Suicide Squad

As previously established, I love films.  I love going to the cinema.  Tonight I went to the cinema to watch a film - ah, two of my great loves combined, yes?

No.

Tonight I went to see Suicide Squad.

I had thought, based on the trailer and the hype, that this might be DCs equivalent of Deadpool - a darkly comic super hero film.  The antidote to the dark, brooding noir of Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise, and the angst of the Spiderman saga.  We seem to be moving to a lighter, frothier superhero age - Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool (oh, I've said that already).  The premise is simple - what if there's comic book film based entirely based on a group of bad guys.  We love the bad guys, don't we?  Heath Ledger's Joker won him a posthumous Oscar, Tom Hiddleston's Loki won him a legion of fans - he was more popular than some of the actual heroes.  So the logic makes sense - surely we'll go nuts for Suicide Squad?

I loved a talking stick, for crying out loud

So a cast is assembled.  And it's an impressive cast.  I count a couple of Oscar winners and nominees - Viola Davis, Will Smith, Jared Leto, Ben Affleck.  I have no issues with this cast - they act their socks off.  Margot Robbie is a complete scene stealer, and Harley Quinn's relationship with the Joker is a complicated and fascinating thing to behold.

And it's got to be attention grabbing.  Which it is.  This film looks fantastic.  Punkish, sleazy, stylised and beautiful.  It's visually arresting.  And the soundtrack is fantastic - featuring The Rolling Stones, Eminem, the White Stripes, Grace and Skrillex (side note: decent soundtracks are really making a comeback, aren't they?  I digress.)

Brilliant - let's sort the plot.  "No!" laughs David Ayer, the writer and director.  Clearly a man who has heard the saying that the majority of communication is expressed through visual and auditory non verbal means, and that only a tiny fraction of what we actually say should be heeded.  And found it deeply profound.  And decided not to put a plot in his film.

So let's look at the characters:

I have just finished watching these characters for

2 hours and couldn't tell you the names or motivations

of half of them.

The first 20 minutes is Viola Davis spelling out who everybody is and why they're bad.  And then a lot of information is flashed up on screen and disappears again almost instantly.  It's like a terrible Powerpoint presentation.  And then after she's completed her massive info-dump, we get shown it all again in flashback.  The plan is to use them as disposable assets for the US government.  The US government is understandably dubious, and rightly so because this plan goes almost instantly wrong and Enchantress is released, who hatches a plan to...take over the world...with her brother...(ah pants, didn't introduce him.  Crowbar him in, quickly!)...so that they can...do...something.  No idea.  Sorry.

We meet Deadshot, played sympathetically by Will Smith.  He quickly demonstrates that he is Not A Bad Guy, and may as well have been playing his character from Wild, Wild West.  Margot Robbie plays Harley Quinn, and is an absolute scene stealer as well as the closest thing this film has to nuanced.  [Peeve: she (and everyone else) is repeatedly referred to as "psychotic", when they actually remain in complete awareness of reality at all times.]  Then there's everybody else.  They're just there, really.  Katana gets shoved into the film halfway through as an afterthought.  As if a team of 8 new people wasn't enough to get your head round.

Some very poorly explained things happen and a lot of things blow up for 2 hours.  It seems like a lot longer.  At the end some people win.  As an audience member, you are not one of them.

I was discussing this with one of my friends who said "what do you expect - it's a comic book adaptation.  That's what they're like."  But I disagree.  Television has brought us Jessica Jones and Daredevil, which deal with complex characters and issues with nuance and subtlety.  "The Avengers Model" proved that audiences will buy into the long game - introducing one character per film for a couple of years, so that when they all came together that world was richer, vibrant, and full of characters that we'd already been hanging out with.  And understood.

So maybe this is what Suicide Squad should have tried - a film with Deadshot, a film with Harley Quinn, a film with Killer Croc, and then bring them all together for Suicide Squad.  Problem: back stories tend to neuter bad guys somewhat.  Hallowe'en is scary because we don't understand Michael Myers.  Unless you watch the 2007 remake, in which we understand what motivates Michael Myers and instantly stop fearing him.  Plan B: make films in which the characters in Suicide Squad are the villains, so at least we know a little more about them, who they are and what makes them tick.  So that when Slipknot appears on screen, we need little more than a prompt to remember who he is.

This image looks great on film.  Close up, they

look like Barbie Dolls.



The script is wafer thin, full of clichés upon clichés (example: "I'll accept the consequences" "I am your consequences").  The whole thing is a meme, the characters will become great fancy dress fodder.  But so far they aren't great characters.  To paraphrase, this film is "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I got that from a book...