Zack Snyder, USA/Canada, 111mins, 2011
Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung
Review by Matthew Rodgers
There is a moment early on in Zack Snyder’s latest visual headache in which one of our scantily clad protagonists turns to another indistinguishable similarly clothed hot young thing and says “You’re gonna be ok, it just takes a little while to get used to”. I kept repeating that to myself for approximately half of this nauseating punch to the senses, before finally accepting that it truly did suck.
After a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, which unfolds in a beautifully realised prologue, Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is locked away in a mental asylum by her wicked stepfather. Informed that she is to be lobotomised in five days, Baby Doll retreats into her imagination in which she is a member of an all-girl dancing troupe plotting to escape from the grip of the sleazy impresario/warden, Blue (Oscar Jones). Cue further regression into her fantastical sub-consciousness, with guidance from the Wise Man (Scott Glenn), and battle with huge ninjas, a multitude of cyborgs, and on one particular level, I mean scene, a huge fire breathing dragon.
A review of a Zack Snyder film wouldn’t be the same without the old “style over content” diatribe, and nowhere is it more prevalent than here. He is a director that has been consumed by suffocating visuals with each film; Dawn of the Dead’s stylish immediacy is a distant memory, 300 was relatively fresh at the time, Watchmen could only have been rendered in the way it was, something of a perfect melding of director and material, and “the owl movie” was a decent distraction. But this is too much, a tedious series of narratively defunct sequences constructed with entirely weightless, boredom inducing CGI. Put it this way, when Snyder’s Superman reboot finally hits cinema screens, the poster will not say “From the director of Sucker Punch”.
This is essentially a pre-pubescent boy’s wish list; fighting, babes, and computer games, that have been thrown into a cinematic blender and poured into a script that’s an incoherent mess. You couldn’t really care less about what’s going on with any of the clunk spouting actresses – “We’ll be dead”……….”We’re already dead” – because 90% of the time you can’t work out what the hell IS going on!
Of the “acting” on display, John Hamm fans will be disappointed by his “blink and you’ll miss it” appearance. The girl power battle is won by Abbie Cornish, given a little more to chew on than the others; she at least wrings something other than pouting and cliché spouting from her Sweet Pea character. The strange thing is that this is a female empowerment movie in which that intention is undermined by the fetishisation of these young women, but that’s another argument altogether.
The soundtrack is great, but then the movie is like watching MTV for two hours straight because you’ve lost the remote down the side of the sofa. Offensive, brash, dull, and the most unintelligible misfire since The Last Airbender.
