Suicide Squad

Alternate Title:  A Tale of Two Studios

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: ...

...

...

Er... Things Havoc Liked?

...

...

...

...

... ?

...

...

...

...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.

 

Final Score:  1/10

Red Tails

Alternate Title:  Turn Tail and Run


One sentence synopsis:  The first Black fighter pilots fight bigotry and the Nazis during World War II.


Things Havoc liked:  Um...

Er... well...

Okay, so, The Tuskegee Airmen: Back in the closing days of World War Two, when the US army was still segregated, a group of black pilots fought their way through a racist, bigoted system to be allowed to fly fighter planes for their country in the greatest war in history. These men formed the 332nd Fighter Group, four squadrons of black fighter pilots who were eventually assigned to escort heavy bombers back and forth from their runs on Germany. Despite opposition from the finest German fighters and pilots that remained in the Luftwaffe, these men performed brilliantly, losing very few bombers (by some accounts none at all) and shooting down the first Me-262 jet fighters of the war. In performing well above and beyond the call, the Tuskegee airmen contributed to the collapse of the color barriers in the US army and air force, and justly earned a lustrous place in military history. I applaud the notion of making a film about this subject.

The actors in this film vary in quality, but I will admit, the best job is done by the pilots themselves (which is only fair, I suppose). The movie focuses upon a small group of pilots, particularly two with callsigns 'Lightning' and 'Easy' (David Oyelowo and Nate Parker respectively). These two, and the other pilots that surround them, played variously by R&B and hip hop artists, actually manage a decent amount of what I would call real camaraderie in this movie. Scenes of them sitting about playing cards, discussing missions, lying and bragging to one another, actually strike home reasonably well, and David Oyelowo in particular does a pretty decent job with the material he's given. One does get the impression that this could actually be a group of real pilots in a real movie.



Things Havoc disliked:  I could try to get glib here, try to coyly hide what I actually think, but my duty as a reviewer is to warn people when something like this comes about. So let me get right to the point. This movie is an unqualified piece of shit.

I have never in my life seen a movie torpedo itself so quickly out of the gate. The very first line in the movie is a line so transcendentally awful both in writing and delivery that I turned to my viewing companions and whispered "uh oh". Not even Last Airbender managed to make me lose faith that quickly, and when you're causing me to compare your film negatively with the worst movie ever made, you are in trouble.

I'm no stranger to bad writing in movies, but this screenplay is the worst I have seen in a long damn while. Every single line is an abysmal, cringe-worthy, disaster, so bad that I suspect that George Lucas recycled all of the lines that he thought were too bad to fit into the Star Wars prequels into this film. Characters do not stop at stating the obvious, but narrate their own actions to other people in the same room. Officers give lectures about duty, pride, and honor in such an unfathomably schmaltzy, wooden manner that they look and sound embarrassed to be there. Pilots speak to one another using language that no pilot, indeed that no human being in the history of time, has ever pronounced in all seriousness to another person. These lines are not helped by the soundtrack, comprised entirely of faux-patriotic orchestral crap, which succeeds in making the movie worse in direct proportion to how much it plays. When one is listening to an actor recite awful dialogue, it does not improve the experience by having bad Sousa marches swell up every time someone mentions the word "mission".

It's hard for me to separate the terrible quality of the writing from the acting, but the acting here is absolutely terrible. Yes, I praised David Oyelowo, but that's because my system requires me to find at least SOMETHING I liked, and he's simply the least bad of the lot. Terrence Howard, an excellent actor whom I loved in everything from Crash to Hustle & Flow to Iron Man, here turns in a performance that looks like it was generated under the influence of powerful drugs, staring vacantly into space as he recites terrible and cliche-ridden lines about the power of self-belief. Cuba Gooding Jr, who won an Academy Award for Jerry McGuire, here manages to effortlessly disguise whatever talents led the academy to give it to him. Chomping on his pipe as though it were some alien life form he did not understand, his role is completely superfluous, in that he does not one important thing for the entire movie, plot or character-wise. Gooding has been in his share of bad movies before, but manages here to trump everything he has ever done in terms of awfulness, and for a man who last 'starred' in 'The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends', this is not a statement I make lightly.

One might think that George Lucas, who produced this monstrosity and funded it himself, might at least know how to create stunning aerial dogfights and thrilling scenes of combat. One would be wrong. Comparing the action in this movie to a video game is to inflict a grave and unwarranted insult to video games. Planes dash about the air performing maneuvers that are not simply impossible but laughably so, even to someone with no experience at aerial combat. Our heroes have infinite ammunition in their guns, which appear to fire explosive howitzer shells that trigger stupendous explosions in everything they so much as approach. One of the pilots manages to detonate a locomotive, derailing and obliterating an entire train, by firing into it with .50 caliber machine guns for two seconds. One does not have to be a military historian to know that such events are ludicrously impossible, and as though that weren't enough, he turns around later in the movie and does the same thing to a destroyer! Worst of all, these sights aren't just thoughtless eye-candy we the viewers are treated to while the movie winks at us. At one point that same pilot is congratulated by his superiors for having destroyed SIXTY-THREE aircraft in one strafing mission, a number so absurd as to invite ridicule from people with no prior experience with anything military. I have seen five year olds describing the imagined gyrations of their magical starfighters who maintained a better sense of reality than this.

And yet the worst thing of all about this movie, unquestionably, is the subject of Race. The Tuskegee Airmen, beyond being amazing fighter pilots, were trailblazers, instrumental in the first wave of the civil rights movement by proving conclusively that blacks could do anything whites could. Race is central to the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, and yet this movie manages, somehow, to both whitewash away the racism that the airmen faced, and also reduce it to ludicrous cliche. We see the obligatory racist southern senators sitting around talking about how the airmen are incompetent because they're black, and hear the virtuous (and awful) speeches that the officers of the unit give in their defense. But the pilots scarcely seem to realize that race is a factor in their lives, discussing it infrequently and in pathetic sound-bytes that do the subject no justice. When one of our heroes walks into a whites-only officers' club, and is chased away by racist white officers, their insults sound less like biting, shocking incidents of racism, and more like barely-literate idiots reading uncomfortable lines from a cue card. Every white pilot or crewman, without exception, is portrayed as a bumbling idiot (possibly because the actors are all incompetent, and possibly because the writing is so awful), so stupid and uncomfortable with their lines that we can't believe for a second that these people actually believe what they're saying. The turnaround, when our heroes finally start to get recognized by the formerly racist whites, feels contrived and unconvincing, partly because the writing is still awful, and partly because the threat of racism previously felt like a joke. There is (of course) no mention of their struggle in a wider context, no hint of the racism that might await them back home, nor of the struggles they undertook to get as far as they did. The post-script doesn't even mention the de-segregation of the US military. Instead we are apparently meant to believe that racism itself was vanquished along with Nazi Germany. The movie even goes so far as to include a long (and completely pointless) romance sub-plot between one of the pilots and an Italian girl, ignoring the fact that while any two people can fall in love, there is no way on earth that a black man would be permitted to date (much less marry) a white Italian girl in Italy in 1944. Race riots and lynch mobs were formed over less.



Final thoughts:  Sixteen years ago, HBO produced a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen called (appropriately enough) The Tuskegee Airmen. The movie starred Lawrence Fishburne, Andre Braugher, and, of all people, Cuba Gooding Jr. It did not have an enormous budget, nor was it a perfect film, but it managed to express quite expertly what the conditions for these pilots were like, and what obstacles they were faced with and overcame, all without artifice, blame-throwing, or recourse to ugly stereotypes. Compared to that film, Red Tails feels like an ugly slap in the face, not just to the Tuskegee Airmen themselves, but to the fine black actors who starred in this abomination, which may well set the cause of black actors in this country back twenty years. Men of talent created this film. Aaron McGruder (of the Boondocks) wrote the screenplay. Terence Blanchard (of Malcolm X and Bamboozled) wrote the score. And yet whether because Lucas turns everything he touches these days into galvanized crap, or because some collective mania overcame everyone involved, the result was one of the most complete trainwrecks I've ever seen.

George Lucas claimed in the press that one of the reasons he financed this film himself was that Hollywood was unwilling to back a movie that did not have a single significant white role. At the time I praised him for having dared to do what the studios would not, and given a chance for great actors to portray a story that deeply deserved a full cinematic treatment. Having now seen the result, I suspect that the reason he couldn't secure financing is because someone saw the rough cut and wisely ran away. I sat through this movie in mounting awe at the depths to which it fell, wondering at every turn if it could possibly get any worse, and discovering that it could and did. This movie was a complete disaster from start to finish, and I can only hope that those involved will recover from the experience of having produced it soon.

Lord knows it will take me a while.

Final Score:  1.5/10