Losing Their Nerve

Suicide Squad picks up where BvS left off with Superman dead and Amanda Waller (brilliantly portrayed by Viola Davis) is trying to sell the idea of Task Force X to the joint chiefs of staff. It should be said that unlike BvS the movie does actually hold together far better plot wise. It also must be emphaised that all the major actors are doing either very good or great work here. There’s no epic misfires like Jesse Eisenbergs Lex Luthor in this movie. We are introduced to the Squad in a series of flashbacks and these are actually where the movie starts to look really promising. Deadshot (Will Smith reminding is all that he is the most charismatic screen actor of the last 25 years) is captured by Batman. Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) is shown becoming Harley via the machinations of Jared Leto’s Joker (of whom more later). Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney in really good performance shocker) is captured by Ezra Millers Flash. All of these are delivered really well, the actors nail their roles near perfectly and you’re thinking that this is going to be a game changing comic book movie. Then they go on the mission and all the promise vanishes. The problems come not in the acting or technical execution but in how the story is structured and in the dialogue. Dave Ayer has spoken about how he took inspiration from Robert Aldrich’s Dirty Dozen for this. On this evidence though he should have watched it more closely. Aldrich’s film is a carefully constructed piece with three clear acts and an arc for the characters. Lee Marvins Major Reissman brings them together, they fail, can’t work together in the first act, become a team by facing off with Robert Ryans snooty Colonel and by the time the third act begins the audience are engaged with the dozen. Therefore when Donald Sutherland dies you feel it, you want Jim Brown to escape and you’re gutted when John Cassavettes Franco is killed. Aldrich spends two thirds of the film building the characters and dynamics between them, that’s what makes the final action sequence so tense. Ayer only spends 1/3 of the film doing that before pitching the squad into fighting literally faceless bad guys in Midway City. The action is all competently handled and the film itself is well edited, it sounds great (something that can go wrong all too easily) and the CGI largely works. So what you have is a competently put together action action movie with a bit of character development. That the early part of the film is so good with regard to character set up begs the question of what changed during the reshoots and what Ayers directors cut looks like given how much character development he puts into Fury. The problem of the lack of character development is really exposes whenever Leto’s Joker and Robbies Harley Quinn. The two of them together work phenomenally well and whenever they’re on screen the film feels much more alive. Leto deserves great credit for creating a compelling Joker which stands apart from both Nicholson and Ledger but draws some verbal tics from Mark Hammil. Making him a new money gangster actually works in the films favour as it draws a clear distinction between Ledgers anarcho-nihilist version and Nicholson’s Caesar Romero impression. Despite the success of the Joker and Harley together though it ends up creating more problems for the film. The B story of their meeting and her transformation into Harley Quinn is much more compelling than the A story of the squad fighting anonymous hordes of creatures. The frustrating thing here is that the film continues to shy away from the building of the team dynamics in favour of completely bland action sequences. If you’re going to do this then at the very least make the action sequences memorable. A movie crammed with action is no bad thing in and of itself as the Bourne movies (for instance) are pretty thin plot wise but they changed the action genre fundamentally when Paul Greengrass took over because of the way the action and fight sequences were constructed. Unfortunately Ayer delivers the worst of both worlds a lot of shoot outs and fight scenes but neither with the adrenaline fuelled quality of Greengrass movies nor the OTT CGI madness of the Avengers films. What we end up with is competently directed, middle of the road action picture with several great moments in it. This does not live up to the potential shown early in the film though. Ayer insists that the final cut is his and not the studios but it looks like another case of DC/WB asking for something then flinching when the director delivered it. In BvS this led to the disastrously edited theatrical cut in Suicide Squad it’s led to a blanding down of what should have been a fascinating addition to comic book movie making. Let’s hope that having Jeff Johns at the helm leads to improvements in the way DC tells their stories and actually has faith in it’s directors. Alternatively they could do worse than learn from Marvel who give their directors very specific instructions as to where the story has to go to fit in with the wider universe. At the moment DC are doing neither and the lack of vision is telling.