One sentence synopsis: An elite task force comprised of assorted supervillains is set loose to stop an ancient evil from destroying the world.
Things Havoc liked: ...
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Things Havoc liked: ...
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Er... Things Havoc Liked?
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...so... let's talk about Batman v Superman for a moment.
Batman v. Superman sucked. There's really no other way to put it. It was a terrible goddamn film, a useless waste of two, hell three of DC's most important and popular superheros, a maudlin, ugly, disaster, which I hated with every fiber of my being. It had a stupid, needlessly-byzantine plot that made no sense once strung together and was cored around a jar of urine, a directing style that eschewed everything fun from the first movie in favor of a bitter polemical rant against anyone who enjoys superheroes, movies, or life, and a central premise which ultimately pitted a depressed headcase against a roid-raging dudebro for eight freaking minutes before resolving its primary conflict with one of the stupidest contrivances I have ever seen in all my years of moviegoing. I hated Batman v. Superman, and I vented my hate for it in these very pages, denouncing it with all of the biblical savagery that I could muster before announcing that I was rejecting the entire DC cinematic universe wholesale, and that whatever they wanted to do next, I would leave to others to see.
So, obviously, that didn't happen, because here we are. But the reason that didn't happen is more complex than my being a sucker for buzz or a slick trailer (though it definitely does involve those things). The reason that I, in defiance of my previous ban, went to see Suicide Squad, was because it looked... well different I suppose. The rumors that came out of its production that things were not working properly and that DC had decided to re-cut the film to be more like Deadpool were certainly concerning, but it's not like the notion that DC has been having problems making their movies work was a new one, and frankly, I liked Deadpool. With Batman v. Superman, DC's filmmaking seemed to have entered a tailspin, and perhaps ripping off the closest Marvel film in reach (even if it's not an MCU one) was not the worst way to try and pull out of it. Though haters and trolls may say otherwise, I am not against DC in their efforts to replicate Marvel's success. If I was, I would not have stuck with them after such disasters as Green Lantern or Batman v Superman. And so that, combined with the oddball nature of the trailers, the rumors of re-writes, the pedigree of the filmmakers involved, and the fact that several of my stalwart viewing companions expressed some interest in seeing this one, all combined to get me to reneg on the vow I had made not a couple of months before, and go see DC's attempt to get something right this time.
You learn things, seeing a movie a week. Things you might not otherwise have ever known. You learn which actors grate on you like nails on a chalkboard, and which ones are good enough that you'll go see anything if they're in it. You learn how to read between the lines of a teaser or a full length trailer to anticipate what movies have real potential and which ones are just the marketing department desperately trying to cover a flop. You learn that highly-praised indie movies can suck, and that the difference between a good, stupid brainless action movie and a bad one is that the good one isn't as stupid or as brainless as it initially appears to be. Lessons hard bought, the lot of them, some from the collective gestalt of a hundred movies seen, and some from a single moment's revelation after only one. But in all the years and all the reviews that I've done, one of the greatest surprises I've ever had came to me last Tuesday, as I watched this movie, and I learned that Batman v. Superman, a movie I hated with every fiber of my being and condemned in language appropriate for a war crime, was actually the best movie that DC would make in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Sixteen.
Batman v. Superman was bad, believe me, you all heard me rant about its decrepitude and ugliness, but Suicide Squad is, contrary to all reason, logic, and the laws of physics, not only worse, but much worse a movie so bad as to defy description, one of the worst films that has ever been made by anyone for any purpose. Not only worse than its predecessor, but worse than every touchstone of failure that this genre has ever experienced, worse than Catwoman, worse than Barb Wire, worse than Electra and Amazing Spiderman, Batman & Robin and Superman IV, worse than every Fantastic Four movie ever made, the worst superhero film ever committed to celluloid or digital media, and quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen as a part of this project. A bad movie may bore or annoy you, a terrible film may fill you with frothing rage, but Suicide Squad is so bad as to be numbing, a shell-shock-inducing calamity of a film that left me struggling to form complete sentences. Not bad like Green Lantern, not a sneering idiocy like Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad is a systematic, comprehensive failure of basic storytelling, film-making, and human endeavor from start to finish, a movie which, if the Gods are just, will live on in the annals of man as one of the handful of films synonymous with anti-quality, standing in company with giants like Battlefield Earth, Heaven's Gate, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. And yet to scream and rend garments over this eldritch cataclysm of a movie is not sufficient to come to grips with its decrepitude. Instead we must look at what happened and attempt, as might an arson investigator, to determine where it all went wrong.
Movies fail for many reasons, from bad direction to bad acting, but the one that seems to kill the majority of them, and the one that sits like a naked singularity at the heart of the issues afflicting Suicide Squad is the writing, writing so unremittingly ham-handed, so overwrought, so clunky and shapeless that no movie and no director could possibly survive its advent. Lines that could not ever have been a good idea, not even in the vacuum of a table-read, are littered throughout the film like land mines, waiting for a hapless actor to tread upon them. Moments where the cast is asked to exposit actions that the audience has just seen take place, or to tearfully recite some kind of supposedly heartwarming "bonding" dialogue, despite having no setup whatsoever for that statement, could not have been performed satisfactorily by anyone, let alone the flywheels that occupy the majority of this film. And yet to simply call this the result of a bad script or a hack writer is, once again, not sufficient, because this script was written by none-other than writer-director David Ayer, one of the very best filmmakers working, a man who also wrote and directed such films as Fury, Training Day, and End of Watch, a man who knows how to both create and realize not just good but excellent movies. So how could this script have gotten so far away from him as to produce something this bad?
Simple. Ayer wanted to make Suicide Squad. DC wanted to make Guardians of the Galaxy.
You see, for all the rumors about this film being re-cut to take advantage of Deadpool's success, the end result is about as far from Deadpool as it is from Citizen Kane, if only because it has no, and I repeat no humor in it, not even a semi-decent one-liner. What it does have is a desperate attempt to replicate Marvel's "bad people form a surrogate family" dynamic from Guardians of the Galaxy, an attempt so brazen that multiple characters describe the rest of their team as "family" despite having never once evidenced behavior that would support that. While I can understand DC trying to do something, anything to capture even a small piece of the magic Marvel has been using to craft their cinematic universe, the result is nothing but further evidence of just how difficult a line Marvel walked when it came to Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians had, among other things, a cast that was both razor-sharp and incredibly strongly defined, even with one member a mute (essentially), one a cartoon, and another purposely written around the fact that the actor playing him could not act. And yet even with those things, Guardians only managed to make their movie work by armoring it with a thick layer of snark and self-awareness, bending over backwards to gain the audience's permission to be cheesy and schmaltzy when it counted. Suicide Squad, like the DC universe it comes from, does none of those things, attempting to drop a "found family" dynamic directly on top of a collection of gaping-mouthed douche-hats without a single redeeming feature between them, all in the middle of a universe that has quite clearly evidenced its bilious contempt for such notions as human warmth or joy. To say that the result is a tonal clash is like saying that the Titanic was a boating accident.
The actors caught in this suck-vortex suffer different fates, mostly in line with their abilities. Better actors like Will Smith (playing team-lead Deadshot) or Viola Davis (playing arch-strategist Amanda Waller), manage to survive by more or less retreating into their established personas, strong enough in Smith's case that he can simply turn his role into "another Will Smith outing" and get away with it, while Davis switches her emotions off and forces her way through the material as though none of it matters to her in the slightest (this is the correct move, lest I sound critical). Basically everyone else goes down with the ship, either because they are bad actors, because they are stuck in a bad role, or both. Margot Robbie, trapped within the role of Harley Quinn, is one such tragic victim, as her character is simultaneously drill-bit-annoying and Westboro-Baptist-stupid, to the point where she sits and pouts over events that both she and everyone else within a million light years knows have not actually taken place. Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney, the Tweedle-Dipshit twins of bad action movies, have no chance at all, and consequently fail just as miserably as they always do, as does newcomer Karen Fukuhara, whom the filmmakers task with playing Katana without evidencing the common decency required to give her a character, a backstory, or even a viable reason to be present at all. The same is true of the other eighteen or so members of the Suicide Squad, each of whom get a generous nine seconds to establish themselves in, nicely conveying the fact that the movie has too many goddamn characters to try and pull off an ensemble piece, particularly since we have never seen any of these characters before now, and rapidly don't want to see them ever again.
And then there's the Joker, oh god is there ever the Joker. Not that we get to see him a lot, for contrary to what the trailers told us, Jared Leto gets all of ten minutes of screentime, is not the main villain of the movie, and in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, the actual villain, or any goddamn thing. And yet those ten minutes of facetime that Leto gets are more than enough to tell me everything I need to know about this new and updated version of the Joker, namely that he is catpiss-annoying on the level that Jessie Eisenberg's Urine-obsessed Lex Luthor was. The character looks and acts like what would happen if the entire marketing department at Hot Topic were fused together in a bizarre transporter accident, a disaffected hipster affecting pathologies because the alternative would be "conformist". I've long suspected that Jared Leto is an insufferable human being, but he plays this character like he's trying to confirm all of the worst rumors ever spread about him, and the camera lingers on his gold teeth and carefully-selected "gang" tattoos as though the cameraman was bribed by a cabal of his sworn enemies. Insofar as one should hate the villain of a movie (even though Joker is, I repeat, not the villain here), his character is something of a success. Insofar as one should also wish to continue watching the villain, much less so.
All of this seems to take place in a world devoid of anything but grunting shitheels packing heavy weapons and claiming membership in various elite military formations who would, in reality, piss themselves laughing at the prospect of inducting any one of them as a member before kicking their asses just for the fun of it. The film has the customary DC trait of causing major cities to be destroyed without consequence or even concern by the cast as a whole (I speak here of the US government, not the Suicide Squad), only this time, instead of making said destruction at least interesting to see, the movie is so uninterested in the prospect of showing us something interesting that it cuts away from it after a few desultory montage shots. The plot holes are many and cavernous, of course, including a main villain who can apparently defeat half the US army and shrug off direct hits from cruise missiles, but is taken out by a bomb so puny that people standing twenty feet away with no cover are not even knocked over. But the plot holes, as well as the knots that it ties itself into (to the point where I couldn't tell you what the actual plan was for using the Suicide Squad), seem less like carelessness or even stupidity this time than they do the result of complete indifference. The plot of Suicide Squad makes no sense because, on a fundamental level, nobody gave a shit about it, certainly nobody involved in its actual creation. Whether this was always the case, or whether it's simply a matter of the dramatic and brutal editing done to the film in desperation by a frightened studio, the result is a movie where characters find convenient binders labelled "Top Secret Information", whose contents they apparently absorb in fifteen seconds, all while major MacGuffins like a set of sub-dermal explosives injected into the Squad Members to keep them in line, cease to and resume working at what appears to be arbitrary moments, and characters that have been established as being immune to gunfire and rocket strikes not minutes before are suddenly felled by a baseball bat.
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... ?
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...
...
...so... let's talk about Batman v Superman for a moment.
Batman v. Superman sucked. There's really no other way to put it. It was a terrible goddamn film, a useless waste of two, hell three of DC's most important and popular superheros, a maudlin, ugly, disaster, which I hated with every fiber of my being. It had a stupid, needlessly-byzantine plot that made no sense once strung together and was cored around a jar of urine, a directing style that eschewed everything fun from the first movie in favor of a bitter polemical rant against anyone who enjoys superheroes, movies, or life, and a central premise which ultimately pitted a depressed headcase against a roid-raging dudebro for eight freaking minutes before resolving its primary conflict with one of the stupidest contrivances I have ever seen in all my years of moviegoing. I hated Batman v. Superman, and I vented my hate for it in these very pages, denouncing it with all of the biblical savagery that I could muster before announcing that I was rejecting the entire DC cinematic universe wholesale, and that whatever they wanted to do next, I would leave to others to see.
So, obviously, that didn't happen, because here we are. But the reason that didn't happen is more complex than my being a sucker for buzz or a slick trailer (though it definitely does involve those things). The reason that I, in defiance of my previous ban, went to see Suicide Squad, was because it looked... well different I suppose. The rumors that came out of its production that things were not working properly and that DC had decided to re-cut the film to be more like Deadpool were certainly concerning, but it's not like the notion that DC has been having problems making their movies work was a new one, and frankly, I liked Deadpool. With Batman v. Superman, DC's filmmaking seemed to have entered a tailspin, and perhaps ripping off the closest Marvel film in reach (even if it's not an MCU one) was not the worst way to try and pull out of it. Though haters and trolls may say otherwise, I am not against DC in their efforts to replicate Marvel's success. If I was, I would not have stuck with them after such disasters as Green Lantern or Batman v Superman. And so that, combined with the oddball nature of the trailers, the rumors of re-writes, the pedigree of the filmmakers involved, and the fact that several of my stalwart viewing companions expressed some interest in seeing this one, all combined to get me to reneg on the vow I had made not a couple of months before, and go see DC's attempt to get something right this time.
You learn things, seeing a movie a week. Things you might not otherwise have ever known. You learn which actors grate on you like nails on a chalkboard, and which ones are good enough that you'll go see anything if they're in it. You learn how to read between the lines of a teaser or a full length trailer to anticipate what movies have real potential and which ones are just the marketing department desperately trying to cover a flop. You learn that highly-praised indie movies can suck, and that the difference between a good, stupid brainless action movie and a bad one is that the good one isn't as stupid or as brainless as it initially appears to be. Lessons hard bought, the lot of them, some from the collective gestalt of a hundred movies seen, and some from a single moment's revelation after only one. But in all the years and all the reviews that I've done, one of the greatest surprises I've ever had came to me last Tuesday, as I watched this movie, and I learned that Batman v. Superman, a movie I hated with every fiber of my being and condemned in language appropriate for a war crime, was actually the best movie that DC would make in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Sixteen.
Batman v. Superman was bad, believe me, you all heard me rant about its decrepitude and ugliness, but Suicide Squad is, contrary to all reason, logic, and the laws of physics, not only worse, but much worse a movie so bad as to defy description, one of the worst films that has ever been made by anyone for any purpose. Not only worse than its predecessor, but worse than every touchstone of failure that this genre has ever experienced, worse than Catwoman, worse than Barb Wire, worse than Electra and Amazing Spiderman, Batman & Robin and Superman IV, worse than every Fantastic Four movie ever made, the worst superhero film ever committed to celluloid or digital media, and quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen as a part of this project. A bad movie may bore or annoy you, a terrible film may fill you with frothing rage, but Suicide Squad is so bad as to be numbing, a shell-shock-inducing calamity of a film that left me struggling to form complete sentences. Not bad like Green Lantern, not a sneering idiocy like Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad is a systematic, comprehensive failure of basic storytelling, film-making, and human endeavor from start to finish, a movie which, if the Gods are just, will live on in the annals of man as one of the handful of films synonymous with anti-quality, standing in company with giants like Battlefield Earth, Heaven's Gate, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. And yet to scream and rend garments over this eldritch cataclysm of a movie is not sufficient to come to grips with its decrepitude. Instead we must look at what happened and attempt, as might an arson investigator, to determine where it all went wrong.
Movies fail for many reasons, from bad direction to bad acting, but the one that seems to kill the majority of them, and the one that sits like a naked singularity at the heart of the issues afflicting Suicide Squad is the writing, writing so unremittingly ham-handed, so overwrought, so clunky and shapeless that no movie and no director could possibly survive its advent. Lines that could not ever have been a good idea, not even in the vacuum of a table-read, are littered throughout the film like land mines, waiting for a hapless actor to tread upon them. Moments where the cast is asked to exposit actions that the audience has just seen take place, or to tearfully recite some kind of supposedly heartwarming "bonding" dialogue, despite having no setup whatsoever for that statement, could not have been performed satisfactorily by anyone, let alone the flywheels that occupy the majority of this film. And yet to simply call this the result of a bad script or a hack writer is, once again, not sufficient, because this script was written by none-other than writer-director David Ayer, one of the very best filmmakers working, a man who also wrote and directed such films as Fury, Training Day, and End of Watch, a man who knows how to both create and realize not just good but excellent movies. So how could this script have gotten so far away from him as to produce something this bad?
Simple. Ayer wanted to make Suicide Squad. DC wanted to make Guardians of the Galaxy.
You see, for all the rumors about this film being re-cut to take advantage of Deadpool's success, the end result is about as far from Deadpool as it is from Citizen Kane, if only because it has no, and I repeat no humor in it, not even a semi-decent one-liner. What it does have is a desperate attempt to replicate Marvel's "bad people form a surrogate family" dynamic from Guardians of the Galaxy, an attempt so brazen that multiple characters describe the rest of their team as "family" despite having never once evidenced behavior that would support that. While I can understand DC trying to do something, anything to capture even a small piece of the magic Marvel has been using to craft their cinematic universe, the result is nothing but further evidence of just how difficult a line Marvel walked when it came to Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians had, among other things, a cast that was both razor-sharp and incredibly strongly defined, even with one member a mute (essentially), one a cartoon, and another purposely written around the fact that the actor playing him could not act. And yet even with those things, Guardians only managed to make their movie work by armoring it with a thick layer of snark and self-awareness, bending over backwards to gain the audience's permission to be cheesy and schmaltzy when it counted. Suicide Squad, like the DC universe it comes from, does none of those things, attempting to drop a "found family" dynamic directly on top of a collection of gaping-mouthed douche-hats without a single redeeming feature between them, all in the middle of a universe that has quite clearly evidenced its bilious contempt for such notions as human warmth or joy. To say that the result is a tonal clash is like saying that the Titanic was a boating accident.
The actors caught in this suck-vortex suffer different fates, mostly in line with their abilities. Better actors like Will Smith (playing team-lead Deadshot) or Viola Davis (playing arch-strategist Amanda Waller), manage to survive by more or less retreating into their established personas, strong enough in Smith's case that he can simply turn his role into "another Will Smith outing" and get away with it, while Davis switches her emotions off and forces her way through the material as though none of it matters to her in the slightest (this is the correct move, lest I sound critical). Basically everyone else goes down with the ship, either because they are bad actors, because they are stuck in a bad role, or both. Margot Robbie, trapped within the role of Harley Quinn, is one such tragic victim, as her character is simultaneously drill-bit-annoying and Westboro-Baptist-stupid, to the point where she sits and pouts over events that both she and everyone else within a million light years knows have not actually taken place. Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney, the Tweedle-Dipshit twins of bad action movies, have no chance at all, and consequently fail just as miserably as they always do, as does newcomer Karen Fukuhara, whom the filmmakers task with playing Katana without evidencing the common decency required to give her a character, a backstory, or even a viable reason to be present at all. The same is true of the other eighteen or so members of the Suicide Squad, each of whom get a generous nine seconds to establish themselves in, nicely conveying the fact that the movie has too many goddamn characters to try and pull off an ensemble piece, particularly since we have never seen any of these characters before now, and rapidly don't want to see them ever again.
And then there's the Joker, oh god is there ever the Joker. Not that we get to see him a lot, for contrary to what the trailers told us, Jared Leto gets all of ten minutes of screentime, is not the main villain of the movie, and in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, the actual villain, or any goddamn thing. And yet those ten minutes of facetime that Leto gets are more than enough to tell me everything I need to know about this new and updated version of the Joker, namely that he is catpiss-annoying on the level that Jessie Eisenberg's Urine-obsessed Lex Luthor was. The character looks and acts like what would happen if the entire marketing department at Hot Topic were fused together in a bizarre transporter accident, a disaffected hipster affecting pathologies because the alternative would be "conformist". I've long suspected that Jared Leto is an insufferable human being, but he plays this character like he's trying to confirm all of the worst rumors ever spread about him, and the camera lingers on his gold teeth and carefully-selected "gang" tattoos as though the cameraman was bribed by a cabal of his sworn enemies. Insofar as one should hate the villain of a movie (even though Joker is, I repeat, not the villain here), his character is something of a success. Insofar as one should also wish to continue watching the villain, much less so.
All of this seems to take place in a world devoid of anything but grunting shitheels packing heavy weapons and claiming membership in various elite military formations who would, in reality, piss themselves laughing at the prospect of inducting any one of them as a member before kicking their asses just for the fun of it. The film has the customary DC trait of causing major cities to be destroyed without consequence or even concern by the cast as a whole (I speak here of the US government, not the Suicide Squad), only this time, instead of making said destruction at least interesting to see, the movie is so uninterested in the prospect of showing us something interesting that it cuts away from it after a few desultory montage shots. The plot holes are many and cavernous, of course, including a main villain who can apparently defeat half the US army and shrug off direct hits from cruise missiles, but is taken out by a bomb so puny that people standing twenty feet away with no cover are not even knocked over. But the plot holes, as well as the knots that it ties itself into (to the point where I couldn't tell you what the actual plan was for using the Suicide Squad), seem less like carelessness or even stupidity this time than they do the result of complete indifference. The plot of Suicide Squad makes no sense because, on a fundamental level, nobody gave a shit about it, certainly nobody involved in its actual creation. Whether this was always the case, or whether it's simply a matter of the dramatic and brutal editing done to the film in desperation by a frightened studio, the result is a movie where characters find convenient binders labelled "Top Secret Information", whose contents they apparently absorb in fifteen seconds, all while major MacGuffins like a set of sub-dermal explosives injected into the Squad Members to keep them in line, cease to and resume working at what appears to be arbitrary moments, and characters that have been established as being immune to gunfire and rocket strikes not minutes before are suddenly felled by a baseball bat.
Final thoughts: David Ayer, I wish to remind you all, is a man of talent. Zack Snyder,
despite what many people believe, is a man of talent. A good many of
the other people involved in this movie, from cinematographer Roman
Vasyanov (End of Watch, Fury), to composer Steven Price (Gravity, Fury)
are men of talent, as are members of the cast, both of this film and of
its predecessor. And yet all that these men of talent managed to do in
this case was to produce one of the most staggering misfires of modern
times, a movie so bad that I struggle to find a single point to
recommend it with. Had I not expended the bulk of my rage at DC with
Batman v Superman, this review might have consisted of nothing but
incoherent screaming, but as it stands, for all the efforts I've made to
diagnose what happened here, I still feel rather like the explorer
surveying the blasted ruins of a lost civilization and attempting to
guess at what unfathomable catastrophe overtook it.
It should be no surprise that after watching Batman v Superman, swearing off DC forever, relenting, and being presented with this movie, that I intend to see the error of my ways and return to my policy of bothering only with superhero films attached to the MCU. But to write off Suicide Squad as nothing more than a bad entry in a series does not do justice to the transcendent majesty of its failing. This is a film that, by sheer awfulness of writing and acting and plotting, manages to be physically uncomfortable to watch, not because its subject matter is objectionable nor because its cinematography is frenetic, but because one is embarrassed to be watching tripe of this grade, both for yourself and for those forced to participate in it. This is a film destined to be remembered, by me at least, and likely by everyone else forced to see it, a film that will be recalled in hushed whispers around quiet corners of bars, as men grasp glasses of stiff whisky with white knuckles and speak tremblingly of a film they once saw whose gaping void of quality could extinguish the very stars.
It should be no surprise that after watching Batman v Superman, swearing off DC forever, relenting, and being presented with this movie, that I intend to see the error of my ways and return to my policy of bothering only with superhero films attached to the MCU. But to write off Suicide Squad as nothing more than a bad entry in a series does not do justice to the transcendent majesty of its failing. This is a film that, by sheer awfulness of writing and acting and plotting, manages to be physically uncomfortable to watch, not because its subject matter is objectionable nor because its cinematography is frenetic, but because one is embarrassed to be watching tripe of this grade, both for yourself and for those forced to participate in it. This is a film destined to be remembered, by me at least, and likely by everyone else forced to see it, a film that will be recalled in hushed whispers around quiet corners of bars, as men grasp glasses of stiff whisky with white knuckles and speak tremblingly of a film they once saw whose gaping void of quality could extinguish the very stars.
Final Score: 1/10
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