Suicide Squad

Buzz-Kill
or
"Puddin', He's Ruining Date Night!!"

It's hard to say why Suicide Squad leaves such a bad taste in the brain. It is, at least, coherent in the story-telling (the insistence of graphics in the first half-hour is another story*) and is easily followed even if its attention wanders like a five year old on sugar. Based on a second-tier DC comic featuring a "Dirty Dozen" team of "super-villains,"** organized by one of DC's ever-increasing number of government agencies (does DC stand for "DemoCrat?), they take on super-human threats that the "nice" super-teams don't touch...or find out about.

It takes place in the continuity of the DC Movie Universe after the apparent death of Superman (in Batman v Superman: Damn of Justice) when a government operative named Amanda Waller (played by a non-nonsense Viola Davis, who seizes the screen every time she walks in a room) devises a plan that keeps stock of "meta-humans" and coerces them to do her or the government's bidding. Amanda's showed up in other DC properties (like the CW's "Arrow" and "Smallville") and her mantra is "What if the next Superman becomes a terrorist?" There's only so much kryptonite to go around, so she recruits criminals with "special skills" who might be able to take on such a threat. But her idea of doing that is using folks like Deadshot (who shoots good), Harley Quinn (who uses a baseball bat), Slipknot (good with knots...???), Killer Croc, a human alligator and...Captain Boomerang.

These guys will take down a Superman? Not bloody likely.

But, let that pass. She does recruit a remorseful ganger named El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) who has considerably more fire-power (literally) and The Enchantress (Cara Delavingne), an archaeologist named June Moone (go ahead and laugh, Marvel-zombies, then tell me how great a name Victor von Doom is) who is possessed by the spirit of a centuries old witch and becomes Waller's go-to prestidigitator. She uses her best commando, Lt. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, looking perpetually miserable), to keep her manageable, but Moon and Flag fall in love and in the time that Dick York can blurt "Sa-a-am!" things get a little out of hand.

Moone's witch-renter gets a little cranky and takes over command from her host, resurrects her warlock-brother using a stray passer-by, and the two start construction on a thing that makes a big light in the sky, to what end the movie never makes clear other than to employ some special effects houses and direct opponents to their exact position. Not sure why superhero villains like to do this, but they sure seem to do it a lot in the movies. Waller coordinates her select villains, puts a remote mini-bomb into their necks to keep them grudgingly compliant (but no less belligerent) and sends them on their surly way.

The mission is to harness Enchantress and put a stop to the big swirling bright thing pointing into the sky. None of these villains has any great skills that might hinder anything supernatural (bullets, boomerangs, baseball bats?) so the only thing they're good for is to slice through the hordes of humans the Enchantress has turned into walking pudding-pops that seem to have the same ability to attract direct hits that Imperial Stormtroopers do and, from the looks of things, also have a very low threshold of death. Convenient.

Each of the Squad finds a reason (aside from the pains in their necks) to voluntarily put themselves in harms' way, usually tied to their origin stories. Deadshot's is a flashback to when he was captured by Batman (Ben Affleck, now that he's committed) entirely due to the intervention of his beloved 11 year old daughter. Harley's is tied to her work at Arkham Asylum as a psychiatrist and coming under the thrall of The Joker (Jared Leto, good enough but he'll never become a Hallmark Christmas Ornament) Captain Boomerang gets caught by The Flash (Ezra Miller in costumed cameo) during a botched robbery that turns back on him. El Diablo's flash-fires back to his gang-banger days and the death of his family. Everybody else has to wait for the sequel for theirs, I guess.

Except for Slipknot (Adam Beach...and he's a favorite of mine, too!)

Now, director David Ayer can be a very effective director with a knack for the off-putting as is displayed in his controversial police-cam masquerading as a movie End of Watch and the Brad Pitt WWII tank-drama Fury. Both movies have things that were actually arresting, like Fury's field-jousting with tanks and EOW's in-your-face pacing with a perpetual overlay of dread. Ayer is good at portraying sacrifice and selflessness in the midst of looming destruction, which would make you think that something like Suicide Squad would be right in his wheelhouse.

There is some of that; fleeting moments of "why am I doing this, again? Oh yeah, I know." But they flit by and, given the rest of the movie, they're out of place. They're also out of "pace." You can tell when something is VERY IMPORTANT when Ayer tosses in the slow-motion for far too long and for far too much emphasis. You almost want to wave him along, especially when the rest of the movie—except for a couple of thudding laugh-lines—moves along rather zippily.

Sometimes too much so. I've mentioned the graphics sequences that pop up and disappear before you can register what they're saying. Those sequences are so out of whack from the rest of the movie, you get the impression they came from another filmmaker. One hears rumors. One is that there were two competing edits of the movie—one that was supervised by Ayer and another that was supervised by the trailer-house that made the admittedly excellent trailers for the film. 

Bad idea. Ayer is a storyteller. Trailer-editors are marketers. The jobs are completely different. As good as those trailers are (and I've included them below) they aren't a story. They're a collage, a highlights real. It doesn't have to make sense, merely make money. Trailers are sizzle. Movies are a meal. At least they're supposed to be. It's wrong to sell the sizzle and offer a plate of steaming tofu. You're defeating the purpose of the trailer in the first place. It's false advertising. More importantly, if you're splicing together a film from those different sources with their different agendas, you're not making a movie, you're constructing a Frankenstein monster out of disparate parts.

While I'm on the subject, as good as those trailers are, they're an even better example of TMI. This is getting to be a disastrous trend. That first trailer played at Comic-Con for an audience of comics and movie-geeks and was designed to quell the masses, to douse the torches, and dull the pitchforks of their rebellious target-group (that's an exercise in futility—read the comments and you'll find bubble-people who don't like anything that's not originating from their heads).  Reassure them that the Joker is "edgy" (the way you like him), Harley Quinn is "hot" (the kind boys like—not precisely how she is in the comics or the animated series she sprang from), or that even Captain Boomerang doesn't look silly. The schizy target audience wants the comic book characters taken oh-so-seriously, but with a lot of humor. How bi-polar is that? 

But, to appease the fickle and volatile target audience, you run the risk of squeezing every last drop of surprise or discovery out of a movie. You don't start a poker hand showing all your cards on the table.*** And if it happens, you'd better be damned sure the rest of the movie holds up and surpasses its hype. And Suicide Squad does not.

It is designed to an inch of its life. The casting is very well done; even Will Smith manages to make Deadshot seem like a distillation of every Will Smith character from his last ten movies (a combination of hard wise-ass and sentimental softie). But all of those Frankenstein body-parts does not add up to a satisfying movie or movie experience. For whatever reason, and there are many, not just with the movie but its selling and franchise-hyping, they contribute to making the movie an indifferent exercise on first—and more importantly, last—viewing.

My, my. Quite a long review for a movie I had a dull reaction to. But, the many issues it raises in "the culture" padded the thing out. I'll just let Leto's Joker sum it up succinctly:

"Really...Really...Bad"

* It's cute when Tarantino does it, it's entertaining in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but in Suicide Squad, it is irritating and even obfuscating—it tells you less than if they had no graphics at all, if such a thing is possible. They throw so much crap at the screen and in such flashing illegible fonts that you just kind of give-up trying to follow and dismiss it with "it's not important..." Maybe they're trying to encourage multiple viewings by leaving viewers in the dust, but I won't be seeing this twice—what's the point?—and only a devotee would buy the DVD to slow down the retinal-image-defying graphics to be able to see them. Frankly, I'd rather not spend MORE time watching this, even if it DOES reveal that one of the weapons that Deadshot is an expert with is a potato-gun.  That sort of registered as it flashed by. Useful. And telling.

** The cast in the comics has changed over the years—they do specialize in suicide missions—but the movie features Batman villains Deadshot, Harley Quinn and Killer Croc (not only does he have the best toys, he has the best villains, for example....), Captain Boomerang (who battles the super-speeding Flash with...boomerangs), El Diablo (from "All-Star Westerns", originally), Slipknot (from "Firestorm"), Enchantress (from "Strange Adventures" and the "Superman" titles) and the non-villainous Katana (from "Batman and The Outsiders"). At least they didn't include Bronze Tiger.

*** There's another aspect to this: the video fan-press has created a cottage industry of hyper-ventilating fan-people who parse each single image of a trailer in an attempt to "divine" every last tidbit of information that can be gleaned from it, like pigs snuffling for truffles. There are videos of up to 30 to 40 minutes analyzing a 3 minute trailer, with as much misinformation and unsupported speculation as fact. That's nuts, and that kind of spoon-feeding can't come to any good for an audience-member wanting to be satisfied...or entertained.

Paper Towns

thE mYth oF marGo RotH sPiEgelMan
or
"She's Still a Mystery to Me"

Quentin (Nat Wolff) is obsessed.  From the moment that Margo and her family moved into his neighborhood he has been crazy about Margo (Cara Delevingne) and her love of mysteries.  They become fast friends at the age of 5, but as they get older, she matures a little quicker and they slowly become more acquaintances than friends. But Quentin is still obsessed, watching from the side-lines as Margo outpaces him in interests, popularity and lifestyle.  She simply outgrows him.

Then, in high school, things break.  While most of the kids are getting excited about prom, Margo shows up at Quentin's upstairs bedroom window and tells him he has to help her in an adventure. They go to a warehouse store and supply up for a night of what Margo calls "revenge."  She goes to the houses of various of her friends—ex-friends now as she feels betrayed by them—and hurts them where they live, literally, employing various "shaming" rituals which will need to be explained at school—the most outlandish of which is going to her best friend's house, where Margo's boyfriend is sleeping over, and calling the girl's parents to inform them that their daughter is being soiled in her room. The errant boyfriend exits a window, clothes being carried in a pile as he runs buck-naked into the night where he is summarily snapped for posterity with a smart phone. Owned.

Quentin is thrilled (despite subsequently being roughed up by the sosh's the next day at school)—Margo is paying ATTENTION to him, his street-cred has gone up a notch, and he's being noticed at school rather than blending in with the lockers (or being shoved into them). He's one of those undefined ur-boys before they can be recognized as men, doughy and devoid of sharp angles, and he has a lame-ass lope to his mouth that always seems to be smiling even if he's being told that his dog died.* He has two equally fringe friends: the perpetually horny Ben (Austin Abrams), who is a serial up-talker with delusions of studhood; and Radar (Justice Smith), who's managed to pull off the dual demands of being studious AND having a girlfriend (Jaz Sinclair), which he sustains by never letting her near his friends (obviously) or his parents (rumored to have the largest collection of black Santa's in the world). Either could kill the illusion of magic.

Radar, Quentin and Ben (who, by his expression, has just fallen in love again)

Quentin, though, is still over the Moon. The excitement of the previous night's adventure has him dog-tired at school, but still puppy-dog thrilled. "You should live your life like this," Margo had told him. Instead of thinking about the wisdom of taking advice from a 17 year old who has no problems with breaking-and-entering or with revenge scenarios. He instead begins planning what the invitations will say for his and Margo's wedding. He can't wait to see her again.

But, he doesn't.  Nor does she show up at school the next day. Or the third. On that day, her parents file yet another in a series of "missing persons" reports (this is the fourth time she's run away—one time she'd left for three months to be a groupie with a rock band) and Quentin turns his obsession to finding Margo. He asks friends—the ones that don't want to punch him out—her parents, her sister. Nobody knows where's Margo. Particularly worried is Margo's best friend Lacey (Halston Sage)—whose car Margo saran-wrapped that night for thinking she knew about her boyfriend's cheating. After days pass by, Quentin looks across at Margo's window. The blind is down (Margo never left the blind down) and tucked in it is a photograph of Woody Guthrie.

Margo has left clues, and with the help of Ben, Radar, Radar's girl Angela, and Lacey, they start tracking the breadcrumbs and do everything but buy a dog named "Scooby-Doo." Those meddling kids...

It is to John Green's credit that when he wrote his third YAL book (after "Looking for Alaska" and "An Abundance of Katherines") he chose to stray into another genre (other than the standard "romance,") and into that of the mystery (it was even nominated for an "Edgar Award"). That seems right. Kids see life as a mystery—it's all new and new stuff keeps showing up around every corner. And they don't know what they don't know—that's at the very heart of mystery. Try to stuff a teen movie into another genre like "noir" (and I'm thinking of Brick here) the results are as believable as Bugsy Malone being a credible gangster movie.  It's style versus reality, and more stylized than actually evoking any real style. Paper Towns eludes that—they're trying to solve a mystery close to their hearts, as opposed to finding out "What Happened at Midnight" or "Hunting For Hidden Gold." Life's throwing up another question mark and it's from one of their own.

So, they follow the clues, culminating in a road-trip that absolutely, positively has to be finished by prom-night ("Life," after all, must go on) and the kids want to solve the mystery, but it's Quentin who wants to know the motive. He has to know "why." And like any "good" detective, he won't like the answer much.

Neither will some of Green's devoted readers. Paper Towns is adapted by two very good screenwriters, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber, who wrote (500) Days of Summer and adapted The Spectacular Now and Green's The Fault in Our Stars (they also wrote Steve Martin's second "Pink Panther" movie, but we'll pass over that one). In Green's novel, the "ultimate reveal" is a bit harsher, and more of a "tough love" exercise, but in the movie, things are a bit more "feel-good." The situation ends on the same note, but how it gets there, especially in the Quentin-Margo dynamic of obsessor/obsessed and Margo's ultimate sense of self are quite different. In the movie, Margo seems to know what she's doing, but in Green's original, she's as much on a quest as Quentin—she just doesn't know what it is, nor does she care. Quentin gets some of that by his brief association with Margo and starts to generate the understanding that it is the journey, not the goal that is of the most importance. The latter is so High School. The former is a lot like life. Too bad you have to graduate to get there.

A good movie, with more food for thought in the depths than there might be on the surface, which is entirely appropriate.

"What a treacherous thing it is to think that a person is more than a person"

* He's also just a little gifted as an actor—he provided a lot of connective spackle as the "friend with eye cancer" in The Fault in Our Stars (whose male lead has a quick cameo in Paper Towns).