Review: "Suicide Squad"

AYER, David (Dir.), “Suicide Squad”, Warner Bros., DC Entertainment, 2016.

Harry S. Truman was the last of the idealistic American presidents and, ironically, the first of the long line of cynical pragmatists who followed in his footsteps – cynical electoral rorters and political dirty tricksters all. HST was very tall with the demeanour of a hard man who suffered no fools; he was once described as having a voice like honey poured over red bricks. Whenever he needed to convince anybody to see things his way, he would shake their hand, drag them in close and loom over them while patiently explaining what he wanted them to do. It was referred to as “The Treatment” and it invariably got results. This kind of intimidation tactic is probably the least of what you’d expect Batman to be able to pull off; and certainly a staple within the armoury of anyone in his gallery of villains. What we get however, is a bunch of stuffed shirts.

When I heard that DC was putting this group together as part of their opening salvo for the DC Universe, I just shook my head: this was a bad call. I didn’t need to hear who was directing, writing, starring – any of that. If the 90s demonstrated anything about DC, it’s that they don’t do bad guys well. (The 90s weren’t kind to Marvel either, for that matter – see: Deadpool – but at least turning to the dark side wasn’t that much of a stretch for them.) DC is Superman; it’s Wonder Woman. Their hardest hitters have always been the shiny, happy people (with the exception of Batman, but more later). It’s what they do best, and it’s always seemed to me that they did themselves a disservice by not being true to themselves by taking the dark and gritty route – it just smacked of keeping up with Marvel.

The problem with playing dark is that it corrupts everything, and I think that DC is learning this to their cost. If cynical government and social forces oppose Superman, Supes gets sidelined. From the opening scenes of “Man of Steel”, this was what was going to happen. In the original comics, Superman had an open-door policy with the president and could fly right in to the Oval Office without anyone batting an eyelid. It might not seem particularly realistic nowadays – not what we’d expect a US government institution to tolerate – but it made sense in a four-colour world: Superman was a good guy; he didn’t do bad things and so, no-one expected them of him. In our real world, as depicted in Zach Snyder’s films, when people see Superman, the first thought they have is “he could seriously f**k some s**t up!”

This is exactly what occurs to Bruce Wayne when he experiences the fallout from Kal El’s brouhaha with General Zod, and so in “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” he decides to take the Kryptonian out of Earth’s equation. And you can’t blame him really: those fight scenes in “Man of Steel” were an awesome taste of just what two super-people from Krypton would actually be like. Extreme collateral damage. Still, rather than donning the Bat-suit and weaponising kryptonite, he could have just sat back and let the US Congress clip the alien’s wings. Concentrate on taking out Jesse Eisenberg, Batfleck – pick the battles you can actually win. The American government will take care of Superman. Or did I miss something?

Batman is the darkest DC superhero and the last twenty years of the Twentieth Century really put him through an emotional roller-coaster. Every bad thing that could possibly happen to an orphaned billionaire playboy did happen to him, and sometimes more than once. By the year 2000, the scene of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder had been drained of every iota of its narrative and emotional potential. Things were dark in Gotham City, but with Frank Miller in charge, they were about to get blacker. It works with Batman; it absolutely does not with the rest of the Justice League (with the possible exception of Green Arrow).

The Suicide Squad had its own book back in the day and had a creaky and somewhat tottery genesis. The idea is a direct swipe from 60s Hollywood and 50s Japanese cinema, riffing on films like “The Dirty Dozen”, “The Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” (which – good lord! – they’re making again!). The exercise is a high-wire act, because you need to provide a rationale for keeping the group together that outweighs the self-interest of each individual within the team. This calls for some delicate character exposition and some juggling of the opposition which, if done well, really pays off. I never read the Suicide Squad comics so I couldn’t say how they handled it; all I know is that it was a pig’s breakfast on screen.

Right from the start, I should say that I’ve read some of what other critics have said about this movie and, for some of their points, I can see some merit. However: this is not a movie made for critical cinema acclaim; it’s a film for fans. Much ink has been spilled about how tortuous and confusing the plot is; all I have to say about that is: welcome to the comics! In the four-colour world, narratives are twisty and complicated; getting your head around all the ins and outs of a typical story arc requires some thinking, or at least that you pay attention. Negative comments have been penned about the endless fight sequences at the expense of characterisation; but hey! It’s comics: the fighting is the characterisation. “Form over substance!” is the cry ringing across the Internet. Well – duh! It’s a visual medium borrowing from another visual medium which shows off its stories and characters to their best advantage. Cinema critics should just leave criticism of comics vehicles to comics critics.

All that aside, there is a lot about this film which doesn’t work. A thing to know going in, is that this is a Deadshot and Harley Quinn film; they are the main characters and everyone else is incidental. Don’t let any notion of Jared Leto’s on-set stunts or the reported method-acting rigmarole of the actors get you sidelined: no-one else gets the screen time that Will Smith and Margot Robbie do. Which is fine, because Margot Robbie deserves a Best Supporting Actress nod just for putting up with that ridiculous costume and Will Smith is the only character in the ensemble who could reasonably knit the group into anything like a team. The rest are just crazy, or cannon-fodder.

Much is made of the fact that Deadshot has an eleven-year-old daughter, and she gets in his way every time he gets tempted or is about to do something dramatic (like shooting Batman). This is fine – dependent NPCs are a mainstay of superhero fiction. However, when asked by Harley if he’s ever been in love, his response is a definite no, along the lines that those who kill people ruthlessly for a living and yet still “sleep like kittens” are beyond such things. So, why the daughter? And why doesn’t Amanda ‘Leverages for a Living’ Waller make much more of this weakness? She claims to have strings on everyone but it all seems to boil down to putting a grenade in everyone’s neck. If she was as good as she says she is, she wouldn’t need the explosive implants.

Which brings me to Harley Quinn. There’s a lot to like about Margot Robbie’s portrayal – it’s as loopy as you’d ever want. However, the basic premise of this character is dark and twisted and the movie is not helped by scenes of intimacy between her and her obsession. Robbie milks ever second of her screen time throwing everything into her portrayal, and it’s both cute and alarming in equal measure. This is probably not where Paul Dini thought his creation would go, however (or maybe he did? Who can say?). In the animated Batman series of the 90s, Harley was just goofily obsessed with her “Puddin’” and “Mr. J.” seemed merely tolerant of her association. Here, it’s a full-on broken romance with all of the co-dependency and multiply-layered violence that you’d expect. But that’s problematic: the Joker isn’t in love with Harley Quinn. Along with the fact that Batman doesn’t shoot people dead, this is one of the mainstays of the DC universe that those in charge seem happy to toss out with the bathwater.

The other characters are all over the shop. El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) is given some material to work with: he’s ashamed of the deaths and violence which he’s caused and which have cost him his family; having renounced the use of his powers he has to be coerced into manifesting them when the chips are down. This is fine but – can someone please explain the Mayan deity freak-out that happens in the third act?! Katana (Karen Fukuhara) is completely wasted and, if you blink, you’ll miss Slipknot (Adam Beach), who is only there to prove that Rick Flag will push the button if anyone breaks ranks (c’mon, you know someone had to be the object lesson!). Killer Croc suffers from technical issues mainly due to the fact that his dialogue is all badly overdubbed and mostly unintelligible and also due to the fact that, once he takes his shirt off, he looks like a weedy guy with an oversized head. Killer Croc is supposed to be huge; not, in this instance. I’m not sure what was going on with Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney): we get told that he has robbed “all the banks in Australia” and has headed Stateside to widen his field of operations. Excuse me? Australia isn’t a one-horse town on the arse-end of nowhere: we have a lot of banks, thank you very much, enough so that the thought of robbing them all is a ludicrous notion. And, along with this insult, the character is woefully under-utilised in the humour-provision stakes, which is clearly what he’s there for.

One character that piqued my interest was the Enchantress. Everything about the way this character was portrayed was very cool. The spooky eyes; the floating fiery motes in her vicinity; the ashy aura around her – there was nothing to dislike. Everything about this character said ‘Mythos nemesis’ to me, in a big way. Creepy, creepy, creepy. The June Moone aspect of the role was a dead loss, along with the under-cooked romantic entanglement with the eminently-useless Rick Flag; but the mayhem that she and her brother Incubus unleashed had me wondering how to turn that into a “Call of Cthulhu” adventure. I may just do that...

I have to ask at this point: is it just me, or is the footage that we’ve been seeing in the trailers different from that which was in the film? Trailers notoriously show off all of the good stuff before the release of the film but I’m sure that some of the movie’s gags were not the same as what we see in the film; certainly some of the trailer footage from the bar scene didn’t make it to the movie. Take the moment when Deadshot pushes El Diablo to unleash his powers. After the resultant pyrotechnic display, Deadshot tries to avoid retributive immolation by saying “I was just tryin’ to get you there. We cool, right?” But in the movie it falls flat. Because it’s different footage from what was in the trailer. I re-watched the trailers before and after going to the cinema and all of the joke moments I enjoyed were demonstrably different in the film. Maybe it’s just the different editing; maybe the trailers move faster than the film; I don’t know. It was just different; and not in a good way. Jokes, so sorely lacking in all of DC’s efforts so far, cannot be massaged to the point of predictability. If there had been a laugh-track on this film, I think the audience would still have kept quiet.

This film suffers because it takes a tried and true formula as a premise and then doesn’t follow it. Large ensemble casts can work and there is a way to do it – they’re re-making “Magnificent Seven” for gods’ sake! From a writing perspective, each character has a purpose – leader; wounded hero; jester; bruiser – but here, none of that is allowed to crystallise. It’s ill-defined and sketchy, and it serves the movie badly.

I began this review with a look at Harry S. Truman and there’s a reason for that: none of these “villains” in this film could give anyone “The Treatment”. There’s no gravitas in any of them – with the possible exception of Harley Quinn. Even Amanda Waller gets her balls chopped off by Batman in the post-credit sequence. It’s for this reason I agree with the cinema critics saying that it’s all style over substance. Heath Ledger had me looking over my shoulder with his work in “The Dark Knight”; none of these bad boys even made me flinch. A funky costume does not a villain make.

I’m giving this two Tentacled Horrors.

Oh. And Jared Leto? Worst. Joker. Ever.