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.

Robocop (2014)

Robo-copy 

or

A Little Too Much Beta-testing Before the Release

A re-boot of Robocop may be a little too on-the-nose when describing this movie. It's a new version of "Robo-cop," what else are you going to call it but a "reboot?"

Thing is, you usually CTRL-ALT-DELETE when you want to improve the performance of your device. Given the way this one turned out, the third key-stroke of the sequence seems the best course of action—"Delete," then "purge."

1987's version was a roaring Paul Verhoeven movie with a goofy satiric eye towards everything American—the media, capitalism, societal stratification, cut-throat office politics, law-and-order and police impotence, technology, technocracy, and over-the-top violence. Nothing was sacred. Verhoeven's Robocop was so giddy with blasting its societal targets into jelly that it made the movie hard to take seriously, other than as a violent, jestering romp, bordering on camp (you can say that about a lot of Verhoeven movies).

This new Robocop starts in that direction with an advocate news program (hosted by Samuel L. Jackson in the same arch mode as his CapitalOne commercials) wondering why if we can send robots to police the streets of Iraq, why can't we do it in this country? Sure. What's good enough for countries we're at war with, should be good for the people at home, right?

That's as subtle as the satire in this one is.  And it depressingly plays the rest of the movie straight, as the execs of Omnicorp (CEO'd by Michael Keaton, who's always welcome) try to find a way around a legislative ban of their armed robots on continental soil in order to drive up their earnings. The plan (envisioned by Keaton and not some lackey) is to create a "robot with a conscience," in order to gain the trust of the American people, as what's keeping the ban in place are the opinion poll numbers (And see, that's a plot-hole, too, as it's assuming Senators actually listen to their constituents).

The companies prosthetics genius (played by Gary Oldman) is put in charge to make a robot-cop with the mind of a cop, and pretty soon he gets the body of Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) to play with. Complicating matters is that Murphy has a wife (Abbie Cornish) and a son, and although she's agreed to all this to have her husband back, when Murphy's put on the streets again, she never sees him, making a natural enemy to the corporate scheme.

Meanwhile, we're supposed to be concerned that Murphy is still Murphy inside the can; this was an issue with the first movie, too, but Verhoeven swept it aside, until the last to keep the action moving and the sentimentality to a minimum, until the revelation that Murphy was himself again, only galvanized.

On every level, this one falls short, not only in how it's presented on-screen, but also in the deeper meanings and messages that is the movie's after-taste. We're meant to take everything at face-value (and that face doesn't even crack a smile), not even making good on its "Frankenstein" parallels. As far as a vision of the future, there isn't any. All the tech and gloss is inside, while houses and cars are pretty much the same as now (how's that for a statement of progress?).

No, this one's concerned with family values and finding 'the man in the machine." If it was trying to do anything else, it might be interesting, but it might as well be a domestic drama with chrome.

So, "they've" made a weak version of Verhoeven's Total Recall, and now a weak one of his Robocop. Can't wait to see what they're gonna do with Showgirls.