Sucker Punch

MINOR SPOILER ALERT – I’m not going to ruin it for you, but if you really don’t want to know what happens to the doe-eyed sex dolls of Sucker Punch, watch it before you read.

Sucker Punch – 2011, Zack Snyder

So what’s the deal with Sucker Punch? The title and the premise and the trailers don’t really explain much, which is no bad thing, it’s nice to go into a film without knowing what to expect (beyond hot babes shooting big guns).

The deal is thus -
Snyder and his old lady have though up a collection of ambitious action set-pieces based upon pop culture violence. The list reads like a clichéd internet comic:

1. Giant Samurai Monsters With Miniguns
2. Nazi Robot Zombies
3. World War Two meets Lord Of The Rings with Dragons
4. erm...not sure what to do now...Pirate Monkey Ninjas would be silly...lets just do a disappointing rehash of the climax of Batman Begins (you know, with the train) and mix in a little I, Robot action.

The premise which serves to set up all the mayhem is explained in what is basically a series of music videos. The opening sequence is actually very good. Without any dialogue it is established that the main character’s mother has died, leaving her and her little sister all the money. (Step?) Daddy isn’t happy, so he kills the younger girl and frames the older blonder girl for the murder. Poor little blond girl is then sent off to a creepy asylum for insane (insanely sexy?) young ladies. Evil Daddy makes a deal with Evil Chief Orderly to have the girl lobotomised in order to prevent her ever talking about what really happened to her sister. They have this conversation within earshot of the blonde girl, setting up her descent into fantasy and her attempt to escape.

Then there’s another music video sequence (Bjork this time) as we take a tour of the asylum and meet the staff who will later be recast as the bad guys in the upcoming fantasy. In her mind the pretty blond girl replaces the harrowing asylum with an illusion; her own little world where she can carry out her escape. Naturally, she replaces the asylum with a burlesque house. She and the other girls are no longer inmates but captive exotic dancers, with an ever present air of forced prostitution loitering off screen. The pretty blond is henceforth known as Babydoll, forever scantily clad and lusty eyed, fighting for freedom with her fit mates: Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie and Amber.




Blondie, Amber, Babydoll, Sweet Pea then Rocket...I think.
Hmm... the one on the right in the picture below is not one of the characters in the picture above(?). But you get the idea.



To escape they need to nick a load of symbolic items, and the only way they can do that is if Babydoll creates a distraction by doing a sexy dance. The sexy dances are represented by crazy, violent action fantasies. Got that? OK.

Never have huge, carefully constructed action sequences been so boring. There are a couple of reasons why Sucker Punch fails to deliver the promised knockout blow. Firstly, all peril is removed from the action sequences for the sake of a cheap gag; during the stand off between the tiny blond Babydoll and the first Giant Samurai the tension is broken when the Samurai kicks her square in the face and sends her flying through the air and through a wall (ha, didn’t see that coming). But then the delicate little thing stands up without a scratch on her! So it is established that in these fantasy fight scenes, the main characters are invulnerable, and any peril goes out the window before the action really starts.

Secondly, Sucker Punch draws us down into two layers of fantasy, neither of which clearly relate to what is happening in the real world. We jump into the burlesque house dream world from which we drop down into the action sequence fantasy layer (difficult not to make it sound like Inception but it isn’t) and don’t refer back to reality again until the very end, so most of film is spent in a kind of peril-less limbo where the audience is left wondering if it’s all just a dream. Are the girls ever in any danger at all? Nothing compromises emotional involvement better that confusion.

Sucker Punch aught to be mindless fun, and on the surface it is, but somewhat annoyingly it’s clear that Snyder is trying to do something clever. The best thing to do is take Sucker Punch at face value.

Who’s the real sucker? I am, for paying £12.40 to watch it in the IMAX. But I was drunk.

The Mechanic

The Mechanic – 2011, Simon West

Normally I can watch any film without feeling the need to justify the reason for watching it, but The Mechanic is currently in cinemas, I didn't just Sky+ it like all the other mediocre action films I watch. So I'll just explain how come I ended up watching The Mechanic at the Odeon when there are loads of other films on release right now, in particular all the Oscar contenders; The King's Speech, 127 Hours, The Fighter et all.

My Tuesday evening was planned thus:
4.15pm - meeting with mortgage advisor (65% Loan-To-Value! Gee, no thanks.)
7.00pm - play dodgeball (sport of Kings)

So I had two hours to kill from 5 till 7 and after carefully examining the show times of all the cinemas in Manchester city centre, only The Mechanic was on during the time available to me. It’s a remake of a 1972 Michael Winner film starring Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent, the lead roles now played by Jason Statham and Ben Foster.





The plot may have been original in ’72, but now it’s just an expectable pastiche of action movie standards; Statham is a clinical assassin who works for some shadowy organisation, his contact in the company is an old friend played by an established actor (in this case Donald Sutherland) whose ten minutes of time on screen is an attempt to add credibility to a lacklustre screenplay. As soon as Sutherland appears on screen it’s obvious he’s going to die, and that Statham will probably kill him, and that he’ll find out the truth later and regret killing his friend and mentor and head off to extract bloody revenge. I predicted a John Woo style ending with the good guy sailing away on the yacht he has always dreamed of owning but it didn’t quite finish like that. Also, unusually for a Statham film, there was no car chase.

Englishman Simon West (director of Con Air) seems more concerned with creating something technically polished and at the very least credible than he does with shooting exiting action. I’ve seen a lot of action films me, and in my opinion the good ones fall into one of two categories, which for the sake of this post I will call ‘Die Hards’ and ‘Hard Boileds’

‘Die Hards’ are good films that just happen to be action films, Die Hard being the most prominent example. I include such greats as Predator 1 and 2, Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens and Under Siege (among many others).

‘Hard Boileds’ are films that are kind of ridiculous and technically not that good, but the spectacle makes them rise above all the other crap action films. I don’t mean these films are ‘so bad they’re good’, I mean they are entertaining enough to be considered good. Hard Boiled, Commando, all the Rambo films and almost every Jackie Chan film made between 1978 and 1995 are good examples.

The Mechanic is not a good action film by either definition, but it had a reported budget of $40 million and stars one of the few ‘bankable’ action stars going. I for one am proud of our Jason, he’s out there kicking ass in big American movies, but the question The Mechanic prompts me to ask is ‘How long before Jason Statham goes straight-to-DVD?’ To try and predict let us examine the careers of Seagal and Van Damme.

Steven Seagal
Born – 1952
First Lead role in a cinematic release – 1988 (age 36), Above The Law
Highest grossing film to date – 1992 (age 40), Under Siege ($156 million including international gross)
First successive Straight-to-DVD – 2003(age 51), Out For A Kill

Jean-Claude Van Damme
Born – 1960
First Lead role in a cinematic release – 1988 (age 28), Bloodsport
Highest grossing film to date – 1994 (age 34), Timecop (over $100 million including international gross)
First successive Straight-to-DVD - 2001 (age 41), The Order

Jason Statham
Born – 1967
First major lead role in a cinematic release – 2002 (age 35), The Transporter
Highest grossing film to date – 2008 (age 41), The Transporter 3 (over $100 million including international gross and DVD sales)
First successive Straight-to-DVD – 2017 (age 50), The Transporter 5

Looks like Statham’s career is most like big Steve’s, which means Jason has another six years or so of action in him. Realistically though, Jason will probably stay in cinemas for years to come playing non-bad-ass characters in romantic comedies and heist/caper movies.

Nice one Jase.