Silver Screen Review:Sucker Punch

For this week’s review, I look at a film directed by one of my favorite director, Zach Snyder. Zach Snyder has made a career for himself with movies such as “300”, “Watchmen” and more recently, “Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”. This time Zach Snyder creates a movie both written and directed by him. This movie is “Sucker Punch”, a movie that looked to be a madman’s paradise. But is it a madman’s paradise? Prepare for the unexpected in this review of “Sucker Punch”.

Story:  I like the idea of “Sucker Punch’s plot: exploring the human imagination in a very dark world; however the story is lost in translation. The plot is very confusing and spontaneous. It is difficult to understand what the story is trying to communicate. You would think how this film was advertise that there would be something in the story that would blow your mind away, but there is not, it more of a low blow to the audience.

Characters:   Apparently all the girls in the movie were good while the guys were bad. As interesting as that sounds, the development did not work.  The bad guys in this movie were flat with no thought to their characters except for the fact that they were bad. These characters might as well be wearing top hats as they twirl their mustaches and wave their capes around as they laugh manically.  The main female characters had a little more development then the villains, but I felt there was no real drive to their characters. Though the performances were not bad, the development however did not cut for a film of this caliber.

Directing:  At first sight, you can tell that this is a Zach Snyder movie because of the signature to his movies, which are the zoom ups to significant objects and the cinematography to name a few. The only differences with Sucker Punch and Snyder’s other movies is that these elements are taken to the extreme in this movie.  Most of the time, I like the creativity of Zach Snyder, but not when it comes to “Sucker Punch”. I think with “Sucker Punch”, he was doing little too much to make it unique.

Everything Else:  “Sucker Punch’s” imagination sequences are full of swords, samurai, robots, giant robots, dragons and zombie Nazis.  These reasons alone were all that I need to be excited for this movie, but did they help movie in anyway? My answer to that is yes and no. The imagination sequences were cool to see, but there was little to no explanation about them and as entertaining as they were, there seem to be no reason to the madness.

Overall: I thought “Sucker Punch” could have been something interesting, but the story and characters really killed the momentum for me. I suppose that if you do not think much on it, “Sucker Punch” can be entertaining. Unfortunately, “Sucker Punch” is not something to be unexpected. 3 out 5 hats for effort.