Cinema 2011 #34: Sucker Punch

In the 90s, all dressed up in OshKosh B’gosh, off my face on the effervescent dust found crumbling inside a Refresher, and thinking that the highest form of wit was repeatedly making statements, followed by an audibly mid-Atlantic Not, I used to break the 10th commandment. Yes, forgive me lord, for I have sinned. I coveted my neighbour’s goods – I wanted Streets of Rage to be mine. It’s difficult these days, to see just why this game, a 32-bit Sega Megadrive linear-beat-‘em-up, held such a thrall over me, and why I’d long to play, bashing buttons and baddies, to the point of inducing a rose-tinted burning in my thumbs. But I generally only got to watch, as my neighbor would endlessly punch, kick, die, continue, win, lose, and fall off the side of the lift in level 7.

Watching Sucker Punch, the latest CGI opus from 300-director Zack Snyder, sent me back to that living room, with its chintz chairs, yellowing doilies and browning Granny Smith slices. There I was, watching a video-game, with characters equipped with massive machine guns and chop-socky martial arts skills, battling giant ninjas, tik-tok zombie Germans in World War I, a horde of knights and their hot-tempered dragon and bullet train full of zealous robots on Saturn in the springtime. And yet again, I didn’t get to play.

And that’s where it all went wrong for me, in this, the most self-indulgent film of 2011. Looking like a mash up of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Moulin Rouge, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and every Saturday morning cartoon you’ve ever seen, it’s a stylised mess, the equivalent of a CGI Mardi Gras, with cinematographic affectation and unforgivably 2D characters. For mash get smash, and that’s just what Sucker Punch does, smashing together a plot with Inception like dreamscapes with mind-boggling action sequences that look like they’ve been edited by a Ritalin deprived 14 year-old on crack.

Cinema 2011 #31: Limitless

Would you be tempted by it, a magical little pill that sends your cerebrum snapping at 100% capacity? Limitless, based on Irish writer Alan Glynn's The Dark Fields, raises such a question and it's the choice facing Eddie Morra, a fast-talking New York writer down on his luck and with a book advance that’s fading fast. Mind altering substances are nothing new to cinema, with Alice and Neo and friends shoveling down stimulants and narcotics like they’re juicy Big Mac-Guffins, leading to adventures and dangers, and the occasional hangover. Well this time round, the hangover comes courtesy of chiseled charmer du jour Bradley Cooper and a daily dose of NZT-48, a tablet smarter than an iPad, and designed to turn your grey matter Technicolor. Yes, it would seem that in just one peristaltic gulp the very secrets of the universe can be unlocked, with your brain processing information you never knew you knew, remembering every minute detail that’s every stimulated your synapses and turning you into a suave and dapper Rain Man.

The story itself is simple and fun, the writers getting creative with just what a total loser at full speed can achieve. Master languages in minutes, finish that novel before dinner, dominate Wall St. by dusk, and even have time to tidy up, there seems to be no… em… limit to what Morra can do. Cooper is just about charming enough to pull Eddie off, winning the audience over with an affable performance, but not one that will send him into the stratosphere just yet. He succeeds in sidestepping the obvious dangers of a pill the equivalent of mental Viagra, in that his Morra, essentially an insufferable know-it-all, isn’t the biggest prick on the planet.