Are you ready for the new #ReleaseTheSnyderCut? No, not for another DC Comics film, but for another by Zack Snyder that got absolutely demolished by critics a decade ago: Sucker Punch.
Geezus, I’ll never forget the uproar about Sucker Punch, which saw scantily-clad women bridging from reality into a fantasy world where they fought giant robots, Nazi zombies, samurai warriors, dragons, and more. It was a pretty nuts film, both visually and in terms of the female empowerment story Snyder was trying, rather unsuccessfully, to tell. The box office wasn’t great for it, either.
Apparently, Snyder hasn’t forgotten about the reaction to Sucker Punch, either. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he says there’s a director’s cut of it out there, while blaming Warner Bros. for the version that opened in theaters…
“[Sucker Punch] was the first time where I really faced, like, a true radical restructuring of the film for it to be more commercial,” Snyder said. “And there is a director’s cut of that movie that has yet to be released. I’ll say that out loud.”
In regards to the reaction Sucker Punch received, Snyder suggests it was misunderstood by those who never looked beyond surface level…
“It’s a protest movie in a lot of ways. It’s a movie about genre. I was asked at the time ‘Why did you dress the girls like that?’ and I’d always go ‘I didn’t dress them like that, you did.’ I always saw it as an indictment of, in some ways, popular culture. I think at the time I was criticized for it being the opposite, like, some sort of sexist rant. It was fun to make and I still love it to this day.”
I’m not so sure about that. In general, Sucker Punch is a lot of fun if you can simply skip ahead to the action/fantasy scenes, but the stuff set in reality is a drag. And contrary to what Snyder says, I think most people did see where he was coming from, but the script was unsophisticated and probably should’ve been written with a female perspective, like the recent film Mayday which tells a very similar story.
This isn’t the first time Snyder has brought up a different cut of Sucker Punch, which tells me this might be his next fan-driven effort. We’ll see if this one pans out like Zack Snyder’s Justice League did.
