This week, Netflix added one of the most insane action movies of the last decade to its catalog: Sucker Punch. This 2011 psychological fantasy adventure was directed and co-written by Zack Snyder, and was released in 2011. It has a surprisingly stacked cast and a premise that will have you wondering how you forgot about this one – or missed it altogether.
Sucker Punch stars Emily Browning as Babydoll, the main heroine, along with Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn, Gerard Plunkett, Patrick Sabongui and Malcolm Scott. It starts in the 1960s with Babydoll being sent to a mental institution after she accidentally murdered her sister in an attempt to kill her stepfather in self-defense. Her stepfather contrives to have Babydoll lobotomized, while Babydoll begins to plan her escape. In the process, she reimagines her horrific surroundings as a fluid magical fantasy world, which is rendered in over-the-top CGI.
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The movie embraces gratuitous violence in a way that has fallen out of fashion over the last 10 years. At the time, Snyder reportedly described it succinctly as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.” He envisioned the movie after completing 300, but took a break from developing it to film Watchmen.
During the filming of Sucker Punch, Snyder hinted that it would be rated R several times. He even praised Warner Bros. for giving him such creative freedom, telling Entertainment Weekly: “They’ve never said, ‘Ahh, it could have been shorter,’ or, ‘Too bad it’s so R-ish.’ And that’s really cool. I’m challenging them again with Sucker Punch.” However, ultimately the movie was rated PG-13, and Snyder later told Film School Reject that he cut many crucial scenes in order to meet the MPAA’s standards for the rating.
Presumably, Netflix will get the PG-13 theatrical cut of the movie and not the director’s cut released later on DVD and Blu-ray, which Snyder said was closer to his original vision. Either way, Sucker Punch will undoubtedly shock some viewers with its violence – and its attitude towards that violence. At the time of its release, the movie was lambasted for its flippant and excessive portrayal of sexual assault, and attitudes towards that have only grown wearier in the years since.
At the time of this writing, Sucker Punch has a 22 percent positive ratings from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 4.2 out of 10. It has a slightly more forgiving 47 percent score among general audiences, though that could change as Netflix refreshes this memory in the cultural zeitgeist. Sucker Punch is streaming now on Netflix.
