‘Suicide Squad’ is neither painless nor agony, but DC/Warners’ latest foray into the super-powered world feels like characters car-pooling rather than Deadpool-ing……
Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has a black-ops plan that is so far off the official books that the word ‘library’ will never be uttered. She wants to bag and tag some of the country’s worst criminals and shape them into a military unit that can be sent in to situations that America can letter disavow if things blow up in their faces. Her list of bad guys or compromised good guys includes Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Killer Croc (Adwale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and her operatives Katana (Karen Fukuhara) and Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman).
It’s an inevitable explosive incident waiting to happen but the fuse is lit when the city is attacked by a seemingly magical force and someone very important is needed to be evacuated from inside the desolated urban towers. As the team-members test each other’s limits and Waller’s own insurance policy against betrayal, other agendas continue to hamper the mission… not least Harley’s pathological paramour, a man known as The Joker (Jared Leto)…
With the decidedly mixed-to-negative reviews for Warners/DC’s Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, all eyes have been on Suicide Squad to see if it would offer a) a course correction and b) at least some fun. The result is a little of both, but arguably not quite enough of either. It was marketed as anarchic fun, with news of re-shoots rumoured to up that aspect even more. But while Marvel‘s own anti-hero Deadpool felt like a sardonic superhero with its tact-and-diplomacy-muscle amputated in favour of fun, Suicide Squad feels the reverse…more of an ‘R’-rated movie forced to cut off its most extreme moments for the sake of a younger certificate, which is not an unfair description of the probable business thinking behind the release.
It’s a shame as there’s a decent (possibly indecent) movie aching to get out.
The film is neither as bad as you’ve heard from some advance screenings nor as good as alternative reviews have suggested. It fits into the grim world established by the DC/Warnersverse so far, but it’s if someone slipped an hallucinogenic into the production’s water supply for the sake of it. The edginess is there but uneven. Jared Leto’s Joker, despite being a big draw is not the major player nor really the latest iconic heir to a distinguished demonic lineage. Here he is merely a would be gaudy two-bit Scarface channeling an inner Pacino that outwardly gets to be little more than an strutting drug kingpin – and worse a cinematic maguffin so superficially presented that he works best when kept in flashbacks. The Bonnie to his Clyde is Harley Quinn and though she too has been high on the list of marketing punches, Margot Robbie has to walk a fine line. The performance will undoubtedly spawn a whole raft of new cos-players, but this is not, despite the spin, quite the empowered female character one might hope for. The navel-level shorts, strategically shredded t-shirt, pig-tailed hair and smudged neon make-up do not a feminist icon make and though Robbie imbues her with a surreal sense of grand guignol glee, she’s still red, white and blueprinted to appeal to men – indulging the tried and tested ‘sexy psycho’ template that has the undeniably same ‘Fun in the short-term, I could tame in the long-term‘ effect on the male demographic as bad-boys do for the ladies.
It’s easy to see why Will Smith decided to pick this over the limp Independence Day follow-up and for all Squad‘s fault-lines, it was probably a wise decision. Smith’s never feared the ensemble part of films, even when he’s been the name above the title and, accordingly, he seems the most at home in relishing the spotlight but not feeling the need to have it on him all the time. Equally, for better and worse, he plays the most sympathetic ‘villain’ of the piece. The other stars are somewhat interchangeable, overly-reliant on special effects but have enough energy to kick butt and have fun.
Suicide Squad is a prime example of the problems of micromanaging ‘attitude’, but largely throwing elements against the wall and seeing what sticks… and the success-rate is about as chaotic as you’d expect. Taking a leaf from Marvel‘s Guardians of the Galaxy, this is a film punctuated by a nostalgic soundtrack – the movie expanding the trailer’s beat-for-beat efforts and, indeed, there are whole sequences that feel more like music videos than part of a whole. There’s more than a few blatant thematic nods to classic such as Escape from New York, Aliens, Watchmen and even Ghostbusters gets a moment. The basic story is familiar and the idea of a bunch of bad guys forced to work together for a greater good was old when the first western thought it might make a good angle. Since then countless films and bargain-bin DVDs have perpetuated the premise to varying effect and all that’s been added here are more recognisable faces and some special effects. That being said the eventual ‘assault on Big-Bad’s lair’ is played out well enough with enough banter and pyrotechnics to satisfy the average punter.
As an essay on ‘bad for good’ it has its moments, not least of all realising that Davis’ utterly ruthless Waller is ultimately a scarier bad guy than the rest of the characters put together On paper with such star names (including a cameo from ‘Batfleck’ himself) and central concept, it would have looked a guaranteed powerhouse and even as little as five years ago it would likely have cleared the blockbusting decks. But with Marvel‘s success-rate and undeniable better planning – concentrating on HOW the colourful cohesive parts fit together rather than merely making them shiny – this latest DC/Warners effort feels like it’s trying a bit too hard to be edgy and not hard enough to be coherent. Ignore logic, it has no place here. It does have interesting, worthwhile parts, but none seem to fully work in unison with the bigger picture. Perhaps if Warners could remember what makes a ‘hero’ to begin with, it would be a start. So far their universe seems largely devoid of such nobility, instead it’s merely ‘might makes right‘…
Infinitely better than X-Men: Apocalypse and with more of a pulse than the somber Dawn of Justice, it still feels like a wider, wilder universe in search of its own specific gravity. You can see the possibilities swirling in the headlights careering towards Crazy Town but, despite those re-shoots, they remain just beyond the film’s grasp…
Suicide Squad is now on general release in Warner Bros.
8/10
