Finally watched Suicide Squad. It goes to show licensed music and a saturated colorful presentation doesn't fix a bad movie.

I like watching good and bad movies. As with most folks on this sub, I also like discussing the good and the bad.

I knew Suicide Squad wasn't a well received movie, and so I kind of put it on the back burner. Upon initial release it just looked like it was "trying too hard". I can't say exactly when a film or piece of media crosses that line into too hard territory, but it just did. The Joker design was probably what did it. I was super excited at first too, because ensemble casts with a bunch of villians sounded really fun.

Anyway, I never saw it, and when James Gunn got announced to write and possibly direct a sequel, I figured I'd finally watch it. I really like Gunn, and like many other Redditors, I was fucking pissed about Disney dropping him.

So I don't know if I'll give a short summary, because to be honest, the movie is such a mess, yet has an extremely basic plot. Basically the beginning of the film goes over the cast of villians at the "black site", but misses fleshing out a few characters for the sake of doing it later, or just deems some unimportant.

I enjoy some of the goofy nature the film takes, but the characters still aren't convincing, even in a fantasy sense. You want a squad of villians to fight your battles. Okay, that's fine. That being said, they don't get trained to communicate, they don't have the proper equipment, and half of them don't even have real powers.

Captain Boomerang is literally useless, and Harley Quinn is no better. So they have extraordinary fighting skills? That's about it. Flag, the soldier leading the team literally says he can get a better group of fighters, and sadly he's not wrong. Deadshot, Croc, and Diablo are the only ones with applicable skills or powers. That doesn't even cover the piss poor characterization these guys have either. Which I'll cover in a moment.

Let me first go over the plot. As much of an incoherent mess the editing is, it's a stupidly simple plot. The squad gets deployed on a rescue mission. That rescue mission turns into them just going after the main villian. The villian is just a rogue squad member who has some really run of the mill device she's building to destroy the world. It's so fucking cut and paste from a dozen other films. She is just there to move the poorly executed idea along.

So back to these characters, because it bounces off of the thin plot. Most of these villians get better characterization in their Saturday morning cartoon appearances, but I digress. The villian, or Witch character is Flag's girlfriend. So of course Flag wants to save her. Flag realizes he was being used to control her, and quits being the squad leader, frees the suicide squad members of their forced service, but then volunteerily asks for their help.

That's all his characterization is. We know he's not a totally bad guy. We know he took orders for a while and thus did some shady shit. We know he also had a love affair with a villians alter ego.

Deadshot is basically the second most useful character in the film, and played by Will Smith. We all like Will Smith. I love seeing him in anything. That being said, Will plays this character like Will Smith. It just doesn't work. I don't remember Deadshot being a funny character, and he tries to be written and cast as one. I at least like his motives to do good, but the dialogue and portrayal by Smith just doesn't do it for me.

Harley Quinn is absolutely useless as a villian in this particular situation, and is purely thrown in for fan service. Her portrayal is actually pretty good. I think she's the most loyal, despite her odd hooker outfit and tattoos. I'll have a long rant later about doing "edgy" wrong, but her design is a prime example. They even tease her in her Animated Series outfit. She serves little to no purpose to the plot, but she gets an origin crammed in between a bunch of scenes.

Captain Boomerang is also a useless villian in this story, but I admittedly really liked his redesign and portrayal. That being said, I need to mention the stupid pink unicorn he had. That is another example of trying way too hard to be edgy. Like haha we get it, he's a greedy murdering thief, but he's got a wierd soft side. It just doesn't work, and is one of many examples to come.

Diablo was an okay character. He was definitely a third rate villian, but it worked. He even got some background flashback characterization at least, but it was fragmented towards later in the film

Killer Croc is one of my favorite villians in Batman's roster, but here he's kind of really meh in this. He's just kind of there with a few lines of funny dialogue. He doesn't have any moments to dive into his character, so he's basically is a plot device for certain parts of the film.

We lastly have Joker. I really wanted to see his portrayal in this film, and my god do I not like it. I didn't like the design, the dialogue, or even his behavior. I like the idea of joker being more of a criminal and less an anarchist. He is very "Saturday morning cartoon" in this film, which is cool, because he feels like he is from the Animated Series. That being siad, his design and behavior doesn't resonate that. Joker doesn't seem intelligent, scheming, insane, and powerful. He just seems like a crazy idiot who manages to run a few crime circles. He really doesn't seem like he would be taken seriously by Batman, because I barely could take him seriously. It wasn't just the design, as I could get passed that. It was more or less the acting too. Jared Leto is not scary. The last two on screen portrayals of Joker are at least kind of scary or intimidating. Jack Nicholson is scary even without makeup haha.

So there's a few other characters in the film that I really don't care about. There's a squad member who random gets killed as a humorous example, and then the main government woman who organizes the squad. She's basically a selfish nutcase with a twisted desire to protect the world.

Basically that's the characters, but let me just kind of breka down the filming and editing, and why I don't think it worked. The plot is very thin, yet the editing chops this film up into a mess of scene changes and flashbacks. It really isn't necessarily hard to follow, it just isn't good. It's really in poor editing taste. The stuff attempted may work in a comic book panel, but a film doesn't do it.

The filming isn't any better. Every shot or scene is either a CGI mess, cut apart, or so uncreatively captured, it's not worth mentioning. The ending fight is such a garbage incoherent mess. There is CGI and After Effects overlays covering everything. It looks like a slap dash peice of garbage to be honest. I haven't seen a film this poorly executed in a while. The Predator, which just came out, had some bad cuts, but at least it stayed coherent.

The film doesn't do anything visually innovative. With that, it feels like a very corporatey film studio kind of film if that makes sense. It kind of reminded me of the Bay Transformers.

That kind of brings me to my last kind of wrap up rant. Thanks for sticking by me for so long. So on top of all of that hot garbage of a very mediocre film, they drop SO much fucking music in this, it's not even funny. What's even more sad, is that NONE of it works. None of the music is charming or fits the scenes. It's like if I threw a pirated mp3 track over one of my film projects in high school. They have overplayed classic rock, mediocre modern hip hop, and a slew of everything in between, including a track from Guardians of the Galaxy. It's like they wanted to appeal to every generic tasteless movie goer at once, because they were too afraid to set a tone.

This is where I want to wrap this. You cannot be a wannabe James Gunn, Dead Pool, Tarantino corporate slap dash Hollywood film. You can't try to bank off of the work of others, do it poorly, and expect it to work. You can't bill top actors, and expect gold.

Gunn seemed to have really cared about his films. Those music tracks worked, because Gunn carefully made them work. Gunns cast of misfit heros worked because Gunn and his production team cared enough to make it work.

Dead Pool was an obvious passion project for fans by fellow comic fans, and had the benefit of being allowed to be goofy and edgy. Dead Pool is those qualities Suicide Squad wanted to be personified.

I throw Tarantino in there just because he is the master of timed licensed music, weird ass cuts, and great characterization through dialogue. Tarantino breaks the rules, but makes a film flow beautifully.

Suicide Squad felt like a slapped together corporate clone of a lot of superhero and non superhero films put together to score well with a test audience. Sadly, it completely back fired. It is shallow, poorly constructed, and poorly executed. I am so glad I didn't pay for a rental of this mediocre film.

Can Gunn turn Squad 2 into the next Guardians? Is there enough passion in that paycheck to get the ball rolling? I don't know. We'll have to wait and see.

Thanks for reading my rant/review. I'll proof read it later and fix my sausage finger late night induced gibberish.

Submitted October 18, 2018 at 03:10PM by hippymule https://ift.tt/2OtpRm2