I assumed most studios were scared of opening against Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, what with only that and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules opening wide this weekend, but even without any real competition, Sucker Punch lost in a route, $24.4 million for Wimpy Kid to Sucker Punch‘s $19 million.  Ouch.  Though Sucker Punch will probably earn back its $82 million budget internationally, no matter how they try to spin it, no one expected it to get beat by a movie about… what the hell is Diary of a Wimpy Kid about, again?  Forget it.  I refuse to look this up.

Striking approximately 3,900 screens at 3,033 locations, Sucker Punch mustered an estimated $19 million, which included an estimated $4 million at 229 IMAX venues (representing a record share for regular IMAX at 21 percent). That was a tad behind Kick-Ass‘s opening last Spring but much greater than the debuts of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Jennifer’s Body. However, it was no match for the Kill Bill and Resident Evil movies among other comparable titles, and, for all its hype, it was barely average for an action heroine movie. It was also director Zack Snyder’s worst live-action start yet, following 300, Watchmen, and Dawn of the Dead. [BoxOfficeMojo]

Though a wise man might blame the paltry numbers on the fact that the movie wasn’t very good, bad word of mouth, a lack of any real stars, a marketing campaign that stressed that none of the cool scenery was real, the fact that they watered down the appeal by going for a PG-13 rating, etc… let’s face it, this is Hollywood.  Wise men don’t stay long.  Guaranteed this makes studios even less apt than they already are to take a chance on anything that isn’t a sequel, remake, comic book, toy, or video game adaptation.  And that sucks, because if the Family Circus movie actually makes it into production, it will knock off the invention of the anime fleshlight as the low point of civilization.  I’m not exaggerating, someone should die for that.

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Sucker Punch: A movie set entirely within that sleazy alternate future from Back to the Future 2

Before I get to bashing it, let’s remember that the fact that a movie like Sucker Punch can still get made these days is a triumph.  (I don’t necessarily like his movie, but the fact that he’s making it?  I respect that.)  It wasn’t based on a graphic novel or comic book, it hadn’t been, God forbid, a board game or a children’s toy, and it wasn’t a sequel, prequel, remake, or reboot of anything already popular.  There was no “built-in audience” upon which the financiers could hang their toupees.  It was simply the brainchild of Zack Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya, a surrealistic stand-alone epic like Inception on a smaller scale ($82 million budget vs. $160 for Inception).  To their credit, Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures (the same people behind Inception, incidentally) seem to have given Snyder the freedom to let his freak flag fly.  The finished product, sadly, makes as fervent case for creative oversight as Inception made for the auteur. To put it another way, Zack Snyder is great at a lot of things. Self-editing is apparently not one of them.

Let’s see if I can recap: Baby Doll’s mother dies (communicated in a funeral scene that seems to be a shot-for-shot recreation of the Watchmen funeral), leaving her and her sister alone with their evil step father, who’s jealous and angry about being written out of his wife’s will.  We can tell he’s angry because he screams to the heavens in slow motion and angrily chugs vodka directly from the bottle while backlit by the moonlight (strange that you never see this kind of rage-drinking in liquor commercials considering how prevalent it is in movies).  After getting good and drunk in his study, bald, ugly Dad (EVIL!) walks down the hall to go beat up, or molest his cartoonishly innocent stepdaughters (GOOD!).  It’s never clear that his intention is to rape them, but while trying to barge in Baby Doll’s bedroom, he tears from her shirt a single button, which we watch fall to the floor in a super slow-mo extreme closeup.  And slow-mo close-ups of torn-off buttons DO tend to imply rape, the same way smoldering dolls imply civilian casualties.

The slowly-twirling button of implied rape

Defending her sister, Baby Doll (pillow-lipped Emily Browning) steals his pistol and tries to shoot her stepdad, accidentally killing her sister instead (under logistically dubious circumstances).  This two-minute sequence becomes the setup for the entire movie.  The dead sister is all the evidence Baby Doll’s stepdad needs to commit her to an insane asylum (in terrifying BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT!), where she’ll summarily lobotomized, and he can take over her inheritance.  As dad fills out her asylum paperwork, we find out that Baby Doll is 20 years old, which makes it odd, both that she dresses like a pig-tailed porn caricature of a 15-year-old, and that an adult in the eyes of the law had inexplicably chosen to live with her creepy, rapey, no-relation stepdad.  But by making it clear that the girl is of age, the filmmakers can avoid criticism of sexualizing a minor, despite the fact that the story doesn’t really work if she’s not a minor.  Point being, there are only so many narrative discrepancies you can tolerate on the grounds of “because it looks cool.”  …Especially if it’s not that cool.

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Nope, nothing provocative to see here

Want the rundown on this week’s releases?  You’ve come to the right place. Bad luck if you were hoping for zesty chicken recipes.

SUCKER PUNCH: Zack Snyder’s Inception as written by horny 12-year-olds.  As my friend Bret says, Zack Snyder’s business card should say, “No, seriously, guys, I’m not jerking off to this stuff, I swear.”

RottenTomatoes Score: 21%.  Yikes, it’s gone down nine points since yesterday.

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

“It’s bloody but without menstrual awareness; just as its musical pretext neglects to express genuine feminine trauma or yearning.” -Armond White. ["Menstrual awareness?" God, I love you, Armond White.]

“My personal rule of film enjoyment goes a little like this: you can be miserable or pointless, but you can’t be both. Sucker Punch works hard to be both.” -Laremy, Film.com.

“A wonderfully wild provocation – an imperfect, overlong, intemperate and utterly absorbing romp through the id that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.” -Betsey Sharkey, LA Times.

Armchair Analysis: Yes, pretty much everyone hates it and it’s probably going to suck, but most of us are going to see it anyway.  After that, we’ll meet back here on Monday to bitch about it.  It’s movie blogging at its essence, don’t deny it.

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From the beginning, Sucker Punch looked like a movie a 12-year-old boy might have made with no creative oversight and an unlimited budget.  But seeing as how it came from Zack Snyder, who made Watchmen, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and that movie about owls my friend Lindy West assures me is awesome, I was willing to give it a chance.  Well, I’m still willing to give it a chance, but the critics who’ve seen it seem to really, really hate it.  A few people liked it, but the majority who didn’t reacted almost universally as if it had kicked their puppy and flushed their drug stash.  Or flushed their puppy and kicked their drug stash, but either way, they were less than pleased.

“Snyder has described it as “Alice In Wonderland with machine guns,” but it’s more like The Pussycat Dolls Present Steampunk Kill Bill, only more assaultive and pandering than that description suggests.” -Onion A/V Club

“Hands-down the most nightmarishly awful film of the year.” -Philadelphia Inquirer

“Zack Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn’t going to satisfy anyone but himself. [...] A salacious mess, 0 stars.” -Michael Phillips, Chicago Trib

“An unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game/comic book crossover vein, “Sucker Punch” is ” “Last Airbender” with bustiers.” -Orlando Sentinel

“300 was interesting, Watchman was bearable, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole was ridiculous, but Sucker Punch is just sad. Like his porcelain heroine, anyone who willingly spends $13 for a ticket to this smut is willfully lobotomizing themselves.” -NY Press (but not Armond White?! for shame!)

“Just what kind of gyrations is Babydoll doing to effect such awe and conjure such imaginary garbage? Is it like Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” dance? Because that was pretty powerful.” -Jake Coyle, AP

“Just one big hypersexed slo-mo misfire.” -Movieline

Of course, keep in mind that these opinions come from limp-wristed haemophiliacs not fit to scrub the skidmarks out of my stars-and-bars thong.  I couldn’t make it to a press screening this week, but I should have a real review up for you by Monday.  Don’t worry, I won’t let the buzz affect me.  Frankly, I didn’t hear anything after “violent greasy rape fantasy.”

This is the newest trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch (opens March 25th).  It’s fun to watch the trailer for Endhiran (that’s the Indian movie featuring the giant snake made of robot men that slithers around eating cars) because it’s foreign and you can’t understand the words, which creates a nice cognitive distance from which you can say, “Man, foreigners.  They are bugf*ck insane, amirite?”  But let’s have a little perspective here.  Imagine you’re an Indian dude watching the trailer for Sucker Punch.  It has, in order of appearance:

• A fire-breathing dragon
• A WWI-era German army of the undead
• A tank
• A robot samurai
• A robot German
• A robot of indeterminate origin with an exploding face
• Giant samurai now shooting a gatling gun

And that’s just the first half before the quick cuts start.  (This version of the trailer doesn’t even show the dinosaurs).  It’s like Zack Snyder snuck into Michael Bay’s dreams and filled a movie with his secrets. Right about now you’d be rubbing your magic beads and muttering a prayer to a cobra or whatever those people do.

Much like Sucker Punch‘s protagonist who fights a war inside her own mind, I like to imagine that in Zack Snyder’s head, he’s the hero of an epic movie where everything he does happens in super slow-mo, but in reality it’s just him making whooshing sounds with his mouth while he peels an orange.