Skip to main content

Suicide Squad Lives Up to its Title


         When director David Ayer was first announcing Suicide Squad he noted in comparison to Marvel that DC has the better villains. Which is true. The Batman Rogues Gallery alone consists of half the most memorable greats in the genre. A few of them even appear in this movie about a team of villains forced to work together to bring down a greater evil. Which sounds awesome. What could go wrong?
          Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) as a solution to alien or terrorist threats, assembles a team of dangerous super-criminals who if they don’t die on missions and succeed, will be given an alleviated sentence. This team includes hitman Deadshot (Will Smith), crazed former therapist Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Australian master-thief Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), and the reptilian Killer Croc (Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje) among others. They are led on their first mission by Rick Flag (Joel Kinnamen) who has a personal connection that may endanger it.
          It’s important to know that Suicide Squad is not the movie it was advertised as. The team is tasked with facing a very supernatural enemy which most of them, with the exception of Diablo (Jay Hernandez) are pretty ill-equipped to deal with. And it also doesn’t help that this story never grabs you, feeling very generic and derivative a lot of the time. In addition to that, the exposition and general structure is really poor. The pacing in the first quarter is all over the place and the presence of the Joker (Jared Leto) in this movie is clearly an afterthought.
          Maybe the biggest issue with this character is that he’s given little screen-time for a debut outing. Which with a villain of this calibre is not a good thing. And what we do see of this Joker is pretty disappointing. He’s more of a psychotic drug-dealer than an insane criminal mastermind. There’s none of the meticulousness or sense of the humour that the character is known for throughout his incarnations and on top of all that, his role in this movie is pointless except to explore the backstory of and provide conflict for Harley Quinn. As for Harley, Robbie’s terrific hitting the right mixture of deranged and sexy (though at times there’s a little too much fan service). The character’s personality and inflections are spot on. But her arc is really irritating as it’s all concerned with her unhealthy romance with the Joker. Not only is it likely to annoy fans of both characters, but Harley’s dependence on him really takes away from her own identity and doesn’t allow her any growth whatsoever. 
          But what about the rest of the suicide squad? Some don’t make an impression (the one you think is going to die first does). Deadshot is pretty cool, but he is just Will Smith being Will Smith. Nevertheless, he carries a lot of the film. Flag is the typical boring leader and Cara Delevingne overplays Enchantress quite a bit. Killer Croc is alright, his make-up is great. The biggest surprise though is Captain Boomerang. Jai Courtney up till now has given almost exclusively bad performances, but he’s a real revelation here, playing a very fun character with a number of enjoyable quirks. Waller is pretty by-the-book but Davis is great as usual. I like how the movie emphasize she’s just as the bad as the team she’s building. 
          The action scenes are good, Deadshot in particular gets an impressive one early on. But the visual effects are pretty unimaginative. The set-up the main villain creates for themselves is closer to the Gozer scene from Ghostbusters than the recent reboot. And some effects can be obnoxious. A number of the Joker-Harley sequences are really overdone -like the moment where Joker cradles her in a vat of bleach. And one of the climactic scenes is shot in gratuitous slow motion. The soundtrack is great but it’s edited incredibly poorly. So many sequences that don’t need it are accompanied by pop music. It’s trying to give off that erratic upbeat energy that Guardians of the Galaxy did so well, but the songs can be really distracting and are trying way too hard to fit the films’ identity. The costumes are really good though.
          Suicide Squad lives up to its title a little too much. It constantly feels like it’s trying to prove itself with its over-ambitious story and tie-ins to the DC universe. Where it’s best is in its character interactions which I would have liked to have seen more of. I also would have liked the plot the trailers seemed to imply -that the squad is being assembled to take down the Joker (it certainly would have given Harley a more interesting conflict). But as is, it’s pretty disappointing. 
          It looks like DC’s last hope is Wonder Woman. Fortunately the Wonder Woman trailer looks amazing. Unfortunately, so did Suicide Squad’s. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more