Jon Hamm: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked
1. High Roller - Sucker Punch
We should've known. All the signs were there! The evidence was staring us right in the face, and we refused to listen! Zack Snyder's last handful of films have been divisive, to say the least (save maybe for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole), and we have a feeling we know where it all started. Sucker Punch came between Snyder's controversial Watchmen adaptation and then his Superman reboot Man Of Steel, and manages to embody everything that was bad about those films, and then some: the over reliance on style over substance, the obsession with slow-motion, the gratuitous violence, the good actors handed crappy scripts to try and breath some life into.
In fact, Sucker Punch took all of those Snyder trademarks to the nth degree. The film starts with Emily Browning's Babydoll being institutionalised by an abusive stepfather, where she deals with the grim reality be escaping into a fantasy world where she's an exotic dancer. Which is also not much of an escape, so then she likes to imagine she's a samurai schoolgirl fighting WWII-era tanks and giant robots. It's like Inception only much, much more stupid. And with more women dressed in burlesque outfits, firing tommy guns. It's not a good film and, in keeping with the director's inexplicable ability to tempt actual talent into working with him, includes such usually reliable actors as Browning, Abbie Cornish, Carla Gugino and Oscar Isaac.
Plus, duh, Jon Hamm, who has two keys roles in two of Babydoll's levels of reality. In the world where she's a happy-go-lucky strpper and possible prostitute he's the High Roller, a big-time client for her employers that she's expected to pleasure. In reality, meanwhile, he's the doctor scheduled to perform her lobotomy. Neither of which are particularly big or interesting roles and, since Snyder's way more interested in visuals and perversion, Hamm doesn't get to do a whole lot with them, fading into the grey CGI melange that makes up the rest of Sucker Punch's interminable 110 minutes.