Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. The release of M. Night Shyamalan's latest film, After Earth, has us thinking back on good movies from often-maligned directors.
Sucker Punch (2011)
Zack Snyder is hardly a critical favorite, but even by his standards, Sucker Punch took an uncommon beating. At Metacritic, it’s the only one of his five features with an overall negative score, and its 23 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes is less than half that of Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole. Just let that sink in a moment.
For better or worse, Sucker Punch is a breed apart from Snyder’s other movies, including the forthcoming Man Of Steel. Unlike Dawn Of The Dead or 300 or Watchmen or that owls thing, it’s not based on a pre-existing property; the idea is Snyder’s, dating back from before he made his first feature. If ever a Zack Snyder joint could be called a personal film, this is the one.
For anyone raised on the auteur theory or any of its watered-down offshoots, “personal” is an unqualified good. But not everyone’s soul is worth exploring, and some relationships are better left casual. Does anyone want to know what lurks deep inside the recesses of Michael Bay’s heart, or want Justin Lin to abandon the Fast And The Furious franchise to explore his feelings about his father? Fortunately, Sucker Punch isn’t that kind of confessional. On the surface, it’s as big and loud—at least—as any of Snyder’s other movies. It’s full of arbitrary action sequences and action-figure fantasies, with the main twist being that the combatants are not the oiled-up Grindr dates of 300, but a group of nubile young women confined to an insane asylum. In one of the movie’s few concessions to reality, the Gothic madhouse where Babydoll (Emily Browning) is imprisoned after accidentally shooting her younger sister is concretely situated in Brattleboro, Vermont.