Do you ever make chilli con carne? Have you ever made chilli and forgotten to season it properly? I have and I can tell you, it’s a strange and extremely disappointing experience to taste it afterwards. All the right things are there, the flavour is roughly similar and all but somehow it just isn’t anywhere near the standard of your usual cooking.
Can you see the parallel I’m trying to draw here?
The action in Sucker punch is bad, really bad, it commits the cardinal sin of action in film, it’s boring. It shouldn’t be, it has zombie Nazis, robots and dragons fighting unrealistically attractive and scantily clad women one of who rides a mecha suit. Not to mention it’s made by the guy who directed 300 and Watchmen, this film should kick ass but it doesn’t. Here’s why:
The zombie Nazis aren’t threatening at all, as the heroines can and do walk through them as though they were unnamed enemies in a dynasty warriors game.
The robots are just as ineffectual and have a bad habit of standing around and waiting for the stars to kill the last lot before trying to shoot them themselves.
The dragons cause a few more problems for the goodies but are ultimately both killed by one sword wound. Very anti-climactic.
The mecha, and all of the other military equipment one of the girls pilots (She seems to be the designated driver) are all very capable of getting the various missions done in seconds due to the sheer armour and fire power afforded to war-machines and so are forgotten about until they reappear as a convenient deus ex machina.
The girls, while unrealistically attractive and scantily clad, don’t have much character and never once let loose a quick badass one liner. So they don’t carry the film on the back of badass characters.
Overall it just isn’t very exciting. Remember what action films were like before the new Batman and James Bond films? Everyone jumping about on wires and ploughing through mooks without a thought (and not in a good way), none of the hits had any weight to them.
That’s what this is like and it’s a style of film I think Hollywood should really have moved past by now. There are a few nods to the Zach Snyder school of action, you know, the action slows down and speeds up you know the drill. Also, do you remember the first fight in Watchmen where the comedian gets thrown out of his window? Remember how when he gets punched in the face it goes slow-mo and his face gets all distorted and ripples with the force of the punch? That shot is in this movie and it kind of sucks. Probably because a twenty something year old actress probably has much better skin elasticity than Jeffrey Dean does.
So I don’t think Sucker punch is a very good action film. Or maybe to be clearer, I don’t think Sucker punch is a very good action FILM. Without giving out any spoilers the structure of the main bulk of Sucker punches plot structure is consists of the main character progressing though a comparatively realistic over world by going from area to important area and entering a symbolic themed world where the hero’s have to shoot, hack and slash there way though a selection of enemies usually culminating in a climactic battle.
This isn’t just me is it? That’s the plot of a video game right?
I love video games and all but when your high budget blockbuster’s plot is directly comparable to Pokémon red and blue you’ve made a mistake or two.
At the end of the day Sucker punch is the worst thing I’ve seen from Snyder, both in terms of screenplay and execution, it tries somewhat to do something a bit clever here and there but it uniformly fails. It ain’t great but it’s got tits and guns in it so it’ll probably make money right?
DON’T WATCH IT.
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