Author: Dennard Dayle

Sucker Punch punches. Fuck. Starting over.

I keep my top five weaknesses to myself—I handwrite too many duel invitations. But here’s six and seven: my memory is vapor, and I’ve got a teensy humility problem. What do pride and amnesia have to do with Sucker Punch? Simple. To write these articles, I rewatch Sucker Punch each time.

It doesn’t change.

Though my environment does. I’m wasting nature’s fleeting gifts for Sucker Punch.

Spring is in golden bloom. It’s Earth’s last embrace before killing us. The local skatepark’s layout almost makes sense, my neighbors are aspiring actresses, and my ass is inside watching Sucker Punch like it hides the grail. Because I can’t remember Blonde Marionette no. 2’s name or Google it like an adult.

Right. I see why I forgot: Sweet Corn gets the lines of a Sucker Punch deuteragonist, and reads them like it. There’s nothing for an adult brain to retain. Watching Sweet Bean fight for her career is a fool’s choice.

Perfect. I’m finally self-actualizing. Spring should be earned by director’s cut. Once I’ve retained a single line of Sweet Tea dialogue, I’ll be strong enough to survive anything.

To recap, here’s a diagram of reality.

An onion of misery. Not just quality: the tone’s between C-Span and LMG: Enter the Matchstickverse. I suspect the editor needed an all-Exxua diet.

New suckologists might assume the flashy layer‘s a break. Not quite: emptiness hides more pain. Dehydration. Starvation. Ramping. I call this stretch of Sucker Punch The Desert. Forty minutes into the director’s cut, the story stops. It lies flat like Bartleby in Shanghai, leaving us to find our own meaning. What do you think Sucker Punch should be about? A new Wall Street satire could be fun.

In The Desert, they fight zombie Germans. You feel nothing.

In The Desert, they fight a dragon. You feel nothing.

In The Desert, sex slaves dread death. Guess.

Three full premises, reduced to air. I’ve seen Emily Browning and Oscar Isaac elsewhere. They can act. They can say words and make you believe them. They could each, if desired, claim the highest honor in modern storytelling: pushing a shitcoin and fleeing to the Caymans. But some invisible, offscreen, Batman vs. Superman-making force holds them back.

In time, active pain returns. Until then, The Desert regurgitates Babydoll’s plan, repeats Babydoll’s daydream, and plays action scenes for pacifists. What keeps you awake? That’s personal. For some, hope. For me, Dan Campbell’s perfect coffee order. Per The Athletic, it’s about 1420 milligrams of ascension. I can finally see God. We have issues to resolve.

In defense of the pace, it’s a pretty complex plan:

I’m not the type to care if that makes strategic sense. Just the type to drift every time you repeat it. Repeat it. Turn each step of starting a fire and screaming “ATTICA” into a two-year cutscene that canonically doesn’t happen, matter, or not look like shit.

This time, I’ll talk about faces. There’s excess action onscreen, but none of it entertains or matters. So we’ll start with acting. As Pirate Six in a sixth grade run of Peter Pan and Backflip Guy in multiple dance cults, I’m well-qualified.

Humans can’t save this script. It is, however, an amazing study in crisis responses. You learn how each lead acts in a bunker. I’ve prepared a simple chart to keep track. I’m pretty sure they use this in theater school.

To start: our main blonde, Babydoll.

She’s Jesus, if your pastor wanted to fuck Jesus. Though they call Jesus a charisma fountain, and paint him with an eight-pack. Do Christians want to fuck Jesus? Is it heretical not to want to fuck Jesus? What does Aquinas say about the fuckability of Christ? Is this what the Conclave argues about?

Whether or not Jesus jackhammers the pious, Babydoll inspires actress Emily Browning. To take morphine. She floats through cryptic lines about freedom on 50 CCs of whatever keeps elephants from flipping their shit at the state fair. Her mind’s escaped something dark, like elephants not having load-bearing backs. Your dog’s better suited to carry people than an elephant. They are in torment.

She leads her school well.

The Desert zooms in on Sweet Tea, who’s as trapped as I am. She’s the voice of reason, the most benighted role in spec-fic. Channeling Richard Dawkins on a dragon’s back is a disorder. Sweet N’ Low doubts Babydoll’s plan, since bullets hurt a bunch and Babydoll has the skills of a teenage Gogo dancer. Out of all the apostles, Sweet Baby Ray’s the one with too many pages and not enough insight.

Sour Pea’s also the backup point of sympathy/lust, in case you’re into adults. Her actress (Abbie Cornish) tries. She tries so much. If this geek pandering barrage works out, she’ll have a paid convention seat for the rest of her life.

Nope.

Also, in action scenes she kind of flops around.

Sweet Caroline tags along to protect her sister Rocket, the fifth dumbest nickname today. And doomed. Rocket’s the sacrificial lamb in a film where everyone’s already born to suffer. I’ve never seen a more doomed character, and I have Victory Gundam on Blu-ray. A show Gundam fans found too depressing, compared to a shiny version of Johnny Got His Gun. Out of all the apostles, Rocket’s the one that got the others killed following Jesus’s plan to burn down Rome. I haven’t read the Bible in a while.

Selling that arc falls to Jena Malone, who can’t. She sends it and hits a rail face-first.

Then there’s the Wise Man, courtesy of Scott Glenn. In an inspired intro to trench warfare, he says “They’re using steam power and clockworks to keep them moving. So you don’t have to feel bad about killin’ em.” I don’t think Scott understands those words. Neither do I, because the troops are less steampunk and more nothingpunk.

He’s there, but he isn’t there. Scott reads less from a cue card, and more from memories of better days. He’s completely zenned out—an admirable response to failure. I’ll try that if people don’t like Civil War jokes.

Out of all the apostles, he’s the one rolling on ancient hallucinogens. Paul said some out of pocket shit, so that one.

Back in reality, escort wrangler Carla Gugino spends the whole movie doing the Molotov Cocktease voice.

Grim. Meanwhile, team jobber Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) is the only brunette, and Snyder doesn’t underline that joke. It’s a fucking miracle. To celebrate, Vanessa shouts, bounces, and dies as requested. And sounds lost every time. Again, not her fault. The script’s neurotoxic. Blondie’s first line in The Desert laments the prostitutes that died before her.

Amber (Jamie Chung) is the only brunette, and Snyder…ah. Shit. So much for small victories. Well, in Extraction Mode she’s the team pilot. She delivers subaltern ditz lines with eyes that can see the reviews. Hi Amber! It happens. At least voicing Harley Quinn’s fun.

Then there’s our virtuoso. The soul of the film. A performance that leaves it all on the table.

Bunnymech.

Not a single line of wooden dialogue. Actions with weight. A funny rabbit decal on a mech suit. In a sea of sludge, Bunnymech is acceptable. Amber flies it, so I promoted her from “Gun in Mouth.” As for Bunnymech:

Don’t say I don’t engage. You’re right, but I have cover and two degrees in semantics. Also: if you’re not a 8th dan weeaboo, you’ll fucking hate Bunnymech. Anime poison reached my heart twenty years ago.

That said, Oscar Isaac goes for it. I don’t think he even knows this movie sucks. Admirable, unless you value thinky brain stuff.

He dumps normal effort into a speech about knowing something is up with all this hypno-stripping. Including how, if Babydoll’s virginity wasn’t already reserved, he’d hand out a punitive rape. The competence makes the words worse.

That monologue is a relief, since it ends The Desert. We can finally feel again. Granted, it’s only suffering, but an upside goes here.

Overall,The Desert has endless problems, and watching makes you a cenobite. The core is Snyder’s sudden inability to focus. That’s not even a recurring problem of his. He can normally isolate one stupid element, and follow that idiocy from dumbass shot to shot. But he can’t lock in on anything here.

Almost anything. Also: our heroes kill Smough’s dragon baby. They slit its throat for powerups. In case you found something to root for.

How far in are we? Are the credits in sight?

No tears remain.

I’ve compared Sucker Punch to slick and uneven stories, and both seem too generous. This round, in honor of Babydoll, I’ll compare it to another lobotomized film. A ninja waif movie with a script written in red crayon. It even has a desert. But it’s still fun, the action crushes, and like most surgeries it’s better than Sucker Punch.

Enter The Shadow Strays.

More punching from the hero behind The Night Comes for Us (a top-flight The Raid knockoff in a world that needs The Raid knockoffs). It’s a love letter to stabbing and breakup note to editing. Here’s a diagram of reality in The Shadow Strays.

What’s a shadow stray? A cool-sounding title. And a ninja orphan. Batman would be a shadow stray, if he had the guts to kill. Though murder is bad in The Shadow Strays, except when it’s awesome, which is almost always. Just make sure you do it for free.

You’re left to intuit that. The intro’s more into murder. You might think the opening 20-minute Yakuza purge sets up a Yakuza plot, or subplot, or reference later in the film. Get it together. This is about slick gore, and establishing our heroine 13 as a meat sculptor.

No it’s not, she wipes out. It’s about establishing 13’s ninja mom as better in every way. She hits the Yakuza with nearly a half-Kiryu in casualties.

In screenwriting, building your lead this way is called a “first draft.”

Still, it’s economical. Tension between junior assassin and mother hen only ends one way. One rant after Furies, and we’re already back at the family kumite. The Shadow Strays is a lean ride, clocking in at…

See? Snyder and I aren’t the only ones that never stop typing. The Shadow Strays struggles more than it needs to, like its parents think Ritalin’s black tar in a bottle. 13’s arc could be microfiction, but each beat of leaving the group treating her like a murder Roomba gets a half hour.

It’s a bloated, meandering journey, featuring the slickest violence I’ve seen this spring. The Shadow Strays is more choreographed than written, the way that Sucker Punch is more jerked than shot. If you fear no lawyer you can fire up Premiere, hack off everything that bores you, and make the fan edit of the century.

For murder nerds, the violence has surprising range. Katana duels in the forest flank boxcutter fights in crack dens. And then they remember guns work. While ninja segments go full Hayabusa, scenes in the streets have a Raid grit to them. That division could easily mean something, but doesn’t. Every kill in both modes is wild, so I rock with it.

The murder hallways have style for days. You can lean on that when the camera drifts from Babydoll’s socks. And while the Teen Girl squad fails to escape Broadway, 13’s two week’s notice ends in a dead governor. There’s a lot of movie after that, because the structure isn’t. But it retains precise stabbing and corpse presentation. Art’s where you find it.

Besides, that Mother’s Day duel we’re crawling towards? It kicks so much ass none of my bitching matters. I’m comfortable telling you to watch The Shadow Strays after shitting on it in every other paragraph, and this one. It fucking rocks. And sucks. But it rocks four times harder than it sucks, and that’s beyond Babydoll’s grasp.

The distinction’s simple. The Shadow Strays kills and I have no idea what they were thinking. Sucker Punch kills me and I wish I didn’t know what they were thinking. The next rewatch might end me.

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