‘Sucker Punch,’ Zack Snyder’s hated 2011 movie, is actually good

Welcome to No Shame November! This week we’re diving into the pop culture we love that society tells us we shouldn’t.

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We all have hills we’re willing to die on. There’s one in particular that I’ve bloodied again and again over the past seven years. Here it is:

Sucker Punch is actually a good movie.

Zack Snyder created something much smarter in Sucker Punch than he ever gets credit for. It’s deeply flawed in a few important ways, but pay attention and it’ll take you by surprise. It was sold as a vehicle for dazzling CG effects and scantily clad women kicking ass, but there’s a thoughtfulness to the way Sucker Punch is constructed that justifies the marketing sleight of hand. That might even be the point.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it (I’m gonna spoil the whole thing, be aware): The newly orphaned Babydoll (Emily Browning) is framed for the murder of her sister and sent off to a shady mental institution. It’s all the family lawyer’s doing; he wants the mother’s estate for himself, so he pays off the corrupt orderly Blue (Oscar Isaac) to make sure Babydoll is lobotomized.

Image: Legendary Pictures/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

All of this plays out in the first 10 minutes. Sucker Punch doesn’t spend a ton of time on dialogue, and the opening in particular leans heavily on visual clues, relying on viewers to piece things together. It also establishes the dreamlike, dark fairy tale vibe that pervades every frame that follows. 

Very little of the two-hour running time plays out in a real world. Shortly after she’s committed, Babydoll concocts an elaborate fantasy in which the asylum becomes a cabaret theater/brothel. She and her fellow inmates are the dancers, the doctor who treats them all (Dr. Gorski, played by Carla Gugino) is their instructor/madam, and Blue is the thuggish boss keeping them all under lock and key.

Sucker Punch doesn’t spend a ton of time on dialogue.

That setting soon gives way to yet another layer of fantasy: every time Babydoll dances, she closes her eyes and is whisked off to a new fantastical landscape. We in the audience never actually see her dance; those musical moments are realized instead as CG-heavy action sequences that unfold in these dreams-within-a-dream.

And so we come to the heart of what “works” so well for me in Sucker Punch: Whether he meant to or not, Snyder created what amounts to a cinematic cover of a video game. Babydoll’s dance sequences take their form and structure from games to an extent that I’ve never seen in any other movie.

Consider the environments, for one. There’s the Dark Souls-esque showdown with a trio of towering monster samurai. The World War I trench battle against an army of German zombie soldiers. The assault on an orc-filled castle and its fire-breathing dragon overlord. And the high-speed heist aboard a train defended by faceless automatons.

At the beginning of each sequence, actor Scott Glenn shows up to explain what’s happening and offer some words of encouragement. He is, very clearly, the quest-giver, delivering a mix of exposition and trite one-liners. He’s not so much a character as he is a cipher, fulfilling the demands of an invisible string-puller whom we never meet.

Check out what he says to Babydoll in their first encounter. 

GLENN: These are your weapons. [shows her a semi-automatic pistol and a katana sword] When you take them, you begin your journey. Your journey to freedom.

You will need five items for this journey. The first is a map. Then fire, then a knife, then a key.

BROWNING: You said five things.

GLENN: The fifth thing is a mystery. It is the reason. It is the goal. It will be a deep sacrifice, and a perfect victory. [Browning starts to respond] Only you can find it. And if you do, it will set you free.

Oh, and one more thing. [he turns her around to face her foe] Defend yourself!

It always goes like this. She shows up in some weird fantasy scene, he walks in and explains what’s happening, then peaces out. Free of context, the video game element at play in Sucker Punch is simply an unconventional narrative device. But there’s another layer at work here.

Fundamentally, Sucker Punch is a story about escape. From our demons, and a past that haunts us. From real physical threats. From the ceaseless noise of an active yet fractured mind. Most importantly, from a society that shuns one group or another as less than equal. 

Image: Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock

Babydoll, clearly a victim, is robbed of any power she had right at the start. Sucker Punch isn’t a story of her self-empowerment, or of these women casting off their shackles. It’s about how they craft for themselves this illusion of freedom, an elusive thing that’s always just out of reach and dependent on one more win. As we learn in the end, the only real victory hinges on a great loss.

Much of the plot revolves around Babydoll and her friends engineering a very real escape plan. They all want their freedom. We see that plan hatched not in the real world, but in that action-packed sub-fantasy. The map, fire, knife, and key — the focus of this escape “quest” — all have analogues in both the real world and the brothel fantasy layered on top of it. 

The brothel itself is also a form of escape. We’re meant to understand that it’s the defense mechanism Babydoll’s subconscious conjures up to help her cope with her current circumstance and the series of horrible events that led her there.

The video game fantasies, however, represent her truest escape. When Babydoll dances, the world around her disappears. That’s where she sees things as they are. Not the truth of her reality, mind you. I’m talking about inner truth. The ideas and impulses that will eventually lead her to freedom.

The clock was still ticking back then, even if no one could quite hear it.

Games do provide that kind of escape in real life. An opportunity to step away from the world for a period of time and inhabit another being, another mindset, another reality. It’s what makes them so special and unique as a form of entertainment.

Of course, they’re not actually games in Sucker Punch. But in using the language of video games to power those sequences, Snyder helps us contextualize Babydoll’s purest coping mechanism and better understand how it ties into the movie’s broader, darker themes. Babydoll and her friends are chasing freedom, which they all see as a happy ending. But the truth is not quite so clear-cut. These women have been robbed of control over their own lives by the abusive men of the world. Freedom for them, we’re told, is a total removal from that grim reality.

In deference to all the haters, the story Snyder is trying to tell does fall apart in a few key ways. The dialogue-light approach makes way for Snyder’s powerful visual spectacle but it comes at the cost of character development. Babydoll is the most developed of the bunch, but the rest of her squad — even Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the stealth protagonist of the story, and her sister Rocket (Jena Malone) — is woefully underdeveloped.

That makes it harder to vibe with what Sucker Punch has to say about the objectification and othering of women in both pop culture and IRL culture. It’s sadly ironic: Sucker Punch undercuts its own themes because it doesn’t spend enough time giving a voice to the women it claims to speak for. We see plenty of skin from the five stars but very little of what’s underneath.

The end of Sucker Punch‘s theatrical cut is also a mess, largely because it’s missing a key scene between Babydoll and Jon Hamm’s High Roller, the surgeon performing her lobotomy. An extended cut corrects this oversight, putting a much better period on Babydoll’s story as a result.

It’s still a dark ending, but that was always the intent. Babydoll’s sacrifice creates the distraction needed for Sweet Pea to escape and delivers what Glenn’s character had described earlier as her “perfect victory.” Even the procedure that leaves Babydoll permanently catatonic is its own, dark win; she willingly submits to oblivion, and the sweet promise escape it offers.

Snyder’s grim vision fell short because he didn’t employ the tools he had well enough. The dark journey in Sucker Punch is a wildly over-the-top reflection of a world that many people were unwilling or unable to see at that point. He undermined his own work by not giving us enough story, ending up with a movie that feels more exploitative than reflective.

Sucker Punch is meant to be an examination of sexism and the multiple planes on which it exists. This was 2011, remember. Harvey Weinstein was still a movie mogul. Bill Cosby was still a beloved comic and former TV star. The world was waking up more and more, but we were a long way off from Time’s Up. The clock was still ticking back then, even if no one could quite hear it.

It’s a hell of a thing to watch Sucker Punch in 2018, a time when so many of the tough topics Snyder set out to address are squarely in the public eye. It’s not a better movie now (I still maintain it was never bad), but watching it again with fresh eyes, it’s easier to see the story’s strengths shining through.