Suicide Squad

I know I’ve never been known here for good timing or anything, but this one is just ridiculous.  I admit, I was dragging my feet about watching Suicide Squad at first, mostly due to the very mixed (and occasionally highly polarizing) reactions from those around me.  Add that to a general disinterest in DC properties, and I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit.  Then a friend of mine decided she wanted to see it with me, so schedules had to find themselves properly aligned, which, as per usual, took longer than either of us likely expected.  Finally, several weeks after its theatrical debut, and with the recent announcement of the upcoming release of an extended cut of the film, I set my eyes on Suicide Squad, reclining seat, waffle fry, and all.  How’d it fare?

Jesus Ironically-Goddamn Christ.

I don’t even know where to begin.  Deep breath.  …Okay:  So, in his fantastic video on the massive ineptitude showcased in The Last Airbender, Dan Olson boiled the blame down to the “department heads”, so to speak, involved in the creation of a film.  These are the director, the writer, the producer, the cinematographer, and the editor.  Olson leaves out the sound department, but I’m gonna include them as well, not only ’cause I feel they’re often ignored, but also because they’re germane to the discussion at hand.  Out of these six key decision makers, I have issues with nearly all of them.  Holy shit.  Let’s start with the cinematography, ’cause it’ll likely be the quickest to get through.

Roman Vasyanov doesn’t ring any bells to me, and a quick IMDb search shows me why: he’s never really tackled very many promising projects.  Out of his oeuvre, End of Watch and especially Fury stand out, but the other seven or so films don’t strike me as anything visually stimulating.  Funny thing, both in Fury and Suicide Squad, he shows he indeed has a certain flair for the job, general  staging and blocking and lighting coming across fairly well, with the occasional flourish (think Shia dropping to his knees in a smoky haze outside of his tank in Fury) to gussy things up a bit with an exclamation point.  The problem here is the strange placement and frequency of said flourishes.  There are a handful of shots in Suicide Squad, mostly filmed from above and pulling away from the subject, that have no bearing on the story whatsoever and serve only to, I guess, look kinda cool.  The obvious examples include the Joker laying back and laughing surrounded by spirals of instruments of destruction, the Joker macking on Harley in a vat of what is ostensibly acid (put a pin in that one, we’ll come back to it in a later section), and Diablo’s “Nooooo!” moment following the death of his family.  (Oh yeah, I forgot:  Spoilers abound from here on in.  I give no fucks at this point.  Sorry not sorry.)  As nice as these shots are, they inexplicably stop the action to hang on them, allowing us to just wallow in their artistic greatness, I guess.  It’s overly indulgent, pointless, often puzzling (my friend leaned over to me during the first shot I listed and asked me why there were baby clothes included amongst the weapons, something I had no answer to either), and helps in the otherwise systematic torture of the film’s pacing.  Speaking of which, let’s hit the editing department, shall we?

Unlike Vasyanov above, John Gilroy is indeed a name I recognize, apart from his relation to writer Dan Gilroy and writer/director Tony Gilroy (quite the set o’ brothers here, I tell ya).  He’s a seasoned editor whose credits include Nightcrawler, Pacific Rim, Michael Clayton, The Bourne Legacy, Billy Madison, and Warrior.  This mean clearly knows what he’s doing, and he’s shown it time and again.  This makes things all the more baffling, as the editing on display in this film is some of the worst I have seen in a long time.  The aforementioned Dan Olsen refers to it in a reaction vlog as the worst since The Last Airbender (rarified air you sure as hell don’t wanna find yourself in).  The whole first twenty or so minutes is dominated by a quick, flashy, hastily-put-together montage introducing our main cast and how they came to be incarcerated.  All of this set to obstreperous and often out-of-place pop music from the past few decades.  Things are choppy not only here, but throughout, with action suddenly halted and cutting to somewhere/somewhen else, random slow motion tossed in for no reason whatsoever (I’m looking at you, Killer Croc tossing a goon onto a car), poorly framed fight sequences, incomprehensible battle sequences, and a general feeling of quite a bit of film gloomily finding itself on the cutting room floor without warning or sense (a notion reinforced by the ridiculously long list of uncredited cast).  It’s nigh gibberish with just enough masking tape applied to make the barest bit of coherent sense.  There is a clear lack of evenness regarding tone and story, and it hurts everything.  Seeing his otherwise positive career, I can only call this an aberration, an accident, or the result of producers and studio execs getting their grubby paws on the product.

Aside from comic industry talent like Geoff Johns, the producing team includes apparent DC Stromboli Zack Snyder and his wife and a group of folks I’ve never heard of.  Frankly, having ten producing credits sends up some bright red flags for me, giving the impression of a decent amount of upstairs interference in the project.  Unfortunately, with my limited knowledge of the system, I can only speculate there.  Somewhere I don’t have to resort to speculation is the sound department.

I don’t think I’ve ever openly derided a sound crew before, but I’m gonna here.  To begin with Suicide Squad seems to be following a recent trend in action flicks that eschews the inclusion of many layers of sound effects during massive action sequences.  See any major action blockbuster lately and you’ll notice quite a bit of sound missing, usually involving the jetsam resulting from explosions and crashes and the like.  It’s as if things are going to hell right in front of us, but we can’t hear much of it.  I can’t blame certain theatre acoustics, as I’ve experienced this phenomenon at many film houses and in several private homes.  It’s just a thing that’s popular now, I guess, but the lack of sound is fucking obvious, dammit!  And it detracts from an already ragged film.  Added to this issue here is a strange mixing of the soundtracks, a few instances of bad looping, and a general feel that what’s supposed to be happening on the screen is even more fake than it is.  It’s a strange feeling that you have to experience and notice to properly understand.

Of course, all of this is exacerbated by a hack script and poor direction, both of which can be attributed to David Ayer.  As a writer, Ayer seems to have had his best work on display in Fury, U-571, and Training Day, but he’s also penned some scrub work like Sabotage, The Fast and the Furious, and SWAT.  In the director’s chair, his pinnacle was Fury, with Sabotage, End of Watch, Street Kings, and Harsh Times not only showing a strange proclivity for street justice and whatnot, but also a decidedly workmanlike talent.  There’s nothing all that outstanding about his work in either area, though it seems he’s better suited for writing, just not by too much.  Regardless, he looks to know better than what he put on display here.  He has quality actors like Viola Davis and Jared Leto overacting melodramatically, ruining any sense of both seriousness and fun.  In Leto’s case, the decision to have the Joker take the form of a fucking lameass street dork who acts tougher than he likely is is downright fucking baffling.  (I mean, Leto had enough issues stepping into the shadows created by past Jokers, including Nicholson, Romero, Hamill, and most powerfully Ledger, he didn’t need the additional ridiculous bullshit tossed on there.)  Meanwhile, Davis is left overreaching to be intimidating, nefarious, and enigmatic; Margot Robbie is made into some kind of schizoid pixie with no real sense of self (though this situation comes close to being righted near the finale); Jai Courtney, who’s got his best work on display here, sadly, sounds like a fake Aussie, despite his authentic Australian heritage; the already imposing-as-hell Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is smattered by Tim Story Fantastic Four Thing makeup and ludicrously dubbed with a voice modulator that renders him nigh indecipherable; and Jay Hernandez is stereotyped within an inch of his Latino life.  Most laughable, possibly, was the casting of Cara Delevingne as the main baddy, Enchantress.  Nothing against her on my part, I thought she did pretty well in Paper Towns and I hear decent things about her work in Orange Is the New Black (I’ll get around to watching that sometime, I promise), but she looks fucking twelve years old, not the best choice for either a seasoned scientist or a metahuman beast.  There was nothing to get me to take her seriously, from her hackneyed plans for world domination (insert Raul Julia from Street Fighter here) to her hilarious voice modulation to the fact that she looks too young to even be hanging out with anybody on screen.  (Side tangent:  I have the same issue with Selena Gomez.  I find these women impossibly unsexy, ’cause I’m not attracted to goddamn teenagers.  Yes, I know they’re old enough to legally drink and whatnot, but they look too fucking young.  It’s ridiculous.  Ahem.)

In terms of the rest of the script, Ayer seemed to have no idea what he was doing.  The tone was everywhere, waffling between Snyder-style brooding darkness and a blatant attempt to capture the smartass magic of Guardians of the Galaxy.  The dialogue was pathetic, cliche-ridden, and condescending to the audience (we’re constantly reminded of things we already know).  Character motivations are mostly nonexistent outside of Deadshot, Harley, Flag, and Diablo, and even they are relegated to a single note (daughter, Joker, Delevingne, and family, respectively).  Moreover, any sense of real characterization at all is hardly there:  Boomerang might as well not be there, considering how little he contributes beyond quips and whatnot (not that I’m complaining, he did make me laugh a couple times); Katana shows up out of nowhere and does very little herself; Croc’s only contribution is an aptitude for fighting underwater and acting like a dorky reptile dude; and, my personal favorite, some rando named Slipknot is brought in, following the long montage of gathering the other team members together, out of nowhere, the only background given consisting of “he can climb anything” (whatever the fuck that means), only to have him do nothing but nod at Boomerang and get his head blown off trying to escape.  I think Diablo had the best chance at being an actual character, what with his reluctance to participate out of guilt for killing his family, but his arc inexplicably leads to a noble sacrifice while powering up into an Aztec fire god (you tell me what the hell that shit was, the movie sure as hell didn’t!), something he could apparently do whenever he felt like it.  It was a waste.  The next possibility was Deadshot, powered by a return to snarky form for Will Smith, but the singular devotion to his kid and his need to show up Flag and serve as a goodwill surrogate for the team dragged him below the waves most of the time.

And that brings me to the issue of story.  Plot and scripting are bad enough here, but they could have been salvaged by a solid story underlying everything.  And there seemed to be a promising candidate for this very thing in the nature of good and evil, the ostensibly “good” Waller being a controlling, manipulative, bitch-goddess, and the ostensibly “evil” Squad showing that they can indeed serve a public good.  Unfortunately, nothing about this is fleshed out nearly enough:  The Squad’s participation is only spurred on by self interest, they only decide to continue to basically keep themselves and their loved ones breathing, and they only occasionally bandy about terms like “bad” and “good” in the most inane, superficial ways (like Harley stating, a couple times, that “What?  We’re the bad guys…”) that not only lack definition or elaboration, but also serve to diminish the import of said terms.  Even the stock save-the-world-from-extra-powerful-destruction-stemming-from-vague-reasons thrust is not only cliched as hell, but is relegated to the background for most of the film, the focus being on the slipshod introductions and bevies of purposefully faceless Putty-like horde battles.  I mean, one of the powerful baddies, a resurrected metahuman with incredible powers, is taken out with an everyday explosive (tip of the cap to Croc and Scott Eastwood, who seems doomed to supporting-player hell these days), and the allegedly unstoppable world-ending spell/machine (it got kinda hazy in there, what with Delevingne’s awful reading and laughable voice modulation) is equally easily dispatched in the very same manner.  Hell, this highly-powerful baddy is herself defeated by an obvious trick from Harley that everyone in the theater (all five of us) saw coming from our distant vantage.

Remember that scene with the Joker making out with Harley in the vat we put a pin in earlier?  Let’s go back to that.  It’s representative of another problem with the writing: the fact that the script doesn’t know what it’s doing outside of fan service, lots and lots of fan service.  I can’t say too much about Harley’s outfit, as she likely would have looked ridiculous in her traditional harlequin unitard, and my male eyes just couldn’t get enough of Robbie’s cheeks pressing against the floss that comprised those hot pants, but her look was definitely a heaping helping of fan service, down to the white shirt (don’t get me started on that trite slogan on it) that inevitably succumbed to the copious amounts of wetness that bombarded it.  A deeper dig toward fangasm appeared with Harley’s exposition, wherein she posed with a tuxedo-ed Joker, mirroring an Alex Ross comic cover from years back.  Then there’s the inclusion of creator John Ostrander’s name on the side of a building, a little inclusion I otherwise wouldn’t have a problem with had the camera not fucking lingered on it for too long, ruining the Easter egg nature of the reference.  Then, with the vat scene, that’s supposed to be acid, right?  I mean, it says so on the side of the vat in huge letters.  Yet nothing negative seems to be happening to either Harley or the Joker, save a bit of soupy liquid temporarily covering them and the Joker’s makeup running a bit.  But we needed that shot, y’see, not only to help establish the Joker’s hold over Harley, but also to get a rise from the geeks looking for some clown nookie.  Nevermind the whole fucking point of the Harley-Joker relationship, one of a warning illustration to women about the dangers of abusive relationships, we need to have them make out, dammit!  We need to make this sickly-looking rigging session appear cool, dramatic, sexy.  Asses in the seats, don’tcha know, and Harley is our most malleable object to sell to these drooling fans.  Just tell the damn story, you fucking hacks!

In the end, there was almost nothing positive for me to find in Suicide Squad.  It was a garbled mess of hack efforts all around, with the exceptions of Smith, Kinnaman, half of Hernandez, and half of Robbie.  I couldn’t sit back and enjoy the wildness, ’cause there was little wildness to be found amidst the thunderous jungle of inept filmmaking and cynical marketing.  I didn’t want to hate this thing, I really didn’t, but that’s exactly what I ended up doing.  I have little faith in the extended cut, as it’s likely just going to present a less haphazard edit (you know, the one we should have fucking gotten in the first place!).  I can see why they didn’t release a stronger product, what with the relative failure of BvS and whatnot, but at least turn in a competent product, guys.  Most of you are capable, we know that, just do it.  Fuck the studio, which has a history of mishandling its properties (anyone remember Schumacher?  How about Wild Wild West?  The poaching and destruction of a potentially interesting Superman movie from Tim Burton?), fuck the fanboys and fangirls who’ll likely never be fully satisfied anyway (I know this from experience), just make a good movie.  The money will come.  Trust me.

I need a stiff drink…