Movie Review: Sucker Punch

Somehow, there's this indelible sense of global coolness to this film! Seriously.

It's a no-brainer - on a technical standpoint, Sucker Punch was outstanding. Unbelievable visual style. Grand action sequences. Beautiful set designs. Awesome special effects. Brilliant sound mixing. Fantastic cinematography. Epic soundtrack. Yes, I sometimes tend to lapse into hyperbole and those crazy superlatives, but I'm not kidding here. I really wanted to shed a tear just from the quality of it's production alone. It's nothing groundbreaking, but - wait for another one! - it rocked my brain out of my skull. Haha. It was too much to handle.

But while everything looked and sounded ridiculously amazing, the story, I thought, seemed a bit thin at times. Don't get me wrong, I found the whole concept to be great and the way Zack Synder attacked it was actually good, but with everything running in full throttle, I somehow wanted the story to be right there with it. I mean, it was almost as if they knew they had a great premise, but decided to focus on the action sequences with more precision.

Which, ironically, became a setback for the film. Sure, the stunts and action scenes looked wonderful, but everything became heavy handed half way through that - at one point - it all seemed quite repetitive and began to appear rather generic. The "missions" though pretty clever wasn't very thematic as far as I could tell. I was actually hoping that they would become progressively more challenging and difficult to complete, but they didn't even go there.

Dialogues were also almost non-existent in the first 30 minutes of the movie, solely relying on the gorgeous visuals and incredible soundtrack to provide a means of understanding things. Yes, it somehow worked, but it definitely ruined the potential the movie could have. I mean, it wasn't until the latter parts of the film where I felt any sort of emotion towards the characters and even then it seemed somewhat lacking. There wasn't much depth to any of them, which was a bit unfortunate.

For what it's worth though - and in a film under this genre where acting is of second priority - I thought the cast did a fine job with what they were given. Some characters felt a bit flat, but I saw good moments here and there.

Ultimately, Sucker Punch was something to marvel at visually with several shortcomings. Sure, the relatively thin plot kept it from achieving greatness, but I stubbornly overlooked that fact due to the abundance of it's unique stylistic flair and, as I've said, it's sense of global coolness. Haha. Of course, if you require a strong narrative on a film, I'm pretty sure that you may not care for it so much. But if you just want to take a little escape from reality, I guess this is the movie to enjoy.