Five months ago I finally managed to drag my deadbeat cheap ass to the cheap theater and finally watch Batman versus Superman colon Dawn of Justice for the legal first time (lol). I already knew what I was getting with that since I had had two months to hear about it and from my trustworthy sources of criticism (primarily redlettermedia and We Hate Movies) I knew it was a complete fucking turd. So basically a Zack Snyder movie. The most common method used to wave away the inherent structural problems with the whole movie was the commonly employed "this was one for the true fans" defense. Which is not a valid defense when you're trying to refute criticism of a 200 million dollar movie, because with production and advertising costs no one spends half a billion dollars to console idiots with bad taste when they could have done more good flushing it down the toilet, or burning it, or donating it to the Nature Conservancy or something. Making something specifically for fans is not a defense when it's a logically flawed nightmare of stupid, moronic shit that thinks it's smart, and is the worst rejection of valid criticism second only to "I'd like to see YOU make [X]".
So as bad as Batman versus Superman colon Dawn of Justice and the aftermath of it being a massive commercial success and artistic failure, it looks like the Godfather when compared to Suicide Squad. Which is an incredibly hyperbolic and inflammatory statement that is probably wrong, because they are both terrible, but fuck it I can say what I want it's Trump's 2016 America: fuck your feelings.
Suicide Squad is also another one "for the fans" except in this case I have no idea who those fans are. Suicide Squad is more perplexing in its unique brand of a horseshit and trump yard signs-fueled dumpster fire. The acrid, caustic smoke and fumes billowing out from its depths hide a mysterious secret, of how and why the fuck did thousands of people decide this should be the finished product, and then go on to make 3/4s of a billion dollars. This movie make a goddamn inappropriate amount of money, although considering how absolutely saturated its bizarre Hot Topic-esque marketing campaign was I don't think it was a runaway success, which is the only good thing I can take away from my experience with it today.
I say this all the time but I have a real problem deciding where to start with Suicide Squad since it is an absolute goddamn mess of a movie, from its writing, acting, directing, editing, it's basically the quality of an Asylum mockbuster that accidentally got a budget and wide release.
The plot is a lazy-yet-somehow-complex mess of twists and turns that you can tell thinks it's smart and doing something different, so I think I'll start from the top down dissecting this bloated stinking corpse and point out every stupid thing that washed over me to the point where I was rage-eating my popcorm. This is my design.
WHY:
Why is this here? There is one right answer, that is a composition of functions with a primary derivative of "fuck everything". I would argue that Suicide Squad is the culmination of a little over a decade of the commodification of nerd culture. For when capitalism wept since there were no lands left to conquer, they realized the internet existed and decided to mine the shit out of the culture of weird reclusive social outcasts that gleaned happiness out of the unending futility of life through escapist fantasy whether it be roleplaying gayass elf villagers, thinking they could serve on the Enterprise, or manically collecting comic books initially written to sell gum to children. Comic book movies have been deemed cool and it's all Marvel's fault. As the Promethean bearer of fire of sorts, every single other intellectual property became a hot commodity again, because how better to drive forward the engine of our own extinction than dying under the collective weight of a billion DVD's of comic book characters and sass-talking robots that no one really ever needed?
So when every other movie studio saw what was happening they decided to imitate success, because the phrase lightning in a bottle totally means that something inexplicably good and popular and successful is easily repeatable since we have an inexhaustible supply of petroleum polymers and an entire nation of chinese factory slaves to churn out our plastic collectibles, right?
I know why these studios are doing what they do, because money, but what I don't get is why they insist on making everything SO FUCKING BAD. It's completely possible to want to do a good job on something that contributes to culture, to make an effort to move us forward as a goddamn society instead of being a lazy asshole sitting on a throne of gilded skulls taking giant slimy shits and adorning them with costume jewelry and passing them off as something valuable. There are countless creative, smart, amazing people with the chance to revolutionize our very way of life that are crushed under the massive clankering juggernaut of opportunistic greed and ignorance, since they're not as big or loud as the Harkonnen's of this world and not even intentionally ignored.
Holy shit I haven't even gotten to the movie yet.
WHY (take II):
There is no possible scenario in which this reality's version of Suicide Squad could have been good. It is impossible to convert anti-good into good, since just as when antimatter contacts matter all that's release is a destructive wave of energy. Zack Snyder and David Ayer are two directors and """"""""writers"""""""" composed almost uniformly out of anti-talent. Snyder's flimography is a wasteland, and Ayer is of similar quality, but perplexingly contains a handful of legitimate quality works that show a stopped clock has the chance to be right at least once a day, maybe twice I don't know how many metric-time weirdo Europeans read my blog.
Don't get me wrong, Ayer is a BAD director, a bad writer, a stereotypical angry white middle-aged american with a dime-store grasp of philosophy and faux aura of intelligence, craft, toughness, etc. He wrote Training Day (which i contend is only good because of Denzel Washington because Denzel is never bad in anything), and also wrote and directed Fury. Fury is, in my flawed opinion, a movie that is excellent for reasons I cannot fully elucidate. A grim, gritty take on the depths of human misery and our darkest id, I think aside from Son of Saul it's the only movie set during WWII i've ever seen that really demonstrated just how low we can get. But its still totally watchable, enjoyable, and for some reason occupies a space in my blu-ray collection.
But this isn't a review about Fury. This is a discussion hitpiece on how fucking awful Suicide Squad was and how its supporters should be jailed and recycled. I'm fully aware of the 'creative' clashing between the production and the studio during its development, and while there might actually be a cut of Suicide Squad that at the very, very least makes narrative sense, I don't care how poorly this was edited you cannot make something out of nothing. And that's what Suicide Squad is. Nothing.
The premise of Suicide Squad involves a studio scraping the bottom of the comic book barrel and trying to sell us something weird and I will make the extremely unfair comparison of Suicide Squad to Guardians of the Galaxy, because that's the atmosphere the end product tries extremely hard to plagiarize and fails miserably at.
DC is attempting to be the counter-Marvel, by giving us movies that are supposed to be much more grimdark and realistic. They are trying to avoid cartoonish green giants and robot men exchanging quips while fighting one-dimensional villains controlling endless faceless soldiers that the heroes dispatch with ease, with final acts involving superweapons that shoot beams of energy into they sky...
Except.... that's.... exactly what Suicide Squad is. To a fucking T.
Green giants (Killer Croc), robot men (Joel Kinnaman acting as even less of a human that RoboCop), quips (every fucking conversation), one-dimensional villains with faceless armies and superweapons (Enchantress and her literally faceless minions and the fucking STUPID final act), it's all there. So instead of trying to be new they're just copying, eh fuck it whatever it's fine.
The entire fucking plotline of Suicide Squad is Viola Davis convincing a bunch of dumbass stuffed-shirt army guys at the Pentagon that the next Superman (or "metahuman" as the movie terms them and proceeds to say over 9000 times ) might not share the values of truth, justice, and the American way (lol), and instead might proceed to level a city, killing thousands. AKA exactly what superman does in the two previous Snyder movies but shut up you dumb fuck and keep shoveling popcorn into your mouth and stare at the shiny screen. Her argument is that the government needs a program where they release a bunch of literal supervillains loose into a chaotic situation because.... umm... something about plausible deniability? Because apparently in this universe people are really steamed over the fact that the government is functionally incapable of controlling or stopping monsters fueled by the sun and immortal godlike entities with FUCKING MAGIC POWERS.
So they need a program where Harley Quinn with a baseball bat and some shithead that throws boomerangs are sent out to stop the physical manifestation of Death.
Sure. Totally winning strategy, guys, sleep safe we're totally in the clear with Davis' program creatively named "Special Unit X" protecting us at night.
Except the fucking plot of this shit is only driven forward BECAUSE one of Viola Davis' recruits, who just so happens to be an extradimensional entity of unlimited and nightmarish power, decides to turn on her for keeping her prisoner and attempts to destroy the Earth.
SO Viola Davis (who is... not bad, per se, in this, just not good) assembles a team that decides Special Unit X is a retarded term and adopts Will Smith's description as a Suicide Squad, that is composed of the following members:
Harley Quinn: Credit where credit is due, Margot Robbie did a... fine, i guess? job imitating the accent and mannerisms of the Batman: The Animated Series character, with her sexuality cranked to 11 because chauvinism. But, unless a 4-hour cut of this shit turns up, her character had fuck-all to do aside from make conversation with Will Smith because all the intercuts of flashbacks with her and the Joker were POINTLESS. Utterly, completely fucking pointless to the point where they basically padded out the runtime, of a 2 hour movie.
Harley Quinn: Credit where credit is due, Margot Robbie did a... fine, i guess? job imitating the accent and mannerisms of the Batman: The Animated Series character, with her sexuality cranked to 11 because chauvinism. But, unless a 4-hour cut of this shit turns up, her character had fuck-all to do aside from make conversation with Will Smith because all the intercuts of flashbacks with her and the Joker were POINTLESS. Utterly, completely fucking pointless to the point where they basically padded out the runtime, of a 2 hour movie.
Deadshot: Will Smith was hands-down the best part of this attempt at a movie. It was nice to see him act again, as the Will Smith we know and love, a cocky smartass with a charisma that is undeniably magnetic. Deadshot was the only character with any actual depth of sorts, although apparently his entire character motivation was to murder Batman for beating him up in an alley in front of his daughter, but whatever. I needed an anchor against the goddamn deluge of shit and here it was.
Captain Boomerang: Jai Courtney is a cancer that ruins everything he's attached to, oh but look in this movie he's a bank robber that has a fetish for pink unicorns isn't that quirky?! Squee! Go fuck yourself.
Killer Croc: Growled. Punched stuff. Likes the BET channel. The end to being a character.
El Diablo: The only member of this team of alleged metahumans that are supposed to fight OTHER superpowered supervillains, he can shoot fire from his hands and accidentally murdered his family because he got mad one day and swore never to use violence until Will Smith bullied him into using his powers, then in the end he might or might not also be a godlike fire deity i'm not sure the movie kind of glossed over it.
Slipknot: Adam Beach was on the posters to this movie. In the editing process his introduction was cut out of the movie, reduced literally to Joel Kinnaman saying "oh that's Slipknot, the man that can climb anything", then in the next scene he tries to escape so they blow his head off and that's it for the character. the end.
Enchantress: Played by some woman with eyebrows whose density gives Peter Gallagher a run for the money, she starts off as the world's worst archaeologist. Falling into an ancient temple, walking up to an altar and breaking the clay figure sitting on it and is then possessed by "The Witch" as the movie continually refers to her. She winds up being RoboCop's girlfriend but then betrays the team of villains run by a villain by being even more of a villain, deciding to get revenge on humanity because, and i fucking quote: "The humans, they used to worship us as gods. Now they worship machines. So I will built a machine to destroy them all." Eat my ass, movie.
Rick Flagg: Joel Kinnaman is a terrible actor, and brings his trademark wooden robotic performance to a role previously filled by Tom fucking Hardy, who left due to creative differences with David Ayer. No shit. Winner: Tom Hardy. Loser: everyone else.
With supporting appearances by:
Katana: A character included solely because Ayer and Snyder watched Kill Bill halfway through writing this shit and decided "oh man you know what would be cool? a bitch with a sword but the sword is also magic because magic exists in this world for some reason". As the rest of the Suicide Squad is taking off in a helicopter to go to the city that is clearly under attack by some monstrous force shooting lightning into the sky, but are told it's just run of the mill terrorists, Katana walks up the ramp of the helicopter as it takes off. Joel Kinnaman says "this is Katana, she's with me, also her sword collects the souls of everyone she kills. No big deal." And THAT'S IT for character development with her.
Actually, Katana is easily the best character because she has the least to do with literally everything else.
Joker: Let's get into THIS shit, shall we? I'll start this off with an entirely reasonable and agreeable statement: I wish Jared Leto had died after playing the Joker in an homage to Heath Ledger's far, FAR, ASTRONOMICALLY FUCKING FAR superior performance. Jared Leto sucks. He's not that great an actor, he's a white-trash Christian Bale if you will, willing to take alienating risks with his performances without any of the payout. All of those fucking antics you heard he did during the production of this movie left a sour taste in my mouth. His whole take on the Joker isn't an amoral creative psychopath, but a monkeycheese random lover of chaos and carnage that does shocking shit just for the sake of it, his motivations and character are as skin-deep as the stupidass full-head white makeup that is supposed to be his actual skin color. I fucking wish that he had tried that condom bullshit with Viola Davis since apparently he didn't fuck with her because her retired football player husband would have literally murdered him. *sigh* I can dream though.
Oh also, the Joker is not a character in this movie. The theatrical release, which at this point I am going to accept as the legitimate final product, contains probably at most 5-7 minutes with he actual Joker doing things, and most of those are only in flashbacks and ALL of them are only with Harley Quinn. He has no connection to the titular Suicide Squad aside from the fucked up relationship he has with her, that was completely unnecessary to the movie and ever her as a character. Fuck this Joker, he's a goddamn joke.
Enchantress' brother Incubus: The actual kind of primary antagonist of this movie (aside from David Ayer), who is a complete and total ripoff of a character design from Gods of Egypt. BU is a better movie than Suicide Squad. I would rather watch Gods of Egypt, i would feel less embarrassed having Gods of Egypt on bluray in my fucking house than Suicide Squad.
Incubus actually led to the most enjoyable part of the movie for me, because in the last act they need to fight him and his stupid sister from blowing up the earth, and so they try shooting this gigantic metal golem that can fire tentacles from his hands, and it goes exactly as well as you think it would. Boomerangs don't work, bullets don't work, baseball bats don't work, enter El Diablo who says "don't worry about me I'm gonna show him who i actually am" and then he shoots fire at Incubus, and turns into a Diablo 3 character, so now it's the flaming incarnation of Mephisto fighting a ripoff of a giant metal egyptian god, and then they both get blown up with a landmine by Clint Eastwood's son who was a navy seal tagging along with the Suicide Squad for some reason. I was laughing so hard during that scene the awful teenagers sitting behind me started to laugh too, either at me or the movie I don't fucking care since it's so terrible there's only one reaction you can have.
These stupidass characters appear in scenes that are randomly and frequently injected with pop songs that either literally explain the atmosphere of the scene (House of the Rising Sun during a scene in the stupid fucking "black site" prison that is run by Mad TV's Ike Barinholtz????????) or some stupid gun-for-hire editor decided would work like Seven Nation Army while the Suicide Squad opens crates that just so happen to contain their supervillain costumes and get dressed, with a smash cut of the male gaze panning up as Margot Robbie pulls up some hot pants and slides a tight shirt over her sexy body and literally everyone in the military base stares at her until she says "what are you looking at?" then everyone starts moving again. I counted into the double digits of extremely tone-deaf music references, which MOST FRUSTRATINGLY were sometimes diagetic, sometimes non-diagetic.
Diagetic sound is something that happens inside of the movie, like a character starting a jukebox song and acting thematically appropriate to the music that is supposed to be playing. Non-diagetic sound is stuff only the audience can hear. A montage is usually only accompanied by non-diagetic sound, since it would be weird to have elements of your life played out set to one specific soundtrack. Suicide Squad cuts back and forth between those kinds of sound, a bizarre blend of a soundtrack that tries to have everything at once, and nothing. It's clear the stupidass executives got Ayers initial cut and decided it was too weird and violent and bizarre to market as a family-friendly celebration of supervillains and cut it to fucking pieces, using Guardians as a framework, and failed fucking miserably.
Some asshole tried to clap when the credits started. And fuck that guy. I don't like being a theater asshole, but you don't clap for this shit. When the stupid neon colored credits start for Suicide Squad you let out a huge sigh, check your popcorn bag, and get ready for the retarded mid-credits scene where Batman blackmails Viola Davis into giving him information of Justice League members that he already has, as evidenced by Lew Luthor's files that he then emailed to Wonder Woman.
Apparently I really, really hated Suicide Squad. I remember having an opinion when it was first announced of "oh maybe it won't be terrible, i should give it a chance". Fuck that. And fuck me. Fuck you too if you liked this, i don't know who could have but why not let's have a discussion of why. I want to know why people like absolute trash unironically, while refusing to admit it's bad. At least i'm man enough to admit I love the ninja turtles and have ninja turtles-themed birthday parties while accepting they're garbage, what's your problem?
