Sucker Punch is peak Zack Snyder, for better or worse

There may be Zack Snyder movies more notorious than Sucker Punch — particularly those that pertain to Batman and/or Superman and/or their mothers’ shared first name — but no Snyder movie has bombed harder at the box office than his action-fantasy-psychodrama. (Yes, even the one about warring owls did better.) Perhaps not coincidentally, Sucker Punch, which takes place simultaneously in a corrupt mental institution, a gangster-run brothel, and an impossibly vast fantasy battle-scape, is also the only Snyder movie not based on pre-existing materials to receive a wide theatrical release. Its flop was a sign that, for as much mainstream success and cult adoration as the filmmaker has enjoyed on various projects, there are limits to his fandom, and maybe also his imagination.

Fittingly, the attempt to transcend imposed limitations by unconventional means is very much a subject of Sucker Punch. In the 15 years following its release on March 25, 2011, Snyder has made this a subject of his career. He has repeatedly delivered movies that seem like pure, uncut shots of his sensibility, only to later insist that these big-budget productions had been compromised by studio interference. Maybe that’s why the central narrative hook of Sucker Punch resembles a galaxy-brained pitch meeting more than a traditional story, and why that bizarre pitch is ultimately more successful (creatively, if not financially) than many of his adaptations.

In the film’s opening moments, a young woman nicknamed Babydoll (Emily Browning) is committed to a mental institution by her evil stepfather, who bribes an orderly (Osar Isaac) to have her lobotomized. (It appears to be sometime in mid-century America, when this practice was still relatively common.) Faced with this seemingly hopeless situation, Babydoll imagines herself in a different world, though not a less cruel one. In her fantasy, the institution becomes a brothel, where she and her fellow patients/inmates Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) are imprisoned as burlesque-dancing prostitutes. Babydoll is forced to rehearse for the arrival of a “high roller” who will take her virginity, but devises an escape plan — and when she performs her distractingly beguiling dances, she enters an additional level of fantasy, where she and the other girls battle robots, dragons, and steampunk zombies. In the brothel world, these videogame-like quests are actually the girls secretly gathering supplies they need to escape while men stare slackjawed at Babydoll.

Snyder’s decision to layer three realities on top of one another is equally audacious and confusing. It almost feels as if he wanted to make a movie about escaping into the fantasy of a colorful movie musical but couldn’t sell anyone on the actual musical numbers, and so for those segments returned to the fantasy-action territory he’s better-known while inexplicably refusing to completely cut the brothel material. The result is a hybrid of Dancer in the Dark and Charlie’s Angels. According to Snyder, he was commenting on how women are sexualized in genre films and geek culture. According to some viewers at the time, he did so much sexualizing himself that he might as well have made pornography.

Though the action sequences are used to elide actually showing Babydoll’s apparently incendiary and seductive gyrations, the fact that the gals are outfitted like characters out of a male-drawn anime sent up a red flag for critics, especially when combined with Snyder’s claims of subversion and empowerment. Granted, the latter might be a bit lofty given what actually happens in the movie. It’s a trademark of Snyder’s work that he often speed-runs toward bleakness in a way that doesn’t feel earned, no matter how many extra minutes his extended cuts add on (a bigger-picture version of his treasured slow-mo-then-fast speed-ramping). Sucker Punch suffers a little from his competing instincts to empower his female characters with big, crazy action scenes, and to bum audiences out by spitting bleak truths about his characters’ struggle.

Image: Warner Bros.

But it’s also wild to recall that the appearance of sometimes-bare midriffs and somewhat short skirts were described as such masturbatory filth. The sexuality of the movie’s action sequences is incredibly tame by almost any standards. In an era where cosplay is more mainstream than ever, the idea that Emily Browning wearing a little sailor outfit and Jamie Chung going sleeveless represent the height of insidious exploitation sounds pretty limited, maybe even condescending.

The movie’s action was also criticized for appearing too weightless and CG-saturated — too much like a video game, in other words. But compared to so many drab-looking visual effects extravaganzas released since, Sucker Punch’s visual scheme falls closer to live-action/animation hybrids of the period, like Speed Racer and Avatar. In a retrospective interview about the film, Snyder and interviewer Evan Schwartz both describe its quartet of fantasy-action sequences as “lyrical,” and less based in tension than traditional action. It’s true that most of these scenes don’t generate suspense. They’re more akin to comics splash pages or music videos (each sequence basically has a cover of a pop hit serving as a theme song) with a dreamlike freedom from gravity and human physicality. Received on those terms, they’re lighter and more whimsical than many superhero movie battles, albeit with grimmer circumstances underpinning them. They exist outside of the usual demands of action sequences, especially compared to the superficially similar 300, with its emphasis on bared muscles and painterly bloodshed.

If there’s tension in those scenes, it derives from contrasting the women’s constricted lives with how freely they’re able to use their bodies in the deepest-layer fantasy world. This has less to do with their showing some moderate amount of skin or wearing potentially fetishized outfits than their ability to leap and twirl with impossible confidence and abandon. Due credit to Snyder’s scrambled multi-level vision: The digital acrobatics do loop around to resemble over-the-top dance numbers (which, hey, also often feature unrealistic and sexualized costumes).

Babydoll’s ability to mentally escape, and eventually help at least one other girl literally escape, does leave the group of women looking like ciphers, channel-flipping through traumas and fantasies in search of agency and identity — the combo of weapon-wielding and dance moves (again, very videogame-coded) that will define them. It’s a provocative idea, muddied by how Snyder’s style blurs the lines between fantasy and reality before the movie even gets to its brightly colored brothel or steampunk zombies. Scenes in the mental institution as just as heightened as those fantasy worlds, with exaggerated imagery (a pair of split-diopter shots to go ultra-close on Babydoll’s eyeball while keeping the faces of her captors in focus) and on-the-nose music cues (“Some of them want to abuse you,” says the “Sweet Dreams” cover as orderlies make clear their intent to abuse Babydoll). It’s a kick to watch — this may be Snyder’s most visually inventive movie — and murky to meaningfully sort through.

Image: Warner Bros.

So while Snyder’s movie has been misinterpreted from a variety of angles, that’s in part because he provides so many of them in the first place. That Sucker Punch is richer in both visual and thematic ideas than many of his other movies only increases its dissonance, especially when Snyder gives the impression of not having quite worked everything out. He’s not the only contemporary filmmaker whose propensity for making (or vaguely planning to make) director’s cuts indicates a tinkerer’s sensibility. But next to Michael Mann, James Cameron, or Ridley Scott, his particular method of tinkering looks especially arbitrary and sometimes downright speculative.

Hence there is a theatrical cut of Sucker Punch that runs 110 minutes; an “extended cut” on Blu-ray that runs almost 20 additional minutes, clarifying certain story points and adding some more R-rated material; and a nonexistent “director’s cut” that Snyder has talked about without quite explaining what it would entail beyond an ending scene that would tease out another genuine musical number. (Oscar Isaac and Carla Gugino’s performance of “Love Is a Drug” is restored to the body of the film in the extended version; the theatrical cut chops it up into a credits song.) There’s always some unmade future version of his movies that will more thoroughly illustrate his vision.

To the extent that Sucker Punch comes together, it ends on a clanger of a voiceover call to action, and I’m not sure if Snyder’s proposed production number would have carried his points across any better (though it would have probably been an easier listen than that narration). But that messy, unfinished quality is friendlier to movies like Sucker Punch and Rebel Moon than Snyder’s reverent misinterpretations of various comic book characters. It always felt telling that his big, vague plans for the DC Universe involved not a seminal comic storyline or his own brand-new ideas, but an apocalyptic gloss on the Injustice video game; wrestling with a bunch of high-profile IP only makes his movies feel indecisive. (In this case, there’s a fine line between “deconstructive” and “dumb on purpose.”) Sucker Punch engages more with why people might read comics and play video games and dress up in impractical costumes. This more thoughtful attempt at deconstruction renders its struggles, whether of the characters or the filmmakers, far more enduring — and endearing.

Sucker Punch is streaming on HBO Max.