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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Sucker Punch (Film)

by Erin Free | April 05, 2011 12:27 | Edited April 07, 2011 15:22

While everyone involved gives 100% and the action is dazzling, the lack of coherency and characterisation mean none of it clicks together meaningfully.

In Hollywood, the most dangerous thing can be to give a visionary director carte blanche. This might sound like a creative dream come true, but for the audience, the result is often a nightmare. After mining truly exciting, highly original cinema out of a series of brilliant adaptations - Dawn Of The Dead (a remake), 300 (a comic book), Watchmen (comic book) and Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga'Hoole (novel) - Warner Bros. threw millions at golden boy director Zack Snyder to create his first wholly original big screen vision, Sucker Punch, which he scripted with fellow first timer, Steve Shibuya.

 

The result is the kind of mess that actually could have benefited from the studio interference that we always hear so much about from apparently wronged filmmakers. Sucker Punch is certainly coursing with ideas and interesting concepts, and that's precisely the problem: there's just too much going on, and not much of it really clicks together in a meaningful way. Sure, it's far more invigorating to see a film like this - where everyone involved is giving it absolutely everything that they've got - than a film made on autopilot solely designed to make money, but it doesn't really make the actual act of watching the film any more satisfying.

 

The film's plot - about a young girl (Emily Browning) wrongly imprisoned in an insane asylum who mentally escapes into a world of her own (strangely enough, she imagines that the asylum is actually a baroque dance-hall-come-brothel, which would hardly seem like much of an "escape") - literally allows Snyder to do whatever he likes, because practically the entire film takes place in his lead character's head. Unfortunately, the film looks more like it's happening inside Zack Snyder's own head, with its imagery derived from Japanese Manga, Kill Bill, WW2 movies, The Lord Of The Rings, comic books and video games, with a little costume-fetish porn thrown in for good measure.

 

Though allegedly an exercise in female empowerment (why are nearly all the women in films directed by men about female empowerment so rampantly hot and scantily clad?), the film feels strangely prurient at times, while its fantasy-within-a-fantasy narrative structure is needlessly confusing and largely incoherent. Its action sequences are dazzling and imaginative, but because they're not grounded in any real characterisation, and because they exist largely outside the film's actual narrative, they quickly become tedious. Furthermore, while he seems intent on making a rollicking, cinematic thrill ride, Snyder confusingly punctuates proceedings with such jarring, unpleasant, graceless notes as rape, child abuse, murder, lobotomies and across-the-board cruelty.

 

If you could give a film an A+ for effort, the strikingly all-over-the-place and curiously alienating Sucker Punch would be it. Zack Snyder's bravura filmmaking techniques are in full, eye popping effect, and the performances are for the most part excellent, with Abbie Cornish and Oscar Isaac (as the sleazy, sanctimonious bully who lords it over the brothel) particularly impressive. Unfortunately, however, the film mainly shows that if you give a filmmaker the world, he often won't have the necessary skills to navigate it.