"Suicide Squad" is another DC Comics misfire

A.k.a, Hot Topic: The Movie

 Suicide Squad is a movie that belongs in the future.

It's not that we humble residents of 2016 were unprepared for it. Rather, Warner Bros and DC Comics, so eager -- as they were in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice last March -- to catch up to Marvel's successful Cinematic Universe, have given us a movie that required at least two movies to set up, instead of the zero it got.

In some alternative reality*, that's what we would have gotten. To differentiate itself from Marvel from the get-go, DC would have given us a villain-centric movie showing how the Joker (played in Suicide Squad by notorious method actor Jared Leto as a pimp doing a bad impression of Heath Ledger's Joker) turned straitlaced psychiatrist Harleen Quinzel into Harley Quinn (a character whom the talented Margot Robbie unfortunately wastes in her first-ever big screen portrayal by playing her as the crazed prostitute/stripper whom Pimp Joker keeps for himself), his psychotic sidekick, the sadistic Bonnie to his masochistic Clyde.

I miss the animated version.

Then, a separate movie would have shown the origin of Will Smith as hit-man-for-hire Floyd Lawton/Deadshot, which Smith--still oozing charisma after decades in entertainment--would have sold by credibly balancing Lawton's heartless killer with the pathos of caring for a young daughter. Use those two movies casually to introduce a couple of other side characters who become important later--as Marvel has done in its movies--and then Suicide Squad might have been something to look forward to, with a reasonable expectation of narrative payoff.

This is not what we got with Suicide Squad. Directed and written by David Ayer, who cut his teeth on gritty fare (writer of Training Day, director of End of Watch, Street Kings, and Fury), Suicide Squad is almost hamstrung from the start by an excess of exposition, either via flashbacks or straight-up monologues. Most of the monologues come from Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, playing Waller as a sociopath for some reason), who heads up a mysterious agency that deals with the "metahuman" threats that have escalated since the appearance of Superman in Man of Steel. Waller unsympathetically guides viewers through introductions to our principal cast - introductions that, again, would not have been necessary with some prior setup.

But that problem is endemic of WB's entire desperate, catch-up approach to the DC cinematic universe - or , to be more charitable, baked-in. If one accepts this flaw as a given, might Suicide Squad be a good movie after all?

Sadly, no. There is some good in the movie, though most of it comes in the form of Will Smith as Deadshot. Smith remains one of the best movie stars still working, and one of the few worthy of the term. Though Deadshot is part of the large cast of powerful bad-guys (also including LOST alumnus** Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as the human-crocodile hybrid Killer Croc, among others) assembled/coerced by Amanda Waller (and good guy soldier Rick Flagg, played by Joel Kinnaman) to take on even worse threats while keeping the government's hands clean, the script smartly establishes him early as its de facto leader and spokesperson.*** Jai Courtney, whose career up to this point has mostly consisted of hiding his native Australian accent to play faux-American action heroes (e.g., A Good To Day Die Hard), clearly has fun - and is enjoyable - playing Captain Boomerang, an Australian whose superpowers mostly seem to involve being a jerk, but is otherwise completely useless. Jay Hernandez plays El Diablo, a pyrokinetic-turned-pacificist who alone of the characters in the movie has something of an arc. Oh, there's also less awkward, forced DC-world-building than there was in Batman v. Superman****. And that's about all the good I can say about Suicide Squad.

As Deadshot, Will Smith continues his pretty consistent record of being one of the better parts of whatever he's in.

Were I a kind critic, I would simply stop there and tell you not to see the movie. But I write these reviews as much to get these thoughts out of my own head as I do to get them into the heads of others. Thus, I am duty-bound to reaffirm my disappointment with Suicide Squad's treatments of Harley Quinn, the Joker (he doesn't really belong in the movie, and I think I could have done a better job with the role, as I soon hope to show the world), Amanda Waller, and just about everyone other than the three performances I singled out above. I am duty-bound to reiterate Suicide Squad's excess of exposition, and to emphasize its lack of plot consistency or logic (the antagonists faced by the Squad in the movie's climax are massively powerful, but display physical weaknesses or tactical failures completely inconsistent with their supposed omnipotence), and to castigate its bizarrely nihilistic tone and faux-gritty aesthetic.

Above all, I am duty-bound to stress Suicide Squad's incredible lack of novelty. For something sold for months in advance as new, fresh, and weird, it is, with some exceptions, none of those things. An action-scene confined to an elevator was better in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A confrontation by sarcastic protagonists with a scary god set against a lightshow was better in Ghostbusters (the first one). A slow-motion climax involving a shot fired at a key moment and a separation of a powerful being from what powers it was better in Guardians of the Galaxy (which Suicide Squad, in so many ways -- especially a use of rock music mood-sitting so insistent and forced as to be ineffective, and therefore representative of the movie's overall failure to show instead of tell and to get audience buy-in -- desperately wants to be). And an all-powerful villain shooting a light into the sky, seeking world domination/destruction, while employing an army of faceless baddies*****, has been done to death, but done better in many places. I did detect some novelty in Suicide Squad******, but probably noticed it more because of its rarity. 

But back to the future. Will DC get its act together? Wonder Woman does look promising. It's possible that Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad are inevitable early missteps, the product of a universe still trying to figure itself. out. Or it's possible that the DC Cinematic Universe gets smothered in a contrived, dark, violent, largely humorless, Zack Snyder-ized aesthetic. The future will answer that question. Meanwhile, we here in the present are stuck with Suicide Squad.

All things considered, I would have rather had a full-length movie about the Suicide Squad from Monty Python's Life of Brian.

*I'm also a fan of the approach critic Sonny Bunch outlines of making Amanda Waller the movie's "Slugworth," lurking mysteriously in the background of the capture of each member of the Suicide Squad, only to reveal herself as the orchestrator of it all when she outlines the group's purpose.
**He also had a role in Thor: The Dark World as Algrim the Strong/Kurse, making him one of the most prominent actors with roles in both a DC movie and a Marvel one.
*** Smith's natural talent would have made that happen anyway even if the script hadn't.
****But Batman, Bruce Wayne, and the Flash do all show up.
*****Though the slight body horror was a nice touch, but that may just be because I find body horror so unsettling.
******SPOILERS: El Diablo becomes...something rather unexpected, and Harley and the Joker become something...normal.