Sucker Punch was boring. The frenetic action scenes were repetitive drivel which tried to use CGI and quick editing tricks to mask subpar choreography and uninspired framing. I don't care whether or not they were supposed to be repetitive drivel: I was still bored as fuck watching them. The excellent (and decidedly not fun) Chinese film Mr. Zhao contains a ten minute take of two people sitting on a badly lit sofa and having the same conversation over and over again, and that was still more interesting than anything in Sucker Punch.
As for the message? It's bullshit. Insulting, offensive bullshit. Are any of these movies feminist? Who cares? If Robin Morgan, Jessica Valenti, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine Breillat, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ozy Frantz, Noah Brand and Clarisse Thorn are all feminists (and that's only a very limited selection), I'm not sure how meaningful that adjective can actually be. The message Sucker Punch is pushing is the idea that having a sexual fantasy (specifically, a man having a sexual fantasy about a woman) is not only inherently wrong and harmful, but defines the person having it and their relations with others. It goes on to equate those fantasies (and here I would like to point out that the film specifically takes aim fantasies of men considered socially undesirable and thus already easy targets) with real acts of institutionalized abuse and violence. This is a blatant false equivalency and it plays to the romantic fantasies of the eternal female victim at the mercy of a cruel, brutish world that are far more insidiously patriarchal in their own right than any of the layered delusions. As a real life victim of institutionalized abuse committed by (mostly female) social workers on account of my mental condition, I was deeply offended by Sucker Punch and the shallow pandering drivel it attempts to pass off as a deconstruction. To be brutally honest, the film feels like an outdated separatist piece from thirty years ago more than anything else.
As for the message? It's bullshit. Insulting, offensive bullshit. Are any of these movies feminist? Who cares? If Robin Morgan, Jessica Valenti, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine Breillat, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ozy Frantz, Noah Brand and Clarisse Thorn are all feminists (and that's only a very limited selection), I'm not sure how meaningful that adjective can actually be. The message Sucker Punch is pushing is the idea that having a sexual fantasy (specifically, a man having a sexual fantasy about a woman) is not only inherently wrong and harmful, but defines the person having it and their relations with others. It goes on to equate those fantasies (and here I would like to point out that the film specifically takes aim fantasies of men considered socially undesirable and thus already easy targets) with real acts of institutionalized abuse and violence. This is a blatant false equivalency and it plays to the romantic fantasies of the eternal female victim at the mercy of a cruel, brutish world that are far more insidiously patriarchal in their own right than any of the layered delusions. As a real life victim of institutionalized abuse committed by (mostly female) social workers on account of my mental condition, I was deeply offended by Sucker Punch and the shallow pandering drivel it attempts to pass off as a deconstruction. To be brutally honest, the film feels like an outdated separatist piece from thirty years ago more than anything else.
