Sucker Punch

AFTER HEARING SO MUCH BAD about Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, I really expected to dislike this movie. However, I'm glad to say that I was pleasantly surprised by what I've watched and this is the theatrical cut of the film I'm talking about (I've seen at least three deleted scenes exclusive to the BLU-RAY on YouTube and it's simply up to my mind to fill in the blanks when I watch the movie on DVD and those particular scenes happen to be missing).For the most part, I think I'll just skip over my opinions on the all the Feminist arguments and follow-the-leader "I'll compare to this movie to a movie that came out a year earlier" commentary that I've seen on around the internet. I'll simply say that for the most part, I think most of the things said about this movie are in fact valid as far as Feminist critique is concerned. Zack Snyder, try as he might, doesn't understand feminism and empowerment for women and shamelessly attempts to cover his fantasy behind a flimsy veil of fan service and a love for how certain types of anime depict females. It wants to subvert the degrading ways women are depicted in media, but it fails in every way possible on this aspect. But is the movie bad because of it? No, not really. It's more embarrassing than anything because it reflects just how badly feminism is misunderstood and seen by general [male] populace on a whole.However, when it comes to knocking an otherwise enjoyable action flick for being an "Inception" / "Matrix" ripoff, this is where a lot of the complaints lose me. People did the same thing with " PUSH  (2009)", a sci-fi/superhero movie (I that I loved) that has almost nothing in common with 2008's " JUMPER " (a poor adaption of an otherwise great sic-fi novel by Steven Gould) outside of the "Evil Organization out to get the protagonist" plot and what movie doesn't use that theme? Sucker Punch has superficial similarities to "Inception" (who's concept is by no means as original as its EXECUTION) and the "Matrix" and that's where the buck stops.If I have anything bad to say about this movie it's the fact that you cannot skip the DVD Advertisement to get to the DVD Menu (at least on the Rental DVD version). There has to be a told of six to ten minutes worth of BLU-RAY-COMING SOON-NOW ON DVD ads shoved down your throat and you can't skip any of it. That aside, the storyline is as simple as it gets:[A girl, codenamed "Baby Doll", and her unnamed little sister have suffered the loss of their equally unnamed their mother and are left with a rotten stepfather as their guardian. When he discovers that his wife has left everything to her two daughters, he throws a fit and decides he's going to have his way with the oldest girl. However, when she rebels, he locks her in her bedroom and goes after her little sister (who ends up evading him and locking herself in a closet with his keys). In a panic, Baby Doll exits her bedroom through her window and reenters the house armed with a gun just as the stepfather kicks the closet door open.However, she misses her intended target and kills her sister instead. She's understandably grief stricken that she's robbed herself of the one person that mattered to her and is left with the one she could do without and run from the house. The cops find her at her mother's grave and her stepfather gets her admitted to a presumably all-female insane asylum where she awaits a lobotomy in five days. However, Baby Doll has no intentions of waiting to a hole punched into her head and enlists the help of four girls (Sweet Pea, Rocket, Amber and Blondie) to get her and themselves out of the madhouse. In order to do this, they need five items (a Lighter, Map, Key, Knife and one unnamed item that will be the decider of how the plan goes), but all of them are under the guard of those who would keep them locked inside the madhouse (or brothel, depending how Baby Doll depicts her reality).]Other than that, the enjoyment of the movie hinges on how well the actresses perform and how much you enjoy stylized action sequences straight out of an anime realized by someone who knows how to blend the overtop with visually stunning universes out of a fantasy book and not detract from the overall point of the movie. And with that, for a movie that literally runs on the fuel of a screenplay written by himself, Snyder does a good job. He gets the point of his tale across better than most would be willing to admit. It's certainly not the tasteless and fetishized movie a lot of people made it out to be.When the characters interact with one another it doesn't come off an contrite or something made to kill time between action sequences; on more than one occasion, three out of the five female characters have a actual conversation with each other and the movie is better for it, I think. The relationship between sisters, Rocket and Sweet Pea, as unexplored as it is, for me, was the most genuine part of the movie. The actors Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone, made me believe that they were siblings on polarizing ends of a situation that was guaranteed to fail if something went wrong.However, the one thing he does fail on is the entire concept of a Sucker Punch. Granted, it's no surprise what happens to Baby Doll (they show it at the beginning of the movie for goodness sake), but Between Scott Glenn and Jon Hammm, I'm not sure who gave away the meaning of the entire ending more. The Doctor/High Roller or the Wiseman who likes quote Grandpa from " The Jackie Chan Adventures "? If I was surprised by anything it was how abrupt the cut between the close up on Baby Dolls face to the lobotomy needle was, other than that, one of the two the characters I wanted to see get out of that place alive, did and therefore I was content.I, for one, enjoyed all four universes created by Baby Doll, paricularly the Medieval Japan and Futuristic city that bookend the first and final acts of the movie. The action sequences, complemented with a impressive soundtrack of varying sounds and styles of cover songs or remixes of the better known singles of days gone bye, are executed with perfection. The music video feel of it all works well with the interpretation that Baby Doll's dances are interpreted by her mind through violence and a way to achieve her goals which coincide with one another. I'm not even disappointed in the fact that we never get to see her dance as that was never one of the things I was dying to see in this movie.The acting for the most part is good. Emily Browning isn't a terrible actress, she gets the personality (or lack thereof) and determination of Baby Doll's character across to the audience rather well, but if anything she was one of the weaker performers of the primary cast. Vanessa Hudgens doesn't do a bad job in a movie that is basically her way of trying to become an adult in the wrong way most young actresses tend to do, but she isn't awful until she tries to cry on screen.The actress who plays Amber isn't given anything to do except play wingman for most the movie and therefore has the weakest performance in the movie because she isn't given anything worth its weight in significance. Honestly, the strongest actors in the movie are Abbie Cornish and Jena Malone, who are given more do in the action and non-action sequences any of the other girls combined, especially if you adopt the idea that the tale of the movie is basically a story told in the second person narrative and the story is really about the two sisters (the oldest in particular). I was a little more than misty-eyed at one particular scene between the two (in both realities) just because of how they performed.The orderlies and doctors were just there, I really had no emotional investment in any of them and therefore really can't comment on them other than to say, the orderly-turned-pimp's mustache was the only thing I could look at when he was one screen and, yes, indeed, the Polish accent for the doctor is something out of Rocky and Bulwinkle, but it's hardly distracting in any sense that it's bad. At least the actress is consistent.All in all Sucker Punch is a good movie that does a excellent job of blending fantasy with action and anime with live-action (even if that was unintended or not even a thought in the visual effects artists mind). The movie is a beauty to look at on every level possible. Snyder's direction is competent, but it's nowhere near what he did for "Dawn of the Dead" or "Watchmen". I don't think Sucker Punch is great by any means or that I'm even in love with it, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. [4 Out of 5]

Zack Snyder has gained notoriety for his extremely visually-appealing films. If there's something you can't say about his movies is that they don't look pretty. When Sucker Punch was being marketed, people wowed at the looks of the movie, but they were mostly at odds at what to think at what little they knew about the film's plot. Some people didn't care, because they knew they'd at least be entertained, while others pointed out that Snyder's most famous and best films have been adaptations, while this story was wholly original, and they didn't trust Snyder had what it takes to write a compelling story.When the movie was released it was inmediately panned by most critics and audiences. I admit that was the reason I didn't go see this film in theaters. Heck, even after I purchased the Blu Ray I let it sit there for weeks until I got the courage to watch it. Everyone complained about the fantastic visuals being wasted in a poor story with bad characters. On the one hand, it gave me hope, since it would mean people would finally be taking into account good stories in their films instead of just the visuals. On the other hand, it gave me pause, since except for this particular event, people kept and still keep proving to this day that movies with terrible stories and awful characters are still successful, even with visuals much weaker than the ones in this film, or even terrible (for instance, the Twilight series).What happened then? Why is that movies with worse elements had been less despised, or even loved? Sometimes you can suffer from very bad marketing (like Green Lantern did), sometimes you'll have people believing so hard a movie will fail that they'll be conditioned to dislike it even after watching it (like happened to The A-Team). And sometimes... sometimes a movie will simply be terribly misunderstood. This is, I believe, what happened to Sucker Punch.I got this movie's Blu Ray on a whim, and I have to say, I don't regret having purchased it, and I do regret not having seen it on a theater. The visuals are fantastic, period. You know that, going to a Zack Snyder movie. The story, though, can be confusing to the point of people not believing there's actually one. Reading a bunch of reviews, I can see were the reviewers are coming from, but it looks like they didn't consider a movie that looked this good could have a good story and they didn't really bother to look for it. On the other hand, I only saw the extended cut, and maybe the theatrical cut is harder to understand. In any case, there's absolutely no doubt that lots of people failed to understand it, for one reason or another.Emily Browning plays the protagonist, a girl whose mother died and left her and her sister everything in her will. Her stepfather, mad at that fact, decides to kill the daughters, starting with the younger one. Emily's character escapes, gets hold of the stepfather's gun, wounds him but accidentally kills her sister (this part is ambiguous, the sister might be dead before she arrives, but there's no question she blames herself for her sister's death). The stepfather takes this as an opportunity and interns her in an asylum, claiming she went insane and secretly paying a shady employee to get her a lobotomy. Five days later, as the procedure is about to start, we get to see the story of those five days unfold as a fantasy inside her head. That story involves her plan to escape the brothel with a bunch of other girls she befriends.Yes, a brothel. As it happens, those five days are set in a brother instead of the asylum. Why? Well, you see, it's heavily implied (make no mistake, this movie's story doesn't hold your hand, that's one of the main reasons so many people misunderstood it) that the girls in the asylum are victims of rape. The brothel fantasy makes the protagonist put some sense into a situation that's already happening without the girls' consent. She knows they're having sex with strangers, but in her fantasy, they're not being forced, they're choosing to do it. Also, the fantasy replaces her lobotomy with the loss of her virginity. As an aside, she and her friends go by codenames, like Rocket, Blondie or Sweet Pea. The protagonist goes by Baby Doll.After saving a girl from a tragedy, Baby Doll befriends her and her pals and devises a plan to escape, thanks to the one element of the movie that can be attributed to supernatural forces instead of mere fantasy: a guardian angel, an instructor, a wise man. The plan involves getting a bunch of items from the asylum/brothel, which are stolen by her friends while she distracts the staff by dancing. You see, Baby Doll can dance so wonderfully she mesmerizes everyone who watches. Now, people who watch this and take it literally might (and will) scoff at the concept, but you have to realize that, leving aside the fact that this is a fantasy, the rating (PG-13) won't allow them to mention what's REALLY happening. "Dancing" is code for, depending who you ask, either "stripping" or "having sex". This is a brothel, of course it wouldn't make any sense to have a girl dancing fully clothed and that somehow being so good to distract everyone around. Then again, since the entire five-days wait is for her to "lose her virginity" I'd say sex is out the question in the fantasy brothel. I believe the easiest way to explain what happens is this: in the real world (asylum) she's having sex to distract people while her friends steal the items, while in the fantasy world (brothel) she's either stripping or masturbating (or both) while her friends steal the items, but this is called "dancing" for the purposes of keeping the PG-13 rating.In any case, you'd realize that neither of those would be a good fantasy for her to have while the stealing happens, so she replaces that with a Inception-style fantasy within a fantasy. Every time she has to "dance" her mind switches to an alternate steampunk world where she and her friends are a group of sword-wielding gun-totting monster-bashing fighters on a mission to obtain an item that's a representation of whatever item in the real world they're out to obtain. The best action of the film happens on these sequences, which are visually stunning and stylistic. Every time the sequence ends and they obtain the item, we go back to the brothel, where Baby Doll stops "dancing" while her friends have the real item in their hands.So, as you can see, the film borrows heavily from a couple of known movies, such as The Matrix, Inception or Shutter Island. The problem with the back-and-fort between fantasies is that it probably confuses some people who are not used to movies not telling them exactly what's going on. I have to say, you might have to watch it more than once to get what's really happening. I don't think it will be necessary, since I only saw it once and understood it perfectly, but you can clearly see by reading the reviews of the theatrical release that A LOT of people didn't understand it.I will concede a couple of points for the early reviews, though. Despite this supposedly being a fantasy inside a girl's head, visually it's definitely a male fantasy. Hot girls in skimpy outfits, doing cool, stylized moves with swords and guns while doing sexy poses is not something most girls would fantasize about. And, of course, the story isn't very original (as I said, it borrows heavily from other films). So, it's Sucker Punch a female-empowerment tale? Not really. Is it demeaning to girls, then? No, not that either. Is it all style and no substance? No, the substance is there, but sometimes the style will distract you from seeing it. Is it a bad film? No. It's not a fantastic film either, but it's definitely a good one.

I don't know why this movie got so many negative reviews. Was it the greatest movie ever? No. But it certainly is entertaining. The visuals look great and the story leaves you wondering if it was all in her head. It's definitely worth watching. All the actors were good, especially Abby Cornish and Jenna Malone.

Not bad at all but like most snyder films parts seem to lose direction & there probably could be a bit more editing here and there

It's the standard 2.4:1 ratio(the bottom part of the video is covered by black band, to achieve the theatrical 2.4:1 ratio). The 1.77:1 full frame ratio advertised is misleading.

Opinión de Sucker Punch - Extended Cut [Reino Unido] con ASIN: B008YCZAVAEste es la versión del Reino Unido con dos discos, edición con funda de cartón. El bluray principal, con película y extras, es el mismo que la edición española, con serigrafía del Ministerio de Cultura, audio castellano y extras con subtítulos en español. El segundo disco tiene la versión extendida de la película SOLO con audio en inglés, pero con subtítulos en español.Como se suelen mezclar opiniones, copia y pega en el buscador de Amazon el código ASIN que proporciono más arriba, en la búsqueda te saldrá la edición que estoy comentando.¡Un saludo!

Should had ordered the standard movie feature length instead of the extended version which didn’t have anything special but overall still an awesome movie

Love this film