Lauren 10PIB2 Fieldtrip (Assignment)

"Sucker Punch," Zack Snyder's violent mash-up of Dickensian dark morality with Moulin Rouge couture is stun-gun gorgeous, psychosexually unnerving, fantasy action-riffic and most definitely not for the faint of heart. Starring the pretty pout of Emily Browning's Babydoll — sporting machine guns, Mary Janes, black stockings and little else — the film is, existentially speaking, a Freudian nightmare gunning for debate as much as entertainment.

Some will see the worst sort of objectification in its Victoria's Secret-esque femme front line that also includes the scantily clad corps of Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung. Others will argue that "Sucker Punch's" sexy guerrillas represent female empowerment, to say nothing of the benefits of diet and exercise. I'd suggest the film is a wonderfully wild provocation — an imperfect, overlong, intemperate and utterly absorbing romp through the id that I wouldn't have missed for the world.

Though "Sucker Punch" has the fresh feel of something new, the warrior princess leitmotif tracks back to Greek legend and has turned up in fiction and film ever since. The stories are sometimes cheeky in the way of Angelina Jolie's sharp-shooting siren in "Lara Croft." Sometimes, the twisted tales go darker as did Quentin Tarantino's cut in "Kill Bill" Vols. 1 and 2, with a brutalized and sexualized Uma Thurman.

Snyder goes darker still, opening "Sucker Punch" with a look through a rain-soaked window at why Babydoll's such a mess. Her mother's death has triggered a sinister free-fall that includes a narrow escape from her lecherous stepfather's evil intentions, the accidental shooting of her little sister and her immediate incarceration in a Vermont mental institution that prefers its crazies be virginal beauties. Technically the film is set in the '60s, but it feels more like the '40s when lobotomies were all the rage.

The blurring of reality and fantasy is there in every frame and echoes the grim storybook quality found in the graphic novel world and the fantasy look favored by gothic video games — a sort of "Guernica" of comic-book chaos. The vision is so precise and so specifically rendered that it's not surprising that the relationship between the filmmaker and cinematographer Larry Fong started before their collaboration on "300" and "Watchmen" would establish Snyder as a filmmaking fanboy phenom (next up, "Superman").

source : articles.latimes.com