Suicide Squad review

After the clunky and underachieving disaster that was “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” the stakes for David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” were raised too high. Though Warner Brothers never planned it, because BvS failed to live up to its own hype, this quirky film, inspired by a 4th-teir DC comics property, is now expected to give Warner's fledgling movie universe enough fuel to drive fan interest to the next spin-off. Given that “Suicide Squad” is an already an odd premise—grouping imprisoned super-villains to fight for the government against their will--and features mostly unknown characters, a property this idiosyncratic and niche was hardly positioned to save an entire franchise from failing. Making things all the more difficult, Ayer’s attempts at dark satire and genre subversion are undercut by the studio’s bottom-line priorities and the narrative has been ravaged by intrusive re-shoots and bad editing.

Following the events of “Batman v Superman,” government intelligence decides to create a team of mutants and misfits of their own in case another ‘meta-human’ decides he or she above the law. Agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) brings together the unlikely ensemble of a hitman named Deadshot (Will Smith), a dangerous pyro-kinetic named Diablo (Jay Hernandez), the unicorn obsessed maniac Boomerang (Jai Courtney), a sewer dwelling cannibal called Killer Crock (Adewele Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a possessed mystic named Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and an unpredictable Joker obsessive named Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). Once the team is assembled they are set on the first mission to stop Enchantress when her vaguely defined witch spirit is reunited with an ancient Mezzo-American war-god, unleashing a horde of amorphous, blob-headed bad-guys onto the city streets.

The movie almost never works either as a streamlined superhero peice or a darkly humorous action-comedy, but as misbegotten or as poorly executed as it might have been I can’t bring myself to dismiss Ayer’s ambitions. There are moments in this swirling, crass, adolescent and tone-deaf glorified videogame that approaches a level of hysteria and anarchy that too few mainstream comic book movies dare to embrace. Even this year’s “Deadpool,” which was celebrated for it’s hard-R raunchiness, played it safe when it came to defining who we’re supposed to root for, who we’re supposed to hate and it created a safe relatability when it came to the protagonist’s goals and desires. “Suicide Squad” muddies all of those waters and celebrates the sickest and most deranged motives within its characters, but it fails to take its punk-rock attitude beyond the surface into the thematic territory where it could have made a bigger impact.

All the actors seem committed and game to embody these larger than life sociopaths—Margot Robbie walks away with whole movie and Will Smith almost reminds us why we liked him in the first place—but the filmmakers are never as committed to the story. The generic and buffoonish cartoon plot is treated merely as an apparatus to house the ensemble and to highlight the film’s overbearing aesthetic choices. The overall production design seems to be inspired by a 13-year old’s pog collection from the mid-90s and the groan-inducing jukebox soundtrack is filled with painfully on-the-nose rock music selections. It doesn’t help that the actors, as hard as they try, never compensate for the one-note, smart-alecky dialogue.  

Somewhere in the creases and corners of this unmitigated disaster exists the seeds of a more interesting movie.  Jared Leto’s minor appearance as the Joker is occasionally exciting but like everything else is buried under the larger beats of the silly and uninteresting A-plot. I can’t help but wonder if a movie about Joker and Harley that fully explores their toxic romance might have been more satisfying (think Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” in Gotham). Perhaps if the film had been allowed to be R-rated and these supposedly dangerous criminals were forced to plow through the Joker’s hench-men or an opposing military instead of mystically powered, faceless ghouls, the movie could have retained the grit and immediacy of Ayer’s previous work (“Fury” “End of Watch”).  As it stands, “Suicide Squad” is an empty-headed and tonally frustrating missed opportunity and yet another stumbling block in DC/Warner’s desperate attempt to catch up with Marvel’s blockbuster winning streak.

Grade: C- 

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Suicide Squad."

Fury review

               While still retaining the base entertainments of the war genre, David Ayer’s WW2 flick “Fury” tackles topics of humanity, masculinity, ideology and national loyalty in a dense and deliberate way. It’s an ensemble buddy war drama in the tradition of “The Dirty Dozen”—or maybe even more testosterone-driven westerns such as “Rio Bravo” and especially “The Wild Bunch”—but with a leftist post-Vietnam, post-9/11 introspective sensibility that questions the overall effectiveness of war as a means to an end and ponders the long-lasting impact on the individual soldiers caught up in its hell. Sometimes wallowing in its moral greys and other times manipulating the audience with the visceral simplicities of black and white, the mix of these two ideological outlooks, and the way Ayre attempts to balance them within the narrative, is a subtextual war of its own.

               This story of a team of tank fighters, who, at the tail end of the Second World War, are moving through the devastated villages of Germany, begins when one member is brutally killed and a new soldier is brought in to replace him; a 19 year old typist named Norman (Logan Lerman), who’s ripped from his cozy job and thrown into the rainy, blood stained fields of battle. There he meets the steadfast leader Don Collier (Brad Pitt), the teams’ bible thumping gunman Boyd Swan (Shia LaBeouf ), Grady Travis (Jon Bernthal), a troubled southerner who probably takes too much glee in his murderous duties, and a Mexican-American soldier named Trini Garcia (Michael Pena) who’s already showing early signs of PTSD. It’s clear from the first few missions that Norman is in way over his head, and, having just lost one of their own, rolling into some of the most dangerous tank battles against the Nazi’s near-impervious Panzers, the rest of team doesn’t have the patience for him to get comfortable with the idea of taking a human life.

               Ayer’s follow-up to his 2012 found-footage cop-drama “End of Watch” builds on the themes of brotherhood and masculinity in a more cohesive and more pessimistic way. The extremely tense and explicitly violent war scenes are spaced appropriately by character building moments of reflexivity, letting the audience get to know and sympathize with this group of men who’re trying their hardest to keep their emotional vulnerability bottled in.  However, though the performances are sensitively portrayed and the battle scenes are competently staged and shot, when their tank rolls over the dead bodies of their enemies and they poke their heads out of their mobile shelter to shoot down the newly appointed Nazi youth, some of whom are younger than our movie’s hero, the nobility of nationalistic bravery becomes difficult to identify or enjoy. And sometimes--if I’m giving the movie the full benefit of the doubt--that’s the point.

               In one key scene, after a village battle has ended, Lerman and Pitt’s characters enter the home of two German sisters, and after Pitt’s Collier pulls them out of hiding, visibly frightened and shaking with fear, he offers them both eggs and breakfast as a peace offering.  Though this moment breathes with steady directorial observation, as the story progresses, what follows on their path is a series of increasingly depressing and devastating act of violence until the movie’s final showdown between the out-manned, out-gunned Fury and a sizable SS militia.

               Does “Fury” want to be a think piece about the lowest depths of depravity world governments have forced on the innocent minds of naïve recruits looking to serve their country, who then have to numb their souls in order to toe the line, or does it want to be a rousing coming of age story about having your blinders removed and being forced to see what evil looks like by figuring out your place in opposition against it?   It’s difficult to tell sometimes, resulting in a technically accomplished action-drama that tests your moral barometer as you’re often unsure if you want to cheer along or wince in disgust.

Grade: B -
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2014