Cinema 2011 #53: The Hangover Part II

The Hangover Part II is everything you’d expect it to be, and nothing more. Fans of the raucous original will undoubtedly howl with laughter at the booze-fueled antics of Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms’ Wolf Pack, as they waver episodically up a muddled memory lane, piecing together just what happened the night before. And those fans mean serious business, given the worldwide gross of $467 million, and Golden Globe, earned by the original, the sleeper hit and critical darling of the 2009. Those less inclined, however, to Todd Philips’ particular brand of American Arsehole Anarchy™ – Old School, Due Date, Road Trip – where grown men make self-serving choices and jokes at the expense of the poor, the aged, women, the disabled, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and anyone else who isn’t a upper middle-class dude, will also get everything they’d expect, and nothing more.

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.