What If You Spent $50 Million on a CGI Man Taking a Shit?

SUCKERPUNCH
(2011, "directed" by Zack Snyder)

GEEK / NOT GEEK

It's kind of difficult to comment on the movie, without just writing, "Terrible," and clicking the submit button. To write a good comment, one must write WHY it is terrible... but where to begin? If someone came into your home, and took a shit in the middle of your living room, would you need to explain in a calm manner, three reasons why the person was wrong for doing such a deed? No. You'd toss them by their ear out onto the street, left with the unenviable task of having to clean up. Perhaps you'd even call the police.

If, on the other hand, you spent $50 million (or whatever the budget was; it was too high, in any event) to have someone take a CGI dump in your living room... is that any better? There are three actors in this movie, and only three: Scott Glenn, Jena Malone, and Carla Gugino. Four, if you count Jon Hamm, but he's not in the movie long enough to matter. There are these three, and everything else is there to talk until it's time for another special effect. Jena Malone isn't even required to do any of these things (i.e. act), but because she has actual experience as an actress, bothered to create a character and reflect an emotional state during the 'story.' Everyone else just showed up, put on the costumes, and talked until the director said 'cut.' Vanessa Hudgens should have been a clue.

Even if the story is awful, unmemorable, or predictable (Suckerpunch is all three), other Hollywood movies may rely on memorable action sequences or visuals. In a movie roughly 100 minutes long, these action sequences take up roughly five minutes of screen time. Then Snyder detonates an explosive in New York. Again.

It's not so much that Zack Snyder hates audiences, it's just that he's incredibly naive, like a 12-year-old suddenly given the keys to his dads liquor cabinet. He wants you to like a character, he makes them female and puts them in a low-cut top. He wants you to hate a character, he makes that character a rapist or molester of children. He does this again and again; these appear in every movie he's ever made, save for his first (and best) film, Dawn of the Dead, which was written by someone else entirely. Someone who understands subtlety and character development. Realize, too, that I'm saying this about a movie where a smarmy rich dude accidentally chainsaws his most recent sexual partner.

Whatever fancy visuals made it to the trailer for Suckerpunch, the movie is this: Zack Snyder wrote a script with his camera-man, and it is neither funny nor exciting. It's a 100-minute demo reel, and considering this is his fifth movie, he really should have actually created something with weight, by this point.

I went in with low expectations (especially after his shitty cover version of Watchmen and a movie about CGI owls that was so bad, even the trailer couldn't give it life), expecting that even if the movie rose slightly above these expectations, I'd have something to show for it. I paid half-price for a matinee, and not only do I feel ripped off, I feel physically violated.

I'm not going to call the police, but I am going to be mad for a week, because even though I've cleaned my floor, the smell lingers on. 3/10.