The Suicide Squad

Task Force "Ecch!"

or

"Here's Hoping I See You in 3 Hours"

 

David Ayer's Suicide Squad was a sad affair. The trailers looked great, and the fan response was so positive to them that the Warner Brothers team took the movie away from Ayer and tapped the trailer team to re-cut it. There may have been two cuts and some "genius" mixed and matched, but the sum total was not as lively as it should have been, and a lot less anarchic as it was called out to be. It was glum with the sole high point being the introduction to Margot Robbie's version of Harley Quinn.

 

So, now, here's the 2.0 version, with a "The" adjective inserted to tell them apart (the next "Batman" film is "The" Batman), and the Warner Bro's do what they usually do when they think one of their tent-poles is in trouble—hire a director with ties to Marvel to re-do it (because that's worked so well in the past!). In this case, it's Troma director James Gunn, who directed the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films for Marvel, and got fired by Disney for some "bad tweets" he'd made in the past. While Disney got their mouse-knickers in a bunch, Warner grabbed him for the next "Suicide Squad" before Disney/Marvel turned tail and asked him to come back.

It was Warner's gain. Gunn's "take" on "Task Force X" "works".

There isn't a lot of set-up. We're are introduced to the super-villain Savant (Gunn crony Michael Rooker), sent to Belle Reve prison for blackmail. He has been made a deal by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, national treasure and who is put to good use here) to become part of "Task Force X"—The Suicide Squad. An explosive charge is put in his neck (amusingly, played by the comics' creator James Ostrander) and is told that if he deviates from his mission that the device will be detonated, killing him instantly, but if the mission is accomplished and he survives, ten years will be taken off his sentence.

 

He is put on a plane to the South American Island of Corto Maltese, which has just had it's American-friendly government toppled by a new regime of cut-throats. The team consists of Savant, Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman from the original film), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, ditto), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, ditto-ditto) as well as new members Blackguard (Peter Davidson), Javelin (Flula Borg), an alien warlord called Mongal (Mayling Ng), TDK ("don't ask" and played by Nathan Fillion) and Weasel (Sean Gunn). Things do not go well once they make land-fall as their landing has been leaked to military on the island. As some of the posters say "Don't get too attached." More on this section later.

That assault was just a diversion; another team, comprising of Bloodsport (Idris Elba—he's great in this!), Peacemaker (Jon Cena), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), King Shark (Steve Agee and voiced by Sylvester Stallone), and The Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchion) land elsewhere and have a considerably easier time of it. How these guys got mixed up in this is done with a flashback as their mission is to infiltrate the capital and destroy all vestiges of what is called "Operation: Starfish," a super-secret project that has been under wraps for years and is in danger of being misused by the current junta. Oh, and their mission gets revised to also rescue Flag and Harley, who have gone missing.

Sounds simple enough, but there's still quite a few characters to juggle, and unlike Ayer, who gave back-stories to Quinn and Deadshot—and that's about it—Gunn manages to weave back-story in without having to build a whole new sequence around it, interrupting the story-flow. Oh, he jumps around in time a bit, but in the service of planning a surprise with a well-timed "gotcha" at moments of extreme duress for the team. "How will they get out of this one?" Well, just wait, we've got some 'splainin' to do.

Now, those who've seen the Marvel "Guardians" movies will be surprised at the difference between a "PG-13" James Gunn movie and a Hard-"R" James Gunn movie. Those who remember his unrated comics spoof, Super, will be more prepared. In the battle sequences, faces get blown off, people are ripped to shreds, blood spurts copiously, bodies set aflame, and limbs come off—intentionally and unintentionally—in a way that feels more like a visit to a triage unit than it does a comic-book fight. At one point (when Harley Quinn is single-handedly making an escape from the island El Presidente's stronghold) the blood-splatter is replaced by flower-petals and chirping birds, which can be explained away that she's crazy, but more probably it's to avoid an "X"-rating. 

And it's persistent. Parents should be warned: "It's a super-hero movie" is not an excuse and taking your kids to this is like taking them to Taxi Driver.

That being said, the movie also goes out of its way to be goofy. Gunn has picked comic-book characters whose power ratings are very low in the D&D deck—"Polka-Dot Man?" "The Disconnected Kid?" "Ratcatcher 2?" "Weasel?"—but very high in the disposability category. That also includes two characters we meet later: "The Thinker" (played by an emaciated—but no less sharp—Peter Capaldi), and the movie's "Big Bad," one of the original villains of DC's "silver age"—appearing in the first appearance of The Justice League—"Starro, the Conqueror."

Yes, folks, he's a giant starfish. But, an intergalactic giant starfish. (Okay, that's still not impressive...) An intergalactic giant star-fish, who can squirt little starfish that will latch onto your face and take over your mind (except in the movie, they kill people dead and re-animate them as zombies). Well, yeah, it's still silly as all Hell, but...ya know...canon, copyrighted, merchandisable DC property...all of that.

A starfish throws a shark into a building. Yeah, tell me you've seen that before...

 
Okay, it's still silly as all Hell—especially when Gunn has stuck a google-eye rolling around in the middle of it—but, for me, it's a little bit of the charm. I liked the Pacific Rim movies, even though my rational brain told me that giant killer robots are a really ungainly system of defense (like the AT-AT's in the "Star Wars" movies, "just go for the legs and let gravity sort it out"), but it's still something of a hoot to see. And look, you can go as grim and gritty as you want to in the quest to make your movie "bad-ass," but in the end it's still a comic book movie. Real junta's flood countries with cocaine or hack computer clouds, they don't launch giant starfish (although I bet they would if they could).

What I'm saying is the goofiness off-sets the carnage, crossing that bridge between tension and comedy, which, although I say it's a bridge it is actually more of a tightrope. The greater the tension, the greater the release, whether it be shock or laughter. Gunn has always had that sensibility, but the allowance to go "R" just gives him permission to push the boundaries, not unlike the original Deadpool (but without the fourth-wall breaking "meta" quality that quickly wears out its welcome). It's fast, it's funny, and it's more than competent. Recently, I've been decrying the loose/lame action scenes these movies have been sporting, but Gunn lets you know where people are, how they got there, and what the big picture perspective of those sequences are. With so many characters that takes some doing.

Casting helps that process a lot. Fortunately, the film is chock-full of good actors who can do the drama and the comedy. Davis, Robbie and, surprisingly, Kinnaman pull this off amazingly well. But, Idris Elba comes off with one of the best star-turns he's ever done, Cena shows a flair for straight-faced comedy, Melchior becomes the heart and soul of the movie, and Dastmalchion takes a lame part and turns it to an advantage. You care if these guys make it through the movie, and, as it lives up to the title and original concept, that is never a sure-thing.

 

It's a savage/silly romp, not afraid of making fun of and celebrating the silliness of the four-color world.

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.

Terminator Genisys

For Sale on Craigslist: "Vintage" Android: Recycled Parts, Slightly Worn and Rusty, Old Programming, Not Very Expressive—Would Make a Credible Republican Presidential Candidate.
or
Artificial Un-intelligence

As if one needed another reason not to visit San Francisco this movie summer, Terminator Genisys tears up the Golden City that has been already been flattened by the Mother of All Earthquakes, invasions by apes, Godzilla and kaiju, dropping star ships, and everything from A (an atom bomb in A View to a Kill) to X (X-men: Last Stand). 

This time the threat that San Francisco faces is from a movie that seems hell-bent on imploding itself out of existence through that most feared Weapon of Mass Destruction to movie-geeks: continuity errors.

We know the story already, as they've told it every—single—movie:*  a miltary-designed artificial intelligence named "Skynet" goes a little "off-program" and takes the "deterrent-idea" a little too far by destroying the one thing that causes all the wars in the first place—us pesky humans. "Skynet" launches a planet-wide nuclear attack, and after the conflagration of "Judgment Day," hunts the non-crispy humans into extinction. The humans' only hope is their rebel leader John Connor (he's been played by Edward Furlong as a kid and Michael Edwards, Nick Stahl, and Christian Bale as an adult), who, after the machines invent a way to time-travel, sends one of his operatives Kyle Reese (used to be: Michael Biehn, now is: Jai Courtney) back in time to protect Connor's mother, Sarah (then: Linda Hamilton; now Emilia Clarke) who is under threat from a "Terminator" (the once and future Arnold Schwarzenegger) missioned to kill Connor before he is even conceived. Ironically (HEDGED SPOILER) the plan ensures that John Connor is born, despite the death of Reese while defending Sarah. Silly robots.

Good Idea for a Movie. Bad Idea for a sequel, which are variations of the same theme as Skynet sends ever better, sleeker and less Austrian robots to do the job, and the rebels send their own increasingly aging "terminators" to stop them. Surprisingly the films were not called "Try, Try Again" and "The Robots Don't Realize if You Do the Same Thing Over and Over Expecting a Different Outcome, You Have a Screw Loose," or even "Another Waste of Time-Travel." But, if Skynet is dumb, the humans are even dumber: every time they fix it so that Skynet doesn't come about, it still manages to come about.

As it does here. We go over the same Skynet story for the fourth time, and then, again, Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor to save his mother...again. We even get a reprise of the first film where "The Terminator" (a CGI-zenegger) confronts the same 1984 vintage heavy-metalers and tells them he "vahnts" their clothes. Then something different actually happens: he is confronted by a figure in a hoodie carrying a gun. Low and behold it's an old Arnold Schwarzenegger, who blasts away at his earlier version, and they get into a knock-down-dragged-on fight between "new" terminator and "old" terminator, with the grayer version getting the worst of it, until he/it is rescued by...Sarah Connor?  Huh?

With Terminator: Genysis, Arnold Schwarzenegger again announces he'll be back (and it's never sounded more like a threat). The former California Governor—who can't credibly run for President as a Republican because The Terminator always enters this country illegally—is looking a little worse for wear. It seems he's been around for a bit longer than the movie-going audience has previously suspected....approximately since 1973 as he's seen rescuing Sarah as a child in a flashback (the whole thing is a flashback, really, if your perspective is from the movie's starting point). And ever since, has been giving her a crash-course in bad-assery. So, things have actually changed from the original "Terminator" movie. Why, Sarah Connor never even goes through the "big hair" period of the first film.

So far, so odd. Let us file away the original movie's notion that time-travel is limited in the future and that if Skynet is ultimately defeated, who or what sent this "Olde Arnold" back to the past (earlier than the ones already sent) should be a mystery, if not an impossibility. Skynet wouldn't have the ability to send it as their precious time-travel gear has been captured, and the rebels would have no reason to because the war is over. File this, because it will become irrelevant and minor compared with the whoppers to come.

Eventually, Reese hooks up with Connor and "Olde Arnold" just in time to defeat another blast from the future—one of the liquid metal terminators from T2 (played by Byung-hun Lee) that seemed unstoppable in that film but is pretty much dispatched fairly early here. At which point, "Olde Arnold"—called "The Protector" or as Sarah Connor calls him "Pops" (yeesh!)—reveals that he has also built a time-machine in 1987 (evidently because he was too busy in the other movies to think of creating one then). Reese and Connor decide to hop forward in time—which, mind you, doesn't exist yet—to right before "Judgment Day" to stop Skynet from launching its missiles. "Pops" says he can't travel in time, only meat-people can (Oh, yeah? How'd he get there in the first place?), but he'll just live for the 30 years or so to catch up with them.**

They jump in time to 2017 and make plans to destroy Skynet, which is now called "Genysis"—and it's no longer a military brain-hive, it's an inter-connectivity system for cell-phones, tablets, and the next thing in your junk-drawer. And...funny thing...one of the technical developers for Genysis is...John Connor. Yup, seems that John Connor went back in ti-.......

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!!

Wait, wait, wait. Rewind. Remember, the original Terminator movie? (I'm not talking to you kids—you haven't seen it because there's no CGI in it and the FX look "stoopid"). The whole thing about it was that it had that delicious irony that by sending a terminator back in time to kill John Connor's mother ultimately led to John Connor being born. Reese and Connor have the inevitable "fleeing-unstoppable-killing-machines-makes-us-really-horny-moment" and, as a result, John Connor, rebel leader, is conceived. 

Unless, I missed something (and I have to admit, this movie made me want to nod off several places), there was no FUKMMURH moment in this movie, and so as a result, the conception of John Connor in 1987 did not occur. At which point (for anyone who has seen the original) this movie...should be over. O-ver.

"I'm John Connor. These are not scars. These are gaps in logic."

No John Connor. So, then no war with the machines (because as this movie would have it, no Genisys). No resistance. No time-travel. No Connor sending Kyle Reese back in time. Nothing. There's no John Connor, so what the hell is he doing in 2017 (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE TRAILERS), having been sent back in time as a killer-cyborg/technical engineer? The movie sets him up as the bad guy, but if the movie were to follow this timeline, he shouldn't even exist...because he'd never been conceived. Never been born. End of movie, right?

Yeah, and this couldn't happen, either...

But, no, it keeps plodding along, not imagining that the very reason for its existence never happened. Unless there's been a second Immaculate Conception, which I don't think James Cameron believes in (and I know for damn sure Schwarzenegger doesn't), the movie should just stop dead in the projector with the forward time-jump, followed by the ushers with the brooms and rolling garbage receptacle. And see, they've managed to completely eliminate the whole franchise in this one dumb movie. It's one thing to change the space-time continuum in a re-boot (Hello, Star Trek), but make sure that you don't eliminate a character that sets the thing in motion—and no, I'm not talking Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor—from the start. Massively, unequivocably...dumb. Blame screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier and director Alan Taylor, who couldn't have an explanation other than "shit happens." 

Shit does indeed happen.  And this movie is the proof.

Rest in pieces

* Not that the original was...wholly original: It's part of record that Harlan Ellison was paid a bunch of money (which he can't disclose) and a special credit tele-cine'd on prints of the film ("...gratefully acknowledge his work.") because he threatened to sue Hemdale and Orion Pictures when he saw an early screening of the film and saw that the opening sequence had a lot of similarity to "Soldier," an episode of "The Outer Limits" that he wrote in the early 1960's.  Cameron wasn't happy about it, but didn't want to be sued by the corporations if they lost, so it was all settled out of court.  It's claimed on the internets that there's a similarity to "Demon with a Glass Hand," another episode of "OT" written by Ellison, but it is a little more far afield...until this movie.

** Fulfilling the original premise of Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand," one of the "Outer Limits" episodes mentioned above.