10 Crazy Directors Who Went Completely Over The Top

9. Zack Snyder - Sucker Punch

The spotlight focused onto Zack Snyder with his serviceable remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead in 2004. The film even won over die-hard fans of the George Romero horror classic. Snyder followed up his success with Dawn by adapting two well-regarded comics 300 and Watchmen. The resulting pictures emphasized his strengths and weaknesses as a film maker. Both films have fantastically choreographed action scenes, but when the action stops everything feels stilted and rehearsed. This is most glaringly apparent in Watchmen which stutter-stops its way through what feels like disconnected montages rather than a cohesive whole. Part of this is because of Snyder's slavish adherence to the comic book source material instead of properly translating it to film. Where he excels is in bold action scenes with large-scale presentations like the ones seen in Snyder's Man of Steel. He has proved himself an excellent technical director but not necessarily a proficient storyteller which created a huge gaping hole in his first self-written and directed project. Riding off of the success of Watchmen Warner Bros. basically decided to blindly accept Snyder's follow-up project from his production company Cruel and Unusual Films. The result of their faith was a cruel and unusual punishment on audiences all over the world. Sucker Punch concerns Baby Doll who is wrongly put into a mental asylum and must escape before she is lobotomized. The real surprise here is how the movie breaks the fourth wall by brutalizing the viewer into feeling they are actual lobotomy victims. Basically the entire film can be distilled into one nicely packaged analogy. Sucker Punch is every poorly crafted cut scene from every video game designed for 14-year-old boys. Snyder completely disregarded all sanity and reverted back to an attention-span-disordered child slapping everything he thought was "cool" up on the screen. Think of Jackson Pollock throwing random comic book pages onto a canvas of glue and you'll start to get an idea of what Sucker Punch is all about. Again there is nothing more dangerous than a film director being given the keys to the movie studio system without limits. What usually happens is the director with their new-found freedom will spiral out control like a creative Exxon Valdez. Given total control Zach Snyder assaults the system with hyper sexualized teenage fantasies filled with swords, mechs, dirty sex club inspired grinding and machine guns galore. Snyder was completely out of control and let his inner child run amok at everyone else's expense.