Suicide Squad, 2016.
Directed by David Ayer.
Starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Jai Courtney, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Cara Delevingne, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jay Hernandez, Adam Beach, Jim Parrack, Ben Affleck, Karen Fukuhara, Common, Ike Barinholtz and Scott Eastwood.
SYNOPSIS:
A group of highly dangerous super-villains are forced to carry out secret missions for the government.
(SPOILERS!)
For over a year now we’ve been drip-fed pictures, information and rumours about DC’s latest (anti)superhero film. The trailers and posters teased and prepared us for a funny, twisted and anarchic film, which is exactly what writer/director David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury) has delivered. However, despite a record-breaking opening in America, the film has received incredibly mixed reviews, much like DC’s last film Batman v Superman. While it does share a couple of the same problems, it has what that film was sorely lacking – an enormous sense of fun.
In the wake of the arrival of ‘meta-humans’ like Superman and The Flash (who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss it cameo here), government official Amanda Waller (played with bad-ass authority by Viola Davis) comes up with a plan for putting together a secret task force made up of very very bad people – the kind of people powerful and/or crazy enough to “stop the next Superman, should he turn out to be a terrorist”. This ‘Suicide Squad’ includes a firestarter, a crocodile, a sniper, a witch, a girl with a sword, a guy with a boomerang and the Joker’s girlfriend, and it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company. They’re introduced in the first twenty minutes of the film, which are a joyful blur reminiscent of the beginning of Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces, only with groovier music and some very amusing touches (we learn that one of the characters has a golf handicap of 3, and another has a fetish for pink unicorns!)
The cast are all well chosen – given that he’s been pretty bland in the many action/sci-fi films he’s been in before (like Live Free or Die Hard and Terminator Genisys), I was particularly surprised how much I enjoyed Jai Courtney’s performance as Captain Boomerang – there’s a really dark but funny moment where he convinces another member of the squad to make a run for it just to see if their explosive neck implants really work (which they do!) It’s also nice to see Will Smith in a good film for a change, even if his version of Deadshot is a typical ‘Will Smith character’ (a guy covering up his emotional demons with a hefty dose of humour and swagger), but it’s Margot Robbie who steals the show. This film marks the first live-action incarnation of the character of Harley Quinn, and she nails her trademark mix of little-girl enthusiasm and sadistic glee. She has plenty of great one liners (screaming at Batman for “ruining date night” with her puddin’ Mr J was my favourite) and she also had, in my opinion, the film’s darkest moment – when El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) tells the story of how he lost his temper and burned his wife and kids alive, she’s the only one of the squad who isn’t disturbed by it (“You gotta own that shit! It’s who we are!”).
The challenge with making a film where the heroes are villains is that there has to be a reason for us to root for them, and the film-makers have achieved this by making each of the characters and their motivations sufficiently different – some are doing it for their family, some are doing it to atone for past sins, and some are just doing it to reduce their prison sentence or for the sheer hell of it! With so many characters, it’s inevitable that you don’t get to know some as well as others, but I thought the screen-time they were each given was completely proportional to how interesting they were (i.e. I found El Diablo and the slow reveal of his back-story fascinating, but I was perfectly content with Killer Croc only having a couple of lines and one real function in the story). The one exception to this was the Joker – with so much having been reported about Jared Leto’s bizarre ‘method’ process, it’s sad that his character’s presence in the film is so brief – he’s only in about five short scenes. He’s great fun to watch when he appears, but his performance is basically a collection of intense stares, purring threats and the occasional bout of maniacal laughter – we never really get a chance to get under his skin in the way that we did with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Let’s hope, like with BvS we get an R-rated extended cut on the DVD release, or at the very least some juicy deleted scenes.
For me, the film’s biggest problem is the actual mission the Squad are sent on. Basically, Cara Delevingne plays a scientist called June Moone who becomes infected with an ancient spirit that occasionally turns her into Enchantress, a witch with extraordinary powers. Amanda Waller wants to recruit her into the Suicide Squad program to use her gifts, but Enchantress quickly goes rogue and tries to build a weapon with her powers that will destroy humanity, so the rest of the Squad are sent in to stop her. To me, the unnecessarily complicated set-up felt like such a missed opportunity, because with a few minor tweaks it could have been so much more effective. Waller initially assigns Joel Kinnaman’s soldier Rick Flag to look after Moone in the hope that they’ll fall in love (and she’ll therefore be easier to control), which they do. This is arguably the most far-fetched element of the plot – why not start with the two of them already a couple? A few short scenes of them together wouldn’t have gone amiss either – we don’t really get to know Moone much at all, and making us care more about their relationship would have made Flag’s mission to save her more emotionally rewarding.
There’s also a twist where we find out the Squad haven’t been sent to deal with Enchantress at all, but rather to save Waller from the building where she’s trapped – I guess it showed Waller’s sense of self-importance, but it does mean that the threat that Enchantress is posing is put on the back-burner for a big portion of the film. And although it’s fun to watch the Squad punch, shoot and slice their way through Enchantress’s pustule-infested minions, they’re rather dull opponents. However, one aspect of the film that is most certainly not dull is the music – the brilliantly diverse mix of songs and artists (Eminem, Queen, Skrillex) reminded me of Watchmen’s similarly electric soundtrack, and Steven Price’s score is very effective, particularly during the film’s climax (when the super slo-mo kicks in, the score swells up and turns it into a truly epic moment).
After the criticism of BvS’s relentlessly dark tone, scenes were reportedly added (and removed) from this film to make it lighter – or, to put it another way, to make it more Marvel-like (the tone of DC’s upcoming Justice League has also been reportedly revamped). It would have been great, especially in light of Deadpool’s recent R-rated success, if DC had embraced the darkness a bit more with this film, since it pretty much is an Anti-Avengers film anyway (there’s even a cool sequence where the characters are shown visions of what they most want, which is an exact mirror-image of the scene in Age of Ultron where Scarlet Witch shows the Avengers their worst nightmares). But then again, I’m not the head of a major movie studio – I’m a movie-goer, and I have the luxury of saying exactly what I want studios to provide for my entertainment, and for the most part this film delivered what I expected and what I wanted. As for what I felt it was lacking, there’s always the inevitable extended cut, as well as sequels and spin-off’s – personally, my biggest hope is that the already green-lit Harley Quinn solo movie focuses on the early days of her and the Joker’s unique and twisted relationship.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Eric Bay-Andersen
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