Just when I think Bob has become so jaded and cynical that I think he won't be able to enjoy a movie like Sucker Punch on its own terms, he turns around and pleasantly surprises me my giving this a good write-up! For the most part, Bob and I seem to agree at least 80% of the time on films...except when it comes to Michael Bay and his review of Splice (which started out soooooo good, but then in the last 15 minutes went soooooo bad, soooooo quick). This is probably on the order of his review for 2012, which also got critically savaged, but when I saw it on Bob's recommendation, I enjoyed for a lot of the same reasons he did.
Then again, like Bob, I'm also a Zack Snyder fan, and I've never been disappointed by any of his movies (although I thought Legend of the Guardians was kind of slow-paced compared to the others). I was very happy with Watchmen especially, being a big fan of the book for decades. And I was probably also one of the few who actually thought the movie's ending was kind of an improvement on the original (on objective analysis, the squid does seem like it came out of left field). Frankly, I don't understand where all the Zack Snyder hate is coming from...except maybe that some who see his movies might be inclined to blithely dismiss him as a style-over-substance director, which is easy to understand. Like Bob, I personally think he "gets it."
I can see where this is going to be a "love it or hate it" movie. The marketing alone already probably bewildered the average person. Seeing beautiful girls fighting giant samurai one moment, fighting in a steampunk WWI the next, battling dragons the next, and robots the next would leave them wondering, "what the heck is this?" That the movie itself reportedly doesn't help and leaves things intentionally ambiguous will probably leave a lot of people even more frustrated, as audiences tend to like things spoon-fed to them and wrapped up in a neat little bow.
But for audiences who are just willing to go with it and let it take them for a ride, like me, it sounds like they're in for a good time.
I think Sucker Punch for Snyder will probably be like Zardoz was for John Boorman. Both are pet projects of their directors which got critically savaged for generally being thought of as too weird, but are actually pretty good films for the people who are willing to give it a chance.
