Are you in the mood for some fantasy and escapism? Do you like wild costumes and traveling back in time? How about a heavy dose of teenage female exploitation? Well, look no further than Sucker Punch and The Runaways, two movies that fit the bill.
Both movies feature pubescent girls dressed in tight, provocative clothing, playing with objects normally considered boy toys. Both spotlight a protagonist who’s verging on the edge of sexual maturity with bleach blonde hair, wide-set eyes, pouty rosebud lips and captivating gyration skills. Both movies purport to celebrate female strength and empowerment. However, both movies fail their intended purpose, one due to its calculated desire to titillate, while the other never quite reaches its aim but shines briefly at its highest heights nonetheless.
Sucker Punch is the more visually arresting, and seedier, of the two movies, thanks mainly to endless special effects and the over-the-top sensibility of its writer-director, Zack Snyder. Snyder, of 300 and Watchmen fame, is a well known for his stylized visuals and comic-book characterizations. It’s no surprise that with Sucker Punch, his first non-adapted film since gaining notoriety, he resorts to what he does best.
Yet Snyder’s best is far from good enough here. Co-scripted with Steve Shibuya, Sucker Punch comes off as something calculated to show off nifty special effects and barely-legal babes with pseudo martial-arts moves. More thought was put into the set pieces than the storyline or the characters.
Sucker Punch follows a young woman, nicknamed Baby Doll, as she’s placed in a mental institution after losing her mother and sister to unnatural causes. Baby Doll’s stepfather conspires with the institution’s chief administrative staffer (Oscar Isaac), to lobotomize her. In order to cope with her dire circumstances, Baby Doll (Emily Browning) retreats to her imagination.
There, she’s in the same institution, but it’s a front for a brothel where the female inmates are the main entertainment. They entertain by dancing and pleasuring the clientele. Baby Doll befriends four other inmates, sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), and two others named Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung).
At this subconscious level, Baby Doll becomes the prized bait. She’s saved for the richest client, High Roller (John Hamm), because she’s an innocent and because when she dances, all are mesmerized. Everyone becomes so entranced by Baby Doll’s dancing that the other girls are able to do things that they normally wouldn’t do since everyone is watching Baby Doll dance. It’s during that time that the girls plot a plan to escape from the institution.
If Sucker Punch stopped there, the movie would’ve been tolerable if predictable. But no, Sucker Punch continues to push the genre’s suspension of disbelief even further. It throws in massive robotic martial arts creatures, fire breathing dragons, an endless army of dead Nazi soldiers, and Scott Glenn as a not-very-profound, fortune cookie spouting mystic guide for the pixie army of five.
Those strange characters exist on another level of Baby Doll’s subconscious – the one that’s activated when she’s dancing on the first level. (We can blame Inception for creating the multiple subconscious craze.) What’s weird is that the audience never gets to see Baby Doll’s spellbinding dance skills. For a movie that can visualize things like fire breathing dragons and Nazi zombies, creating scintillating dance moves should’ve been a breeze.
That’s the problem with Sucker Punch, it’s an idea ripe for picking, built for decadence and extravagant visuals. But what ends up on the screen is a lukewarm tease, calculated for maximum profit and as hollow as Baby Doll after her lobotomy.
There are some signs of life in the acting department, like Jena Malone as the tragic Rocket, Abbie Cornish as the sturdy Sweet Pea and Oscar Issac as the sleazy pimp Blue Jones. But that doesn’t compensate for Emily Browning’s lackluster Baby Doll and Scott Glenn’s fish-out-water wise man.
When the dance and song number over the closing credits is more entertaining than the rest of the movie, there’s only one conclusion to draw, the movie is a bomb.
From a bomb to a cherry bomb – the Cherry Bomb in question is The Runaway’s song that can be heard all over the 2010 movie about the first American all-girls rock band. The story is based on lead singer Cherie Currie’s written memoir about being a Runaway. The movie stars Dakota Fanning as Cherie, Kristen Stewart as The Runaway’s rhythm guitarist, Joan Jett, and Michael Fanning as their record producer and manager, Kim Fowley.
Set in the mid seventies, a young Joan approaches Fowley outside a bar and tells him she wants to form an all-girls rock band. Fowley, an unscrupulous but smart producer, sees the potential to exploit a novel idea and sets Joan up with drummer Sandy West. Fowley spots a fifteen-year-old Cherie Currie at a nightclub and picks her to be The Runaways’ lead singer based on her looks alone.
While the film focuses mainly on Cherie’s short time in The Runaways, it also briefly touches on the family dynamics of her broken home, with absentee parents and an alcoholic father, and the close relationship she has with her twin sister, Marie (Elvis’ granddaughter Riley Keough). Cherie drifts from Marie once she joins The Runaways and bonds closely with a tough and energetic Joan Jett, who becomes more than a sister figure to Cherie.
In an electric performance, Kristen Stewart, captures Joan’s passion and drive to make rock and roll her life’s mission. While Cherie is the face of The Runaways and the group’s main singer, Joan is the heart and soul of the band. Joan writes most of the songs and occasionally sings, and even as a teenager, it’s Joan's intensity and vision that drives the band forward.
But as a group of teenage girls in the male world of seventies rock and roll, producer Fowley is the one calling the shots. Fowley puts the girls through the ringer, verbally abusing them, booking them in sleazy bars, having them stay in rundown hotels alone, exposing them to sex, drugs and alcohol, and exploiting their budding sexuality for publicity. It’s not surprising when eighteen-year-old Cherie leaves the band less than two years after she joined.
As a movie, The Runaways is atmospheric and episodic. First-time director and screenwriter Floria Sigismondi is a well-known music video director and she really captures the essence of the late seventies. The seventies wardrobe, hairstyles and the look are all there. The movie also has some stunning shots of Fanning and Stewart in iconic poses as Cherie and Joan.
But the movie lacks structure and feels incomplete. Part of that is due to the other band members restricting the filmmakers from incorporating their stories into the film. The stories of guitarist Lita Ford and drummer Sandy West are mainly left out of the movie. There’s also not a lot of background on Joan Jett (although she was one of the movie’s executive producers), other than that she was a Suzie Quatro and Sex Pistol fan. That’s too bad since Joan’s character is the more interesting of the two and Stewart does such a good job playing Joan that something’s lacking when Stewart isn't on the screen. A real Runaways’ movie should have Joan Jett as the lead character, not a supporting one.
As the lead actress, then fifteen-year-old Dakota Fanning does an admirable job, but it’s clear she’s not comfortable doing all of the things Cherie did in real life – like strutting around in skimpy outfits, gyrating on stage in front of rowdy crowds, doing drugs, making out with boys, men and Joan Jett. The audience can tell she’s acting with a capital A.
The Runaways is not a complete bomb though. The build-up to the band's formation is well developed and engaging and the Tokyo tour really captures the excitement of The Runaways’ fame, but how and why Cherie left the band feels truncated and edited. Her downward spiral consists of a couple of hazy, slow motion shots which really don’t explain the emotional toil that life in the fast lane and drug addiction has on someone so young.
The glossed over ending does an injustice to such a pioneering band of young women who were exploited for their gender and sexuality but who proved that they were real rockers and that they were indeed the Cherry Bomb they sang about.
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