Squad Goals

The Bush-era MySpace VFX are obviously trash, of course — but underneath them, as little as I ever expected to be typing anything positive about it, Suicide Squad is a fun, high-compression ensemble thriller with a pulpy, 90s-Batman charm. It’s like Escape from New York meets a charmingly soundstage-y Power Rangers dungeon crawl, with more substance than anyone would have any reason to expect. I…had a blast?

First, the cons, mostly technical and cultural: the visual effects really are godawful; the Joker/Harley “origin” scene in a vat of…hot water?…chicken broth?…is extra ugly and literally makes no sense; we get a decent amount of action-standard racism and sexism; there’s a bizarre amount of casual ableism re: Harley; and, yeah, it kinda fetishizes the abusive Joker/Harley relationship.

But as a piece of narrative, it walks an odd line between the cartoonishly heightened and the unexpectedly honest. There are legitimate character arcs that feel sincere; this might actually be the best Will Smith role I can remember.

There’s even a valid politics contained within. It rejects Marvel’s built-in jingoism, depicting an exploitative military-prison-industrial complex — the movie’s only real villain. It actually consistently underscores a statement about how lowered expectations and criminalization push individuals down bad roads.

There’s even a race element? The entire intro/origin given for Croc is literally just, “He looked like a monster, so they treated him like one, so he became one.” Which matters to the prisoner narrative because, although it took me the whole movie to realize: Croc is literally a black man. Who’s just, you know…also a Croc. For all we know, he was born this way and treated by society like a “killer” from the start. That’s a very 2016 comment.

None of the “bad guys” are actually “evil.” Harley is an abuse survivor looking for a sense of safety; Deadshot is just trying to get by and provide for his daughter with the skills that he has; Diablo is a reborn pacifist living with guilt and shame; Croc just wants to be left alone to relax and watch BET. Even Joker, who is definitely portrayed as a violent manipulator and willful career criminal, is shown to have the slightest hint of a conscience when it comes to, uh, torturing his boo.

It’s honestly sad how badly the press for this movie mis-sold it. And yes, I did honestly enjoy Leto’s Joker. It’s not quite the butch, 2xXtReMe Juggalo stuff the movie’s own press suggested (even if all the PR does make Jared Leto sound like an annoying, self-absorbed joke). In fact, I think they pulled the correct play: run away from the grimdark Heath Ledger expectations by harking back to the old, “fancy,” organized-crimey Joker of the older comics and the 90s TV/movie franchises.

One last angle is that, after Ayer’s snoozefest Fury, I assumed this “trailerized” recut (look it up) must be superior to his, but now I wonder just how quiet and bleak his cut must have been. I can’t tell if the MySpace aesthetics came from him or the recut team — and that is a huge blow to the credibility of whoever ran with it — but I’d really like to see how dark this would play without all the fun music montages.

It’s ultimately a pretty sad film about pretty sad characters with exceptional gifts who get exploited by the powerful and receive nearly nothing in return. How 2016 is that?