24 Lies a Second: The Mad, the Bad, and the Really, Really Ugly
Created | Updated Aug 14, 2016
The Mad, the Bad, and the Really, Really Ugly
I'm hearing a lot of talk about 'superhero fatigue' at the moment – the notion that somehow people are going to get sick of seeing a new comic-book movie come out, on average, about once every two months. Hmmm, well – having lived through many years when there were no decent superhero movies to speak of, once every two months strikes me as being just about right. You'll notice I said 'decent', because the likes of Steel, Catwoman, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace have always been with us. Provided the standard stays high I see no reason why people will stop watching.
That's a big assumption, though. Quite what dark art Marvel Studios have employed to produce so many movies in a row without a significant misstep I don't know, but – and I'm aware this assertion is going to be met with bared teeth by some people – if you want to see how this sort of thing probably shouldn't be done, you can always take a look at DC's recent movie output, for they haven't released an entirely unproblematic film since The Dark Knight Rises, four years ago. Still, you can't fault their determination, for they're at it again with David Ayer's Suicide Squad.
It sounds like a winning premise: with Superman indisposed (i.e., and spoiler alert, dead) following the end of Batman Vs Superman, and Batman and Wonder Woman off the scene, the US government is concerned about who's going to pick up the slack if another giant alien monster goes on a rampage. The solution comes from ruthless government agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) – get a bunch of the villains previously defeated by Batman and other superheroes, fit them with remote controlled explosives to ensure compliance, and deploy them as a deniable task force of superpowered operatives.
The collection of nutters assembled is led by top soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), and includes ace marksman Deadshot (Will Smith), the Joker's girlfriend Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), human flamethrower El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), atavistic cannibal Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), immortal sorceress Enchantress (Cara Delavigne), and the Australian villain Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), whose main superpower is being a ridiculous national stereotype.
Others in the US government are uneasy with the idea of entrusting national security to 'witches, gangbangers and crocodiles' (they forget to mention ridiculous national stereotypes and people whose only apparent superpower appears to be acting like a homicidal pole dancer), but soon enough a crisis erupts with a giant supernatural entity on the loose in Midway City (Hawkman has clearly been clearly slacking off) and the Squad are rushed into action. But there is inevitably a wrinkle – the Joker (Jared Leto, giving us a very Frank Miller-esque take on the character) wants his girlfriend back, and is drawing up plans to get involved himself...
Is it overstating things to say that DC's movie division seems to wobble from one crisis to another in a perpetual state of omni-shambles, with virtually every news story about them featuring the words 'urgent talks are in progress'? Well, maybe. But there were apparently heated discussions after the relative underperformance of Batman Vs Superman, and even before that suggestions that this film was being reshot and reedited to give it more of chance of hooking the audience that made Deadpool such an unexpectedly big hit.
It certainly has the whiff about it of a film that has gone through extensive surgery in the editing suite: key plot beats are critically underdeveloped, and the structure of the film is odd and lumpy, often at the expense of the storytelling. Most of the Squad are given fairly detailed introductions, especially if they're played by an A-list star, but then just as they're about to go off on the mission, a brand new member turns up with no introduction at all (and a frankly rubbish superpower) and you just think 'This guy is clearly just here as cannon fodder who will die in the next ten minutes' – and he does! Not that the film couldn't do with losing a few characters – super-obscure superhero Katana turns up, played by Karen Fukuhara, and does pretty much nothing at all. (Fukuhara says she wants to 'explore the character's back-story' in the sequel, and it's easy to see why: she has virtually no back-story here and is essentially just another national stereotype.) You could even argue that the film would be significantly improved with the Joker completely excised, for he has nothing to do with the main plot and just capers about bafflingly on the fringes of the film.
No chance of that, of course, for DC are clearly fit to bust, such is their desire to get their universe up on the screen in the mighty Marvel manner. I have to say I think there's something deeply weird about this movie being made at all, at least now. This version of the DC universe hasn't done a standalone Batman or Flash movie so far, and yet they seem convinced there is an audience dying to see a film about second- and third-string Batman and Flash villains in which the heroes themselves barely appear. I suspect the Joker is probably the only major character in this movie which a mainstream cinema-goer will even have heard of, which is probably why he's in it.
Then again, there probably is an audience dying to see this kind of film, it's just a very small audience of comics fanatics. One of the key moments in the development of the modern comic book movie was the failure of Batman and Robin in 1997, which the studio apparently decided was not because it was simply a bad movie (to be fair, I still think it's better than Batman Forever), but because it managed to alienate the core comic book fan audience. This audience is lovingly courted at great length these days, and you could argue that with Suicide Squad we see a movie made solely to gratify it, and which has started to forget that the mainstream audience is the one which actually turns a film into a genuine blockbuster hit.
Still, given an arguably less-promising premise than that of Batman Vs Superman, David Ayer does an impressive job of keeping the film accessible and entertaining, even if it feels more like a handful of really good moments scattered through a rather generic and predictably murky superhero film. Will Smith earns his top billing, bringing all his star power to bear as Deadshot (the film predictably favours Smith over some of the others), while no doubt Margot Robbie's game performance will win her many fans. Too many of the other squad members are one-dimensional – I would have liked to see rather more of Captain Boomerang in particular, but they seem to have realised such a wacky character is a terrible fit for a film striving desperately to be dark and edgy, and he barely throws a boomerang or gets referred to by his codename throughout.
In the end, Suicide Squad is a bit of a mess on virtually every level: it's arguably a bad idea to do this movie at all at this point in time, and its structure and storytelling are both rather suspect, to say nothing of its oddly inconsistent tone (most of the time it plays like an attempted black comedy, but some of its most effective moments are when it takes its characters seriously). As an ensemble piece, it doesn't really work either, being too strongly skewed in favour of certain characters. That said, it's not an un-entertaining mess, with some amusing and effective moments along the way. I didn't come out of it wanting to hunt down and exact vengeance on the director, which was the case after Batman Vs Superman. This wouldn't really qualify as a ringing endorsement under normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances: we are in the odd world of DC's movie output, and they do things differently here.
