It's been nearly a decade since the release of Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch.
To sort through our many conflicting feelings about this mind-bending action thriller,
we're giving the film another look and examining all the things we still don't understand about it.
But first, a word of warning, major spoilers are ahead.
After accidentally killing her sister, while trying to protect her from their
abusive stepfather, a young woman only known as "Babydoll" ends up in a mental asylum.
From the moment she arrives, she's at the mercy of a corrupt and vicious orderly named Blue.
With just five days remaining until Babydoll is scheduled to be lobotomized,
she teams up with four other inmates to plot a daring breakout.
Now, this is where things start to get a little tricky.
As Babydoll works toward escaping physically, she appears to be escaping her bonds mentally, as
well. She starts imagining fantastical worlds in which she and her crew are powerful heroes going
on a series of grand adventures. It's all a bit complicated, so let's break it down step by step.
Sucker Punch operates on three levels of reality. The first is the "real world," which is the
corrupt mental asylum where it seems that Babydoll and the other patients are victimized by the
staff. The second level is a nightclub that also functions as a brothel for its wealthy clients.
Babydoll imagines that the asylum is, in fact, this dangerous nightclub
run by a violent and possessive mobster. The third level of reality is Babydoll's totally
fantastical and heroic world of adventures, which is always set to modern rock and pop music.
We completely understand the asylum. That's the real world. We also basically understand the
fantasy sequences. Babydoll imagines a place in which she's powerful because in the actual world,
she's not. But it's that second layer of reality, the nightclub and the brothel, that
has us confused. It certainly isn't functioning as escapism for any of the female characters.
The imaginary brothel is no less hostile than the asylum, just slightly different.
We can't really think of a deeper thematic or artistic motivation behind its inclusion,
apart from being an excuse to dress up all the female characters in mini-skirts and lingerie.
"This is a joke, right?"
Unless we're missing something, we can't figure out what the film would lose if it
cut out the brothel and only had two levels of reality instead of three.
The tone would be the same, the trauma would be the same. All that would change are the
costumes and color palette. Oh, and the fact that the characters wouldn't be in a brothel.
Each time Babydoll dances in the nightclub reality, she's temporarily transported to
a different fantastical world, full of enemies and monsters that she must slay.
She's faced with everything from giant samurai to zombie steampunk soldiers to killer robots.
The implication is that these are Babydoll's dreams, but
why would a young person from the mid-1900s be dreaming in the tropes of modern geek culture?
"That would be crazy!"
However, there's a version of this that could have worked. In movies, a character's dreams
are a general reflection, in some way, of who that person is. Director Zack Snyder has stated
in interviews that the comics magazine Heavy Metal was a major inspiration for Sucker Punch.
So, perhaps, Babydoll herself could have also been established as a comic book fan.
Or, even better, she could have been an aspiring writer or artist who was a
couple decades ahead of her time, dreaming of fictional worlds that didn't exist yet.
For much of the movie, it seems as if the filmmakers treat Babydoll much the same way as
her captors do, simply as a means to an end - an object that only exists to fulfill their wishes.
She isn't really a person and her inner life doesn't matter.
These sequences are, rather transparently, just the writer's fantasies and not hers.
Whenever Babydoll and her friends are fighting enemies in a fantasy sequence,
they're also dealing with a problem in the nightclub reality.
However, most of the time, the actions they're performing within a fantasy seem to have little to
do with the corresponding goals they're trying to achieve outside of it. Do the specifics of these
fantasies actually matter to the real world, or are they just supposed to look really cool?
For instance, in one sequence, Babydoll is distracting a wealthy man by dancing while another
woman, Amber, steals a lighter from his jacket. In the fantasy, however, Amber is providing air cover
from a plane, so that Babydoll can sneak up on a baby dragon and steal a pair of magic crystals.
The action is a complete inversion of what's happening in the nightclub level of reality for no
apparent reason, and it makes it difficult to get emotionally invested in the dragon-slaying scene.
One notable exception to this lack of cohesion occurs when the women are trying to steal a
kitchen knife. When they fail and Rocket gets stabbed by the cook in the nightclub reality,
we cut back to the fantasy world, where Rocket heroically sacrifices herself to save her friends.
It's one of the stronger moments in the film,
primarily because the specifics of the fantasy sequences actually mean something.
A popular fan theory about Sucker Punch is that Babydoll isn't actually the point-of-view
character. In truth, the entire story is being told in past tense by Sweat Pea, the only woman
who actually escaped. Some take this theory even further, asserting that Babydoll herself never
existed, and she's an alternate persona that Sweet Pea invented for herself - a flawless superhero
that Sweet Pea pretended to be so she could gather the strength to break free of the asylum.
"This was never my story. It's yours. Now don't screw it up, okay."
So possibly, Sweet Pea invented the character of Babydoll because even if she couldn't personally
imagine slaying the dragons in her own life, she could imagine another person,
a hero, who could. Lie to yourself if you must, tell yourself that you have super powers,
and there's no obstacle you can't overcome. Or to put it another way…
"You have all the weapons you need. Now fight."
After the crew's plan to escape fails, things don't end well for most of them. Rocket is killed
by the cook, then Blondie and Amber are executed by Blue in the dressing room of the nightclub.
In the end, only Sweet Pea is able to survive and escape. But remember - all of this is only
happening in the imaginary world of the nightclub and not the real world of the asylum. We do get
a few brief scenes in the asylum after those tragedies, but Rocket, Amber, and Blondie are
nowhere to be seen. Were they actually killed? If you die in the nightclub, do you die in real life?
The only hints that we get are courtesy of Dr. Gorski,
when she offers a brief account of Babydoll's eventful five days in the asylum…
"She stabbed an orderly, started a fire, and helped another patient to escape."
However, she doesn't say anything about an orderly named Blue openly executing two other
patients in front of her. Additionally, given that Blue is eventually arrested
for authorizing medical procedures in Gorski's name without her permission,
you'd imagine that openly murdering patients would be much bigger news.
It makes sense if Blue is a powerful and violent mobster, and Gorski is working for him. But it
doesn't make sense at all if he's a mere orderly, and she's a doctor who presumably outranks him.
However things went down in the real version of Babydoll's attempted escape,
it was probably quite different. And whether or not Rocket,
Blondie, and Amber died in real life, that's just one of the many things we'll never know.
There's little in Sucker Punch that's as confusing as the mysterious Wise
Man who appears in Babydoll's fantasy battle sequences. This enigmatic figure
typically offers Babydoll and her team advice in the form of trite bumper sticker truisms.
"For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know."
Even more puzzling, these words of wisdom consistently have no
discernible relevance to the crew's current situation,
nor do they relate to the movie's deeper themes. So why is this character in the film?
We get an answer, sort of, in the final scene. As Sweet Pea is boarding the bus that will take her
to freedom, some police officers start asking her questions, suspecting that she's an escaped mental
patient. Fortunately, the bus driver steps in and convinces them to leave her alone. This character
is played by Scott Glen, who also portrayed the Wise Man. One potential interpretation
makes sense if, as we mentioned earlier, Sweet Pea has been the protagonist all along and she's
telling her story in the past tense. Since all the fantasies are really hers, perhaps she chose
to retroactively cast this man who saved her on the bus as a mentor figure throughout her
entire story. If so, we can't help but wonder why she wouldn't cast Gorski in that role instead.
She was helping all the women stay alive the entire time and not just at the very last minute.
"I teach them to survive you."
Sucker Punch definitely has some problematic moments and most have to do with how the film
treats its female characters. The issue isn't that it's about abuse. Plenty of films about
exploitation aren't themselves exploitative. Consider Mad Max: Fury Road. Just like Sucker
Punch, the plot centers on women who are attempting to free themselves from a terrible
situation. Their roads to freedom are similarly long and dangerous, and not all of them make it.
What Fury Road understands, however, is that even though characters within the film may treat women
as if they're objects, the film itself should always treat them like people. The main female
characters each get clearly defined personalities, wants, and conflicting philosophies.
Though Sucker Punch's heart may be in a similar place, it falls short of the mark
in its execution. The film's female heroes are more or less interchangeable Barbie dolls, with
minimal dialogue and indistinct personalities. They exist only to be stared at, tortured,
and eventually killed for shock value. Contrast this with how the movie treats the primary abuser,
Blue. He's perhaps the most complex, three-dimensional character in the film.
And his numerous, lengthy monologues mean that he has easily twice as much dialogue as any woman.
This sadly proves that Sucker Punch can make a character interesting
when it cares about them - it just didn't care about its female heroes enough to do this.
Sucker Punch is often accused of being a shallow and exploitative film that only
exists as an excuse to show women in mini-skirts fighting in slow motion.
For all the harsh things we've said about the film so far, we don't think that's entirely fair.
The film is clearly trying to make some sort of deeper point. So, let's give it the benefit
of the doubt and try to figure out what the filmmakers might be trying to say.
Within the context of the fantasy sequences, Sucker Punch mimics the tropes of senseless
and seductive action films. This practice of filming women in an objectifying way to bring
pleasure to the viewer is often referred to as the "male gaze," a term coined by film theorist
Laura Mulvey. Sucker Punch, however, might be attempting to challenge this paradigm.
Through additional layers of reality, the asylum and the nightclub,
the film equates the objectification of women in film with the dehumanization they experience
in real life, which could be interpreted as a condemnation of both forms of exploitation.
All of this culminates in the scene of Babydoll's lobotomy. When she is stabbed in the eye,
so is the viewer. The male gaze is penetrated, our happy ending denied. We think we're getting
a fun escapist fantasy, and instead, the ending of the film hits us like, well, a sucker punch.
So what's the final verdict? Is Sucker Punch pure exploitation or a statement about it?
In truth, it's sort of both, but more than anything, it's just confused.
The film takes a stab at a feminist message, but whatever it's trying to say gets lost in
a web of shallow characters, dead-end plot threads, and inexplicable narrative choices.
“Have you just ever wanted to just take something back?”
That being said, for all of the film's faults, a lack of ambition is not one of them.
There were plenty of bigger-than-life action scenes, stunning imagery,
and genuinely outrageous concepts. We'd much rather that filmmakers
take big swings like this one - even if they miss and fall down in spectacular fashion.
"Well, so much for that little experiment."
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