A furious 16-year-old girl cuts her hair in big, violent gestures. This is how we meet Apple, the messed-up heroine of Gimme Shelter, just before she escapes her mother’s grungy, violent household.
Along with cutting her ties to her drug-addled, irresponsible mother, this hair-chopping could also be read as a symbolic act on the part of the actress playing Apple. Vanessa Hudgens found teen stardom as one of Disney’s High School Musical breakouts, and taking on movies like this (and last year’s cuckoo Spring Breakers) is a way of graduating to a different kind of professional status.
As a career-changer, Gimme Shelter is great for Hudgens. She’s completely convincing in it, a dark ball of coiled anger and inchoate acting-out. The rest of the movie doesn’t live up to her performance.
There is no doubt that Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch, the director’s first original script, is a mess of movie. Even the term “original” is a questionable description, as the wide range of influences define the film as much as his own pop sensibilities. Yet Sucker Punch was so critically derided that I think it’s been dismissed without really acknowledging the mad mix of inspirations or Snyder’s own blinkered passion for the project, clearly something that, for reasons he may not be able to articulate, he poured his creative energies into.
Sucker Punch's Baby Doll squad
The vague mid-20th Century setting with a 19th century Gothic attitude and 1990s music-video stylings drops Baby Doll (Emily Browning) into a private sanitarium that looks like something out of the Batman movies. But before we have a chance to ruminate on this post-Dickens orphanage horror we are plunged into her fantasy of the place as a bordello prison fronted by a gangster (the head orderly, with a pencil mustache and zoot suit) in the flesh trade, with the Cuckoo’s Nest of pretty young inmates (Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung) now dancers in the show, which is just part of the club’s entertainment. (The extended version on Blu-ray features an elaborate musical number that puts their chorus girl moves on display.)
But that’s just the first step down the rabbit hole of escapist fantasy. Under the hypnotic sways of Baby Doll’s magic moves, the girls are refashioned as jailbait stripper fantasies (all with exposed navels and a flash of thigh) and arm themselves with heavy metal artillery to take on one anachronistic video game scenario after another: a samurai rite of passage, a World War II mission against zombie Nazis, a siege on a castle of Orc-like beasts and dragons, a sci-fi odyssey against robot terrorists on a moon of Saturn. Because nothing says female empowerment better than little babydoll outfits and really big guns.
