the term, fap-tastic. It even has a soundtrack that makes me wish my candles were all lit and I was losing myself in the rhythmic thrusts of a lover’s embrace.

Now to look at the movie with kind of clarity men only get after climax, when the abruptly induced P.O.D. (post Orgasmic Disgust) lets you see past the glossy candy coating, and you are left with the shallow, frail, poorly nourished and overall weak remnants of a movie that looked so great in the haze of your once triumphant erection.  The movie exists on three levels, neither one in any way really needing the other, except to either ride on the Inception band-wagon or to use misdirection to give the illusion of depth.  You see, at the base level the story is simple but powerful, the type of tail that would make for a compelling short story that could be masterfully told by, let us say Stephen King for example, mostly because of the tragic nature of the end. It is pretty much about a girl whose mother dies, leaves all her wealth to her two daughters and not the money hungry new husband, who subsequently loses his temper, confrontations ensue, youngest daughter dies, oldest gets thrown into an asylum by the authoritarian masculine disciplinary discursive institutionalization system  of the time so she can get lobotomized, *inhale* does some things to escape the awful conditions of the asylum that are instigated by the rape-inclined male orderly, people die, she lets herself get caught and hence lobotomized so some-one else can escape, irregularities in the paperwork get the orderly caught, and he’s a snitch if ever there were one, so all the bad people are going to get punished but the ending doesn’t have too many rainbows, which means I get to munch on a nice big slice of catharsis pie, yummy.  Plus you get to see the endings tragedy in the beginning, so it double barrel’s you with dramatic tension and the classic Greek tragedy structure we like so much with our morning cereal.

                If they had used this alone in a ninety minute to two hour long movie, it could have been a powerful psychological thriller. But alas it got Gothica flash backs, so it decided to tart itself up by adding on completely new story on top of it, I know right, that is in fact far more shallow, but is presented, I think, as her internal coping mechanism for what is going on around her. In this dolled up version of events she is at a nightclub that keeps its girls hostage, where the dancers are whored out. She plans and executes the escape attempt in this version of the story, but it’s really happening in the first version of the story. The premise is that she dances and the other girls steal things needed to escape.

                So far, so followed, but it seems like that is all just pandering for the scenes that are the ultimate suck up to the Big-Boy’s Club of cool. I mean the type of cool you just want to spell with a K for no good reason, or am I the only one who ever feels like that.  You see, when she dances, she goes to the strange, violent and obscenely kick-ass alternative world that looks like it came from an E3 convention, because… now this is where I get stumped. These scenes seem to only give us a crude metaphorical representation of the plans objectives and the dangers they entail. Other than that it they seem to only serve the purpose of taking everything the internet (4chan) can’t get enough masturbating to and wrapping it in an insanely attractive box and going “Ta-Da, you have to like this, we followed the recipe to the letter”. This recipe is a menagerie of fan favourites such as  a giant robot samurai with a Gatling gun, steam punk zombie Nazis fighting girls in school uniforms and a Dreadnaught, Orcs, Dragons, the guy from Kung-Fu who gave us the pebble from the hand snatching, robots, a Samurai sword, Epic explosions, girls and tons of guns. It then applies icing on the cake with copious and unnecessary aesthetically brilliant violence to stoke the thick and pulsating phallus of cool. The way they move and shoot when they are up against the undead anti-Semites is frighteningly reminiscent of Counter Strike meets the chicks of Gears of War, with mini Skirts instead of power amour. And the strange thing is, a part of me is certain it was done intentionally, just to make it cooler.

Sadly, by trying so hard, it lacked what truly makes a movie “Cool”, creativity. This movie just sat down and tried to tick off as many things as it could in the hopes of keeping us happy and not asking to many questions about the narrative’s structure or progression. “Just enjoy the pretty pictures,” it says to us, while with one hand it strokes our head and coos, yet with the other hand it quietly faps and trolls on /b/.

Don’t you love the dehumanizing nick names the girls get, just to nail in that final “women are objects in our society” plug, while at the same time basing the selling point around substituting  powerful and meaningful moments in the narrative with pandering to Internet memes. Question, where do girls in miniskirts and tight fitting shirts keep the bucket loads of ammo they go through as if they were on Metal Storm.

Please tell me “waking the mother” is an inter-textual reference/euphemism for giving the mayor and erection, because if it is, I am so using. Stuff it, I will use it anyway because its cools.

 Fuck them for killing a baby dragon.

                The strangest thing to me is the fact that the most visually off-putting thing in the movie is in fact lead actress. Many people might argue that she is the pinnacle of hot. They will herald her hotness, whilst listing every segment of her and how it’s exactly what we think is hot, or at least strive towards, and therein lays the problem. In the same way the closer an artificial object gets to looking real it borders on the Uncanny Valley, so if a person looks too much like an artificial concept of beauty the weirder and more unappealing they look. If I was wrong about this then Heat Magazine would not be doing monthly exposés on plastic surgery addiction/mishaps. So the main gal actually reverses into the uncanny valley.  And she only has one expression, the Botox-ed, blank stare, pouting, ooze hotness into the distance look. Her face turns me off. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the aesthetic appeal in a woman who resembles more a doll or the surgically altered than a real human being.

I have just realised for what this movie will be burned by the pages of history for, when I write them of course. This movie, on a base level, trivialises its characters. It sits in a boardroom and touts with certainty how “no one wants to watch a touchy feely movie about psycho chicks on their period, just go and Google ‘what gives guys hard-on’s’ and pad the Buddha out of it. Oh, and call my daughter, tell her daddy can’t come her cello recital, he’s got to deposit some seminal fluid on the chest of a well endowed exotic dancer tonight”. Escapism is great, but when it is done at the cost of a great narrative, it conveys to the audience that the suffering and tribulations of others need not, nor should it warrant our attention, lest it be riddled with CGI splendour.