Bullet Points: Suicide Squad
I’m honestly surprised that WB/DC was willing to make a movie with the word “suicide” in it. With the culture that we live in, and how delicately people talk about the subject of suicide, I would expect anyone who mentioned this second tier group as a film idea got quite the mixed reaction when they brought it up for the first time. In a way, it’s even more ambitious than Guardians of the Galaxy but safe in the way that they could just as easily have blamed its failure on the fact that the characters mean nothing to the overall DCU. DC is all about the Trinity (Supes, Batman, Wonder Woman) but Man of Steel didn’t exactly excite the masses and the only hard nipples from the Justice League opening was Joel Schumachers’. Suicide Squad attempted to make a comic book movie that is more The Dirty Dozen than Pearl Harbor. Let’s see if Ben Affleck did any better this time around.
Synopsis: A secret government agency recruits some of the most dangerous incarcerated super-villains to form a defensive task force. Their first mission: save the world from the apocalypse.
- All the Celebs: Suicide Squad loads up on the bad guys as much as it loads up on the celebrities. Will Smith plays Will Smith…but with a mask 8% of the time. Margot Robbie is crazy hot as Harley Quinn but I have never understood the cult that the character has grown and I probably never will. Viola Davis is incredible as Amanda Waller. She puts the team together, treats them like the shitbags that they are, and bosses them around like she’s Michelle Obama. They even got weirdo Jared Leto to play some meth-head Joker with terrible looking tattoos all over his body.
- Prison funny: We get to meet the future team members as they’re all assaulted in different ways in the high security prison known as …*looks around and realizes I took bad notes* some prison that I’m sure is in the comic books. The scenes were really fun, which isn’t the way that super villain prison is supposed to be. The main reason for that is because actor Ike Barinholtz plays the head guard and if you’ve ever watched The Mindy Project because you’re married or Eastbound and Down because you’re cool, then you know that Barinholtz is one funny bastard. It gives us a perfect opportunity to be introduced to them all while also learning a bit about their powers and/or unique abilities.
- Margot got it goin’ on: Other than thoroughly enjoying Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street I haven’t seen her in any other roles. She’s clearly the character that the filmmakers wanted to focus on and that makes total sense once you see her tiny little shorts. I mean, what is sexier than a psychopathic woman carrying a baseball bat around?
- Less is more: While many of these superhero movies spend too much time giving us origin stories that are boring as hell, Suicide Squad doesn’t waste time telling us who characters like Killer Croc or Capt. Boomerang. For good reason, too. No one cares! Just show them to us. We get it….their names tell us all the information about the characters that we’ll ever need.
- Sad stories: The team of bad guys eventually agree to help the good guys for selfish reasons. They are immediately thrown into the fray after one of their own goes crazy and essentially starts a countdown to the apocalypse. Whoops. The crew have their ups and downs as a team. Some try to run away, some fight each other, and some just stand around and do much of nothing for most of the movie. Hell, Boomerang drinks beer for most of the movie! What I didn’t want, though, is to hear a bunch of sad stories from our badass villains. I don’t care about Deadshot’s daughter. What is this, American Idol? What was so wrong with these guys just being crazy and wanting to kill people? Maybe I like Jared Leto’s Joker more than I thought.
- Jared Leto is weird: Okay…Leto is definitely a strange bird. You’ve probably heard about all the weird shit he did on set with his costars but I will contend that this Joker is the most human of any we’ve seen so far. Leto-Joker is in love. He cares so much for Harley Quinn that he’s willing to go through about anything to bring her back to his side. Nolan’s Joker was just an insane animal and Tim Burton’s Joker was a little bit of both. Is this the Joker that I wanted? No. But it wasn’t as bad as I had expected from the terrible look that was first shown.
- The Hate for David Ayers: David Ayers must have been implicated in some serious sexual assault claims that we’re not aware of. The hate for his films goes way beyond anything else I’ve seen. Harvey Weinstein rapes girls, Victor Salva is a child molester, and Woody Allen married his daughter. What has David Ayers done that puts him anywhere near these monsters? Ayers has done some pretty solid work both as a writer and as a director but he can’t release a movie without all the cupcakes out there complaining about it being “too gritty” or something equally stupid. Are his movies amazing? Definitely not, but Fury and End of Watch were good. This one is entertaining for what it is but it is nowhere near as bad as people might say.
The Verdict: Suicide Squad made a good deal of money but you don’t hear many people saying they enjoyed it. I will be one of those people. I didn’t think it was a great movie but I was happy to sit through it and would welcome a sequel that gave us a little more destruction, maybe a few more deaths, and a big bad villain that wasn’t some weird lesbian witch. There is something about these comic book movies where they just don’t know how to make decent bad guys. Marvel has made like 300 movies and has had maybe 2 memorable villains and they all end up being good at some point. I mean, Iron Man has fought Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, and Ben Kingsley for God’s sake. The DCU movies haven’t been great but they’ve at least been better than Iron Man 2.
