2016: The Year in Film: "Suicide Squad" Review

So after the moderate to large sized disaster that was Batman V Superman (seriously, that movie was 85% hot trash and even though the film was a moderate financial success an expanded universe simply cannot be maintained on the back of poorly reviewed and generally bad films) Warner Brothers and DC were in need of a fresh start, something to propel them into the Marvel stratosphere. Hopes have been high concerning Suicide Squad, and DC clearly believes in the project, as they've been hyping it. (and especially Jared Leto's Joker for more than a year) The future of the DC film universe doesn't COMPLETELY rest in the hands of David Ayer and Suicide Squad, as Wonder Woman was the best part of BvS and the trailer released recently at Comicon looks great, but a well done and successful Suicide Squad is pretty key to DC's ambitions to match Disney and Marvel.

On paper, this seems like an intriguing and potentially great match. David Ayer, the writer of films like Training Day, the original Fast and the Furious and the writer/director of the underrated Brad Pitt WW2 tank vehicle Fury and the solid End of Watch (although it does seem suspect in retrospect that he likes the word "fury" so damn much...) has made a name for himself in making gritty, action packed, extremely masculine films with dark characters that pull very few punches. The "Suicide Squad" in DC comics and also depicted in the show Arrow on the CW is a group of villains who are enlisted by ARGUS (DC's version of SHIELD) to take on dangerous and/or deadly missions for the government under the threat of death. So the writer of Training Day writing and directing a movie about supervillains undertaking secret heroic missions starring Will Smith? This should be a home run, right?

The film features a bunch of villains we've never met considering that the DCU is 2 films old at this point, and introduces them to varying degrees of success. Deadshot (Will Smith) is a hitman who never misses. Harley Quinn (Margot Robie) is the Joker's girlfriend. Captain Boomerang is an Australian thief who has the worst name ever and throws boomerangs. Killer Croc is a giant man-reptile. Enchantress is a witch. Rick Flagg is a special forces soldier in charge of keeping them under control, etc.

The Good:  the cast is, by and large, solid. Will Smith turns in a predictably good and charismatic performance and is pretty damn convincing as the ultra competent Deadshot, who becomes a sort of co-leader of this crew. Margot Robie is pretty good as Harley Quinn, even if her accent appears to be the same one she used in Wolf of Wall Street and has me concerned that she only knows how to sound American if she adopts a ridiculous Brooklyn/Long Island accent that sounds like it's right out of Sopranos. Viola Davis is solid as Amanda Waller, the calculating and cold head of ARGUS. Joel Kinnaman is fine. Jai Courtney's Capt. Boomerang is intriguing. Additionally, there is humor to be found here, as Harley Quinn especially has some LOL-worthy lines. The first 20 or so minutes of this film is very well done and suggests that somewhere underneath everything else there might just exist a version of Suicide Squad that is a damn good movie... unfortunately that's not the one they chose to release.



The Bad: this movie is at once bloated and desperately needing more, which is also true of BvS and is, in my book, just maybe the worst sin a film can commit. Its characters are serviced and introduced at random and seemingly nonsensical intervals, with some getting extended flashbacks and backstories, others getting none, and some getting maybe one scene. The plot, insofar that a plot actually exists, is totally predictable and circular. i.e., the Suicide Squad is formed to fight threats that only emerge because the Suicide Squad is formed. The villains are pointless, lack motivation or backstory and are ill defined. Speaking of ill-defined, the film wants to be a superpowered version of Escape from NY or The Dirty Dozen, but WE DON'T EVEN GET A PLANNING SCENE WHERE THEY (and by extension "we") ARE TOLD WHAT THEIR MISSION IS. Only some characters actually know what the mission is, so it results in a bloated back half of the film that consists mainly of people wandering around with no impetus or motivation because no one is actually aware of what the threat actually is. The music. Sigh, the music in this thing is probably the worst part about it and maybe the worst use of soundtrack I've ever seen in a film. In a film that, like I said, lacks exposition, character backstories for most of its cast, and any description of the team's mission, the songs are so incredibly ham fisted and spot on that it's actively offensive to anyone who's left the house in the last decade. Extended scenes in this film feel basically like music videos, and the desperate attempt to parrot what Guardians of the Galaxy did so well is just an epic fail because of how spot-on and unsubtle the entire enterprise is. Also - I'm not sure whose decision this was - Ayer's or the studio's, but a significant amount of the film's marketing centered around Jared Leto's Joker. Watch that trailer, he's in 25% of it. He is in probably... 9 minutes of the film's 120 minutes runtime. It's basically a cameo, which is confusing considering how hyped up it was. If you're going to have hardly any Joker, why play up how much Joker you're going to have? He was fine and different - but he didn't add hardly anything at all.

All in all, the best compliment I can give to this movie is that it's at least twice as good as Batman v Superman, and that there are elements here that make me feel like this movie COULD HAVE been good. Will Smith and Margot Robie are worth watching, and the film itself is roughly 30% an 8/10 film, 20% a 5/10 film and 50% a 1/10 film. Disappointing, DC, although not irredeemably bad.

5/10

2016: The Year in Film: "Batman v Superman: The Dawn of Justice" Review

I seriously can't even imagine how pissed off Warner Bros. and DC are over the fact that Marvel is making widely beloved and extremely profitable flicks featuring their second and third tier characters while DC has yet to establish a shared universe featuring the two most recognizable comic book characters to ever exist. Zack Snyder was brought in to try to bring a shared universe to DC and made the halfway decent Man of Steel a few years back. I mostly liked MoS, but thought that it featured some questionable choices, morality, WAY too much product placement and kind of went off the rails at the end. However, I thought there was enough good there to give the flick a favorable review and it left me cautiously optimistic for what was to come next for DC.  However, pretty much EVERYTHING that happened next only caused me to become more and more concerned for Zack Snyder's sanity and the presence (or lack thereof) of any kind of adult supervision over at DC.  First, the announcement that DC's universe would disregard Christopher Nolan's Batman films (all of which are infinitely better than Man of Steel and which featured a legitimate way forward for Batman). Second, the announcement that DC's universe would continue with a "Batman vs Superman" movie (that was announced featuring a reading from the famous showdown in "The Dark Knight Returns"), where a new Batman would be introduced, followed by Justice League. This set off warning bells in my mind. We were going to go from Man of Steel (a standalone Superman origin film) to full blown Justice League with only one intermediary step? Trouble. Marvel had 5 films before Avengers, and had introduced all of the main characters in a prolonged way. Third, the reveal that not only would this movie feature Batman and Superman, we'd ALSO get Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor, Doomsday, Alfred, Lois Lane and an assortment of nonsense. Trouble. That's without even going into Zack Snyder's problems as a director. He has a great visual eye. That much is undeniable. His films are absolutely gorgeous and he can direct the hell out of an action sequence. HOWEVER, he's also incredibly juvenile and responds in the worst imaginable way to criticism. It was clear that he was extremely bothered by the backlash to the fact that his Superman in MOS completely destroyed Metropolis for largely pointless reasons. He didn't think it was bad that Superman went out of his way to destroy things, because that destruction looked REALLY cool. Who else thinks that way? Michael Bay. Yes, I'm saying that Zack Snyder is Michael Bay who likes the color black. Zack Snyder is emo Michael Bay. Having him direct and be the architect of your comic book universe is fine... BUT you'd better have adult supervision in place. Chris Nolan was supervising Man of Steel... you'd be wise to leave him around, DC. Instead they gave Snyder MORE power and put him in charge of assembling and creating your Justice League. Sigh.

So here we are. It's been 18 months since the events of Man of Steel, and Superman is at once celebrated for saving the human race and mistrusted for being an alien who caused untold destruction during his battle to save humanity. In Gotham City, Batman/Bruce Wayne distrusts Superman following his firsthand witnessing of the destruction of a Wayne Industries building in downtown metropolis and the deaths of many of his employees.

The Good: First, the film is utterly overstuffed. However, some of the elements that make it overstuffed aren't necessarily problems and are in fact the best parts of the film. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is set up here, and she is awesome. Every single scene she's in is a treat and she would have been even more amazing if her intro hadn't been spoiled in the trailer. Which seems like a dumb move in retrospect. Ben Affleck's casting as Bruce Wayne was totally derided in fan boy circles... but he's pretty great. His Batman has an intimidating physicality that makes this more violent and jaded dark knight particularly terrifying. The action scenes are well done by and large, and the hints of the Justice League are some of the best parts of the movie.



The Bad: the plot is a mess. By and large, this feels like a 6 hour movie that was cut down to 2.5 hours... and I suppose that's what you get when you try to do the work of 3 movies in one (still too long!) runtime. Character motivations don't make any sense and characters run around doing what they need to do for the plot without the film telling or showing us why that would actually make any sense. Batman is a total fascist idiot when he needs to be, and yet he's exhaustively researching other characters at other points in the same movie. If he's going to exhaustively hack into security systems and what not shouldn't he at least have a conversation with Superman before deciding to just up and murder him? No? Cool, Zack. Good call.

I want to talk about one thing, especially. This film takes the time to show us Bruce Wayne's parents getting murdered. Why do we need that? Is there ANYONE who doesn't know that Bruce's parents died in front of him and was just dying for a scene of a child screaming in anguish as his parents are gunned down in the street? Who decided that was a necessity in a movie that BARELY has an comprehensible plot? That's without even mentioning how damn stupid it is that Martha Wayne's pearl necklace somehow got caught in the murderer's gun. Was it a 30 foot necklace? Or was the gunman shooting her from 4 inches away but she couldn't just slap the gun away? It doesn't make sense, Zack.

Ok, there is SO MUCH that happens because it happens in the comics. The amount of outside knowledge that is required to watch this movie is insane. What is Doomsday, what are his powers and why does he seem to be impossible to kill? NO ONE KNOWS BECAUSE THE MOVIE NEVER TELLS YOU. Why does Clark Kent love Lois Lane? No one knows. Because he does in the comics, duh. Henry Cavill is boring. Amy Adams is miscast and underused. The Daily Planet subplot is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. (Which, btw, how is Clark Kent a reporter in this world? He doesn't have a degree)  Batman is an idiot and Alfred tells him he's an idiot and then he's no longer an idiot for the dumbest reason imaginable. Batman and Superman murder people. Several people. But for some reason not Lex Luthor. There was probably once a good movie here... but it's buried under what should have been a solo Batman movie to set up Batfleck and a separate Man of Steel sequel.


Pro-tip, DC: DON'T HIRE BEN AFFLECK TO ACT IN ZACK SNYDER MOVIES. Haven't you seen The Town? Argo? Those movies are infinitely better than anything Snyder has made or ever will make. This movie is infuriating because it feeds into the nonsense that superhero movies are stupid and pointless. THIS superhero movie is stupid and pointless because Zack Snyder treats his audiences like idiots.

I HATED THIS MOVIE. Except for Wonder Woman. She was amazing.

Watch, but only to hate watch, and to enjoy a few cool scenes.

4/10