Movie Review: Suicide Squad.

DC have got a long way to go to catch up with Marvel when it comes to movies.
After the disastrous critical failure of Batman vs Superman, it's clear they needed to spruce things up a bit, and you really would have had to have been under a rock for the last couple months not to have seen the banners, billboards, tv spots, and multiple merchandising tie-ins to DC's latest ensemble the-bad-guys-are-the-good-guys action mash-up, Suicide Squad.

Who the main character really is in Suicide Squad, it's a little hard to say. We begin with the mind behind the whole idea, military officer Amanda Waller, a high ranking strategist who is selling her idea of an elite team of super-villains, to be used in the event of a superhuman terrorist threat. With the powers of the mysterious Enchantress under her thumb, she begins assembling her team, selecting the finest thieves and hit-men from the darkest cells of Belle Reve Supermax penitentiary.

Amanda's trump card, the incredibly powerful Enchantress, has an ulterior motive. That of the destruction of the human race, naturally, and when given a little too much leeway with her powers, soon seeks out the means to put her apocalyptic plans into action. When Enchantress and her demonic minions begin laying waste to a major American city, Task Force X, the titular Squad, are put into action under the command of hard edged soldier Rick Flag, not to save the day, but just to rescue a person of value from the equation and get out of there alive.

The set up and the swift devolution into anarchy leading up to the actual mission is a big chunk of the films run-time, and if there's a first place you could criticize Suicide Squad, it's the pacing. A little too much time spent here, not enough there, and then a sudden apocalyptic threat, doesn't go down so smooth. The ride to the films third act is bumpy to say the least. Fortunately, the characters that populate the film are where the majority of the fun to be found lies.

The best performance in the film, without much surprise, is of course Will Smith. He's Will Smith, playing Will Smith, and as always, it's great fun. He has a character arc, a snappy personality, scene after scene introducing his incredible skills and the force that drives him. He is of course the big star of the piece, so naturally a ton of screen time is going to be devoted to him, but it would have been nice to see more of the other enjoyable members of the group, like Captain Boomerang, who gets a laugh from the audience on the majority of his dialogue, or the great Killer Croc, both of whom we get next to nothing of by way of backstory. Some characters, like Kabuki and Slipknot, displayed prominently on posters and promotional material, barely make an impact on the film's events at all.

There are many fine performances among the multiple cast members, like Viola Davis as the stern faced Amanda Waller, the cold commanding military commander who organised the whole shindig. She's a great character, but needed a bit more variety to her scenes than stone faced dialogue, in my opinion. El Diablo, who takes the role of the heart of the team, is lovable, enjoyable to watch, and just plain kicks ass when he needs to. Rick Flag, the commander of the team, is a confusing character however, he's not at all badly acted, he's just not a likable character. Everyone knows the goody-goody 'soldier' among the dirty dozen is always the boring character you root to get killed. So why then was Flag such a huge part of the film? He gets more screen time than everyone but Smith's Deadshot, and his love affair with Enchantress is actually the film's main character based plot. He doesn't seem to be intended to be likable, and he's not particularly heroic, not even in the 'honor among thieves' way.

A film with an ensemble this big isn't without some obvious duds, of course, and Suicide Squad does have a few turds in the punch-bowl.

Harley Quinn is a character that people have waited YEARS to see on the big screen. She's one of the most significant comic characters of modern day, and possibly the most popular female DC character ever. The character we get here, is something of a disgrace. Almost every line Harley delivers is a flat joke, and she comes across as a dull imitation. Her accent is sporadic and uneven, her personality is unclear and undefined. She's referred to as crazy a half dozen times in her first scene, yet at no point in the movie acts remotely insane. In fact, we see her clearly change her attitude to give the appearance of being crazy to others more than once, giving the suggestion that the entire crazy thing is an act put on by a completely sane character.

Harley Quinn wasn't the worst character in the film however. The Razzie without a doubt goes to Enchantress, who I really don't think could have been worse.
A body swapping Goddess of the old world controlled by Amanda Waller, Enchantress delivers a frankly nonsensical performance as the film's main villain. The visual design we see on the movie posters, a green skinned, black haired hag, looks fantastic for the few scenes she's in, and blissfully keeps her mouth shut, but for the most part of the film she takes the form of an idiotically gyrating everyday white girl who looks like the Empress from The Neverending Story, delivering stilted dialogue in a dopey deep voice. A huge amount of plot development is devoted to the relationship Flag has with the 'real' girl trapped within Enchantress, but as an audience, it's impossible to connect with this relationship as we never meet that character. We see a few scenes of an awkward, gawky woman in big spectacles deliver a few lines, but we don't see the lovable character she's apparently meant to be, and that we should be rooting to escape Enchantresses control. A poor villain is an inexcusable error in a superhero film, and having a great antagonist for our Squad to battle against would have changed the dynamic of the entire film for the better.

Of course, they did have that antagonist there the whole time, which is frankly baffling. The character everyone wants to know about, the latest in a long line of performances that define the way a comic book villain can be played, The Joker.
Leto's performance is definitely not the character we know from the comics. He's a street smart gangster, obsessed with obscene displays of wealth and outrageous showmanship. We wouldn't see the comic book version of the character owning a high end strip club, wielding a gold plated pimp cane, and driving a purple chrome Lamborghini, but this is a new Joker, and he's king of the underworld. The few flashback glimpses we see of The Joker and Harley running things from their ivory tower, the criminal world operating in fear of them, are great to see, and there really is no excuse that this wasn't the plot of the film. Why have a character like the Joker, well known as the most popular comic book villain IN HISTORY and use him for less than ten minutes of screen time?

Suicide Squad is not a bad film.
It's extremely popular to hate it right now, and I think it's not getting fair treatment as a standalone film. It's being lumped into the fun-to-tear-apart DC cinematic universe.
Although it is full of references to the larger world around it, the glimpse of the Flash isn't really ham-fisted in for example, and the sporadic appearances of Batman are actually pretty cool. Although I fully expected it to be the case, I didn't feel that it's PG-13 rating severely castrated it either. There weren't any obvious scenes that felt distinctly hampered by the lack of an R rating. If an R rating had been the case, we might have seen more dynamic enemies than faceless, safe-to-slaughter blob people, however.

A bad film has wonky parts that fit together poorly into a displeasing whole.
Suicide Squad has the parts. They're there. The cinematography is great, the soundtrack is top tier, and some of the characters are tremendous fun. The parts just don't fit together all that well. Massive slow motion scenes slow down the great cinematography, the soundtrack is SO full of hits, they play ten seconds of a genre defining song before cutting it off to move to the next track, three or four times in the same scene. Why put these enjoyable characters in a story that doesn't fit them? With protagonists so full of life, why make the villain a goofy caricature devoid of personality with the poorest acting performance in the entire film?

It feels like Suicide Squad wasn't quite the main event, and that this was the sequel, or the spin off, even. They had a great villain, in the form of the Joker, and they put him in as many scenes as they could manage, so why not just make the film about him instead of the uninteresting, uninspired and frankly unenjoyable Enchantress?

Something could be done with Suicide Squad. Whether they are waiting for the home media release to re-edit it and force everyone to pay for it again, like they did with BvS, we'll see.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises

The man who taught me everything I know about making films told me there are two types of tension in any scene. First, we have two men sat at a table, and we know there's a bomb beneath it. We follow their conversation, just when we've just about forgotten about the bomb, it goes off. In the second type of tension, we have the same two men sat at the same table, only this time, we don't see the bomb... We just follow their conversation, and then the bomb goes off. If there was one thing I could choose to dislike about The Dark Knight Rises, it is the absolute lack of tension. We know there's a damn bomb from an hour into this three hour film, and at no point will we honestly be afraid that the fucker is going to go off anywhere near Gotham.
Lets backtrack. The Dark Knight Rises isn't a bad movie, not at all. It's gorgeously shot, epic in scale, cast of hundreds, beautifully scored... it isn't bad. But for the many expecting it to be the film of the year, it will be a disappointment.

The story continues eight years after Batman's fated battle with Two-Face, the result of which left him a shattered figure, hated by the public, and fallen into seclusion.  He hobbles about with a walking stick on his awfully injured leg that he can barely stand on, and generally acts like your standard neckbeard shut in, until the intrusion of Catwoman stealing his stuff prompts him to leave his home to track her down. Now Catwoman is handled well at first, I will say that. Hathaway wasn't a popular choice with many fans, but she's better than Halle Berry. The comparison is barely a grade above an insult of course. Hathaway tackles the character (At least for the first act) with a charm we haven't seen in the character before, acting the part of the screaming victim or the inquisitive but dull maid right up until the very second her target realizes they've been had, when suddenly she transforms into the confidant, sexy Selina Kyle we would expect... It's nice, it's fun, but it soon goes away. All too soon does the character degrade into the obvious love interest, and pulls a huge personality 180 in the third act to fall for our hero for no real reason. Catwoman is the shining example of the strong, self-confidant, self-sufficient female character, probably the only true example in all of DC comics in fact, to quote the observation of Miss Claw. Taking her and using her as little more than a character hook for Batman, as well as taking away her power as a strong female by her falling for him apparently because of his heroism, takes these wonderful aspects of the character and tosses them in the shitter. She deserved better. I'm a man to whom character is most important, and the Batman movies have always seemed to fail in this respect. We sit through long tedious speeches, every damn character having something to say, which they will at length, but in the end all that matters is the villainous plot, and characters will drop so much out of their our personalities they'd be unrecognizable if it weren't for the silly outfit.

The flirtatious back and forth between Bruce and Catwoman is adorable as expected, before the meat of the story comes into play, the big bad of the story, Bane. Now Bane is presented very differently than his comic book counterpart here, by the pretty massive Tom Hardy. He's one of the most entertaining characters in the whole film, visually threatening, interestingly designed, but from the very beginning I could not get over one thing about him...What the hell were they trying to do with Bane's voice? He sounds like someone in a gas mask doing an impression of your granddad. It's awkward and makes you giggle and removes a huge amount of the threat from otherwise brilliantly evil dialogue. A decision I will truly never understand. Bane on the whole was good, but I never got the feeling we really saw the character. He's restrained, he's mellow, he's controlled. Only for one scene do we see the character really let loose in his terrible rage, only one scene is he really Bane, and it's all over incredibly soon. Also, I can't help but see the humour in the mighty Bane's only true weakness being getting punched in the face.
Bane rolls onto the scene in a big way at about the hour and a half mark, when all shit goes to hell in Gotham. Batman is back on the case in moments, which was a little disappointing to me. He's been hobbling around on a shattered limb for eight years. This would have been a tremendously interesting development for Batman, a hero with a major physical weakness he must find out how to overcome and hide from his enemies. Yet in one quick scene, he has a brace fixed up that allows him to walk as well as ever and KICK THROUGH BRICK WALLS. The crippled leg is never mentioned again, even after the brace is removed... After a one on one fist fight with our man Bane, which was a damn good punch up in my opinion, Batman is put out of commission in the way comic fans will be familiar with, being quite rudely bent over Bane's knee and sent to an unidentified middle eastern country to rot in a nightmare prison. This was when the plot started to take off, but also started to come apart at the seams. Gotham is isolated into a military state under Bane's control with a massive controlled coup against the police force, and months pass by in a few short scenes. What's happening with the average guy on the street during this time? We have no real idea, as every scene is divided between Bane's militia army and the shattered remnants of Gotham's police force. The single night that The Joker took control of Gotham in 'The Dark Knight Returns' was more tense and exciting than the months that pass under Bane's rule, as we really don't see any of it here. Furthermore, almost a solid hour passes without much Batman at all. He's lying a prison cell with a broken spine of course (And apparently that's nothing a little peptalk with a creepy old guy in a third world prison hell won't fix just fine!), but so much time passes without Batman that we could forget about him. More time is spent following the antics of Gotham's newest supercop, Blake, played well by Joseph Gordon Levitt. Now he's played well, no complaints there, the character is just so damn hard to like. He's unrealistically perfect. He's a genius, he cares about nothing more than protecting 'the kids' and saving Gotham one man at a time. He figures out Batman's identity in moments, that no one else ever seems to, and he's a brilliant detective and fearless crimefighter to boot. A good hero is built by his flaws! This perfect cop is just too damn brilliant and nice to possibly be real. As I said, Levitt played it convincingly, he just got given a shitty character.

I will stress that the film isn't without its standout performances however, dodgy characters aside, you'll get the brilliance you expect to get from both Gary Oldman and Michael Caine. They're both on form for the characters we've come to know, they're passionate, and Michael Caine in particular acts Cristian Bale off the screen. He's a joy to watch. I also enjoyed the (all too brief!) cameo of Cillain Murphy as Scarecrow. He's a favourite of mine, and his short sequence is a great call back to his madness.
It falls to the end of the story to wrap things up in a rush, and it does so. Sure it's exciting, there's car chases and bike chases and tank battles and Batman's new helicopter/hoverjet doofer shooting missiles everywhere, but it's all action and no heart. The villains are set on the sidelines in favor of dealing with the bomb, and our main adversaries, Bane and the surprise villain that secretly masterminds him, (don't get too excited comic fans, it's not a character you'll be thrilled to see) are dispatched so quickly and off-hand that you expect they'll be coming back for that last good fight the film should've built its climax on. Sure, it all looks gorgeous, it's shot beautifully and clearly and Bane's men fight police officers in the streets of Gotham by the hundreds, but never once did I sit back and think 'wow' at what was unfolding before me. I hope plenty of people saw 'Sherlock Holmes: Game of shadows' last year, as there is a scene in that film that truly stunned me in its incredible visual action. I was in awe of it. You know the one I'm talking about. This is the sort of action scene that makes a movie stand out, shock and stun us with its brilliance. The only scene here that really is a great memorable moment is the implosion of the football stadium, but we saw it in the trailer a long time ago. I wanted more from the biggest movie of the summer...

A big disappointment for me personally, was the aspect of Bane's 'illness'. He wears a respirator/facemask, that appears to be somewhat uncomfortable and alters his breathing. He holds his chest in a certain way as if he has trouble breathing, and we know that the thing getting damaged causes him immense pain. What is it? What is his mystery affliction? Your guess is as good as mine, because we never find out. There's a brief mumbled excuse about an 'illness' in the prison sequence, but it's not detailed or at all interesting. For me this was the most intriguing part of the character, not to mention his standout physical characteristic, and for it never to be addressed felt like a cheat.   
The film ends with a mix of melancholy, and arguably bails out on itself a bit. Would it have been good to end the series with a define full stop? Probably not, he's Batman after all. It's a sound ending if it really is the end. Of course it's open enough to redo the whole damn thing if they choose too, but I honestly don't think we need another Batman movie after this one. The best part of a story should be its end, a grand finale to remember, not a mixed messaged grab bag of half unraveled storylines that may or may not have a future.