Film Review - Sucker Punch

Don't trust the write-ups on this one!! Not a clever way to start my own write-up you say? You may be right, but I rather have you ignoring my write-up as well and go and see for yourself what you make of this film.

Zack Snyder wrote (with Steve Shibuya) and directed "Sucker Punch" - Mr. Snyder's pervious body of work includes "Dawn of the Dead" (the 2004 remake, kind of an instant classic despite it being a remake), "300", the brilliant "Watchmen" and "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole" (can't comment on that one, I tend to avoid films starring speaking animals like the plague). You may have read that Sucker Punch did badly at the box office so far and that about 60% of the reviews are pretty bad. So what. If you rather want to wait for the fourth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, or the prequel of X-Men or some other safe Hollywood bet, milking previously successful franchises, then you better unsubscribe from this blog.

Sucker Punch features a great soundtrack: cover versions of 80s and 90s classics from Pixies (Where is my mind?) and Björk (Army of Me) to name only a couple of highlights provide a great musical atmosphere, which was also one of the strong points of Watchmen ("All along the Watchtower". Enough said!). The opening scene sets the tone for the film - the curtain lifts (literally - Snyder is telling a story after all) after the Production logos and the events leading to the main plot unfold in video clip style to a cover version of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (sung by female lead Emily Browning). The film tells an original story on three different levels of reality (or fiction, whatever you prefer), so you need to pay some attention - this is not Transformers 3 although the action scenes dominating the trailers may attract that kind of audience. Speaking of which - the action scenes are in a class of their own and obviously not meant to be realistic, they are a visual feast and clearly influenced by the pop culture (films and video games) of the last 15 to 20 years. Some of the board postings you can read on IMDB are shocking - a lot of people had no idea what was going on in the film although it really wasn's so difficult to figure out.

Snyder said in an interview that he wanted to make a film with cool action sequences as in "Ultraviolet" but with a meaningful, capturing story. I would say he succeeded in trumping Ultraviolet in the Audio-Visual department and managed to come up with an interesting story that kept me engaged throughout the whole film.

8/10 - watch this if you liked One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Brazil, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Watchmen and... Piranha 3D (that last one is an inside joke! The other ones, other than Watchmen, aren't really all that serious either, but I'd like to think that all of them had a bit of influence on this film)