Warner Bros. PicturesZack Snyder is not so much a director as he is a curator of cool-ass vibes, at least when it comes to something like Sucker Punch. A platinum-blonde Emily Browning leads a tight-knit group of baddies to freedom with a samurai sword and a dream, mowing down giants in temples and robots on bullet trains. As the croon-y cover that opens the film implies, sweet dreams are made of this. But 15 years ago, the whole world was inclined to disagree with Snyder’s proto-feminist manifesto.“Sucker Punch is probably the most obvious example of straightforward, pure satire that I’ve made,” Snyder told Total Film in 2023. “And I still think I didn’t go far enough, because a lot of people thought that it was just a movie about scantily clad girls dancing around in a brothel.”It’s not that Snyder’s fourth feature isn’t about girls dancing around in a brothel, but there’s also so much more to Sucker Punch that critics didn’t seem to fully understand back then. It was deemed the unholy, “unerotic” and “unthrilling” lovechild between a video game and a jiggle film to some; a cloying, “masturbatory fanboy fantasy” to others. But it was also decidedly ahead of its time, the kind of deconstruction that still feels novel even now. The beauty of Sucker Punch lies in its excess, its status as parody. Snyder is commenting directly on exploitation in film and confronting audience expectations head-on. “The main criticism of the film was that it was too exploitative,” the director recently told Letterboxd. It’s a critique that Snyder has always found “interesting,” as the film is “talking directly to [the audience] about what they wanna see. They wanna see the girls, [but] they don’t wanna see the girls empowered. They wanna see them in sexy outfits.”Sucker Punch gives us all of the above with a wink and a kiss, dressing up its battle cry in coquettish costuming and glam doll makeup. It’s a Trojan Horse for this message of autonomy and empowerment, and nowhere is that clearer than with Browning’s Babydoll. She is both victim and victor: her attempts to take her fate into her own hands backfire at every turn, thanks in great part to the grimdark misogynistic hellscape that Snyder has built up around her. It doesn’t get any bleaker than her tragic backstory — she accidentally murders her little sister while trying to protect her from their slimy stepfather — and things only get worse once he sees fit to ship her off to a mental institution. A lobotomy seems to put an end to life as she knows it... that, or finally give her the tools to break free.After 15 years, it’s high time Sucker Punch got its flowers. | Warner Bros. PicturesSucker Punch is a nesting doll of realities, with multiple versions of the same misadventure unfolding entirely within Babydoll’s mind. She reimagines her grimy new normal as something slightly more glamorous: instead of an asylum, she and her new crew are dancers in a brothel. Her warden, Blue (Oscar Isaac), is a lothario who sells arms, secrets, and more to the highest bidder, using the girls in his employ as a form of currency. It’s about as bad as the utter lack of autonomy she has in the real world — but in this reality, Babydoll can control way more than she thinks. By putting on erotic dances, she can hypnotize her audience. She also retreats even further into a dream world where she wields that aforementioned katana and Daredevil’s Scott Glenn serves as her spiritual guide. It’s in this other world that Babydoll formulates a plan of escape. Glenn’s Wise Man instructs her to collect five items: a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a secret, final thing that will require “a deep sacrifice” and signify “a perfect victory.” (This script, co-penned by Snyder and Steve Shibuya, oscillates between sage, succinct instructions and fortune cookie platitudes like “Don’t ever write a check with your mouth you can’t cash with your ass.” Incredible stuff.) Each dance Babydoll puts on is a kind of heist, transporting her and her conspirators — the spunky Rocket (Jena Malone), her no-nonsense sister Sweetpea (Abbie Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung) — into fantasy realms where the only rule is that of unmitigated cool. These divas slaughter dragons in towering castles and automated German soldiers in WWI-inspired trenches; they are all-powerful and untouchable so long as Babydoll dances, quietly shifting the tide. As a feminist manifesto, Snyder’s Sucker Punch actually has plenty to say. | Warner Bros. PicturesSnyder, meanwhile, leans hard on the gratuitous slo-mo and hyper-stylized, comic book-inspired visuals that have since become his calling card. Here more than any of his films, though, that look and feel is more like a means to an end, a symbolic subversion of an otherwise suffocating reality. “I’m not that concerned with the peril than I am with the bliss of the in-mind empowerment of what Babydoll is doing in the moment,” Snyder told Letterboxd. “I know in some ways it goes against the concept of action... [but] that’s kind of the point of the movie — the seduction of imagery.”It’d take audiences years to grasp that concept in full, and it doesn’t help that Snyder faced so much pushback in making his vision manifest. The director was forced to restructure the film, and the bonkers ending he had planned, in paring down an R-rated story into a PG-13 parameter. (Snyder is still lobbying to deliver his director’s cut of Sucker Punch and finally deliver the “fully realized movie,” but there’s no telling when or if that’ll happen.) Whatever sacrifices were made, there’s no mistaking Snyder’s message now. His gonzo dark fantasy remains the most misunderstood in his oeuvre, but it’s impossible not to be seduced by the tale.Sucker Punch is streaming on HBO Max.