After the perceived failure of Batman vs Superman (BVS) to establish a successful franchise to rival the Disney backed Marvel juggernaut enough pressure was heaped on Suicide Squad to sink a small island. With excitable man-child Zack Snyder confusing darkness with a moody, surly teenager and a vomit brown colour palette to spoil Warner Brother’s DC flagship and Jesse Eisenberg sending it crashing onto the rocks with the acting equivalent of shingles, Suicide Squad became the thing.
Indeed, the trailers for the film looked great, it looked like it would be an R-rated version of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Plenty of jokes, colourful characters, a smart soundtrack and Jared Leto. Oh and it wouldn’t have Jesse Eisenberg. This film looked like everything BVS wasn’t and thank Darwin for that.
Well, I don’t want to be a downer on everyone so I’ll get the negatives out-of-the-way first and end on a positive note. Suicide Squad is an ungodly f***ing mess! A ruddy great omnishambles! 24 hours on from watching it I still have no idea what happened.
First among this films many flaws to address, is Jared Leto’s portrayal of the Joker. It is, by a country mile the worst screen version of the character ever seen. A genuinely intriguing character with many incarnations has for the purposes of “appealing to the kids” has been to a bling-bling gangster who is just an arse rather than interesting.
Every actor who has taken on the role from Cesar Romero via Mark Hamill to Heath Ledger, has brought something unique to the Clown Prince of Crime, usually taken from one of the many comic book incarnations. In the context of these DC reboots a Joker inspired by Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns saga would have been apt. A muscular, brooding, softly spoken sociopath who is genuinely terrifying. Instead we get Marshall Mathers on a combo of acid, ket and bourbon with a bad green dye job. Leto’s portrayal fails particularly in comparison to Ledger who modernised and grounded the character as a murderous agent of chaos unconcerned with acquiring wealth or power. Leto’s joker is like some awful, grasping, pop starlet screeching in an interview to pass themselves off as quirky when they have no personality whatsoever. A tremendous waste of a fine actor.
It is the personification of everything that is wrong with the film. Rather than a Dirty Dozen for 2016 Suicide Squad is a two-hour long music video concerned only with surface and failing to establishing anything concretes for us to want to see more of this in the future. David Ayer (Fury; End of Watch), seems to have been caught between making HIS film and making a Warner Brother’s franchise. As a result, we have about three films worth of material burned through in two hours with something resembling one of the many helicopter crashes in this film – because car wrecks are so last year – being the end result
The plot, as far as I could grasp it, compromises of never-ending UFC style introductions, Will Smith ‘being a dad,’ and a giant concrete donut with light effects flying around in the air which will apparently end in the world in an unspecified way partly at the hands of a villain imported from the recent box-office turkey Gods of Egypt. Every now and then Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn chips in with a “we’re the bad guys,” “aren’t we crazy,” or “this is fun.” No Margot this isn’t fun, you’re not kooky, I saw all the jokes in the trailer and I don’t know what the hell is going on.
Somewhere in there, in the midst of this car-crash, is the makings of a very interesting film. A superpowered version of Akira Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai is the film I believe David Ayer wanted to make, but when BVS was revealed as nothing more than a grumpy damp squib, was pressured into producing Charlie’s Angels 3.
All the problems of this film fall into the shadow however, of the film’s greatest offence; Its portrayal of women. Margot Robbie and Cara Delevingne, both accomplished and charismatic performers, are reduced to skimpy outfits and hypersexualised baffling gyrations, which apparently in the case of Delevingne’s Enchantress will bring about the apocalypse. There is a leery, laddy gaze about the direction at times when we take a breather from all the inconsequential battles. So much so, at times I wondered whether Michael Bay had taken over part way through production.
The positives? Well the parts of the film at Bel Reve prison are actually pretty good. That is where David Ayer’s film is, especially with the corrupt cowardly guard, Briggs, played superbly by Ike Barinholtz. And Jesse Eisenberg, he is great, by not being in it.
Other than that, we’re left with a mindless multi-million dollar, cynical, music video. If you want to see an interesting superhero film with a bunch of misfits, get yourself Guardians of the Galaxy on DVD and Blu-ray.
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