David Ayer
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The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
influenced Suicide Squad (2016), Fury (2014)
Characters Plot Themes
The rest of the cast, though, makes less of an impression — an intense Michael Pena, an insane Jon Bernthal (who seems to be channeling John Cassavetes from "The Dirty Dozen") and Shia LeBeouf as a Bible-quoting Southerner who always seems to be shedding a single tear, perhaps because he just realized he's Shia LeBeouf.
Although many commentators will no doubt immediately compare the new WW II epic "Fury" to Quentin Tarantino's brilliant "Inglourious Basterds," largely because both films star Brad Pitt as a heavily-scarred, drawling Army man leading his men in a quest to kill as many Nazis as possible, it is actually closer in tone to a straightforward and un-ironic guys-on-a-mission tale along the lines of " The Dirty Dozen " or "Where Eagles Dare," with a heavy dollop of gruesome bloodletting depicting the true horrors of armed conflict that have been de rigueur for the war movie genre in the wake of " Saving Private Ryan ."
Wardaddy is a tough veteran with scars all over his body — as in many of his movies, Pitt takes the opportunity to display his physique — whose comrades-in-arms resemble the usual bunch of misfits seen in most Hollywood WWII movies since The Dirty Dozen.
In the most obvious ways, “Fury” reaches back to the rousing, band-of-brothers tradition of ‘60s and ‘70s war movies like “The Big Red One” or “The Dirty Dozen,” but it also reflects, more than a little, the post-Vietnam shadow that fell across later films like “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket.”
Which is faintly idiotic, as this is pretty much “The Dirty Dozen” with superpowers — we have very literally seen this movie before.
Based on a DC comic from 1959, this “Suicide Squad” is in effect a superhero remake of the great Robert Aldrich classic 1967 World War II film “The Dirty Dozen.”
The Platoon parallels are the most obvious, right down to the final shot, while an early scene depicting a recent battlefield was reminiscent of everything from Patton to The Big Red One.
It’s also, intentionally I think, a nod to Samuel Fuller’s war-movie milestone The Big Red One, which similarly placed an anachronistic equine amidst the red-misted fog of war.
He’s trying for the grit and grandeur and surprise of latter-day American war films — Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Inglourious Basterds.
Much of Fury hangs on Pitt, and he carries the load dutifully, though Wardaddy’s dicy blend of blood-lusting avenger and reflective soul never fully marry, which is true of much of Ayer’s vision; it never quite registers the true organic essence of men in war the way “alternative” WW II gems like The Big Red One and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron do.
“Fury” is more like Sam Fuller’s personal war memoir, “The Big Red One” — straightforward, less poetic, an action film with a hint of humanity and history that is fast receding from view.
(This movie also looks like it smells really bad.) Adopting the rambling, anecdotal structure of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, Fury works best when it’s a shapeless chronicle of surreal, day-to-day horrors.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Fury (2014)
Visuals Characters Themes
This gory, big-budget World War II movie by writer-director David Ayer (End of Watch) recalls Saving Private Ryan in its assured craftsmanship and underlying hypocrisy.
The newcomer is an almost comical sight beside the hardened animals played convincingly by Michael Peña, Shia LaBeouf and Jon Bernthal, and he'll doubtless remind many of the reluctant translator (Jeremy Davies) in Saving Private Ryan.
At its core, the World War II film is an action epic that recalls Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” without living up to that film’s noble greatness.
Pitt’s Don has echoes of the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan, shaky hand and mercurial back story and all, but he also has the immersive, holy war bloodlust of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
Written and directed by David Ayer, the tough but terrific “Fury” may remind moviegoers of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” another film that addressed the horrors of World War II.
That scene is nothing compared to some of the other violence on display (think “Saving Private Ryan”), but it’s worth noting that it never feels gratuitous.
Ayer’s story – the government unleashing a bunch of wily criminals on a busted up metropolis in a last ditch effort to save the world – is more than a little reminiscent of John Carpenter’s 1981 classic “Escape From New York.”
Ayer keeps the convicts in line by lifting the arterial micro-burst conceit direct from Escape from New York; failure to cooperate causes a tiny charge to detonate in their neck.
If the movie begins with a hardcore action premise along the lines of Escape From New York, it ends up resembling Ghostbusters, and that stuff falls out of Ayer’s wheelhouse.
Ayer is clearly a big fan of The Dirty Dozen, Escape From New York and Ghostbusters, which sounds like a fun mix, but once the first couple of solid action set-pieces are done and dusted, the film’s engine dies.
And even when the team members are hustled into the field, their first assignment turns out to be a small-scale Escape From New York-style extraction that involves completely ignoring the monumental, world-threatening Ghostbusters-style supernatural event going on in the background.
In its construction, Suicide Squad is an Escape From New York -style action-adventure in which our antiheroes trek through Midway City in order to reach a secret destination whose importance has been kept secret by Flag.
Not unlike its DC counterpart the Suicide Squad…
Marvel is doing its best to alter its cinematic course by continuing its own "Suicide Squad"-esque entry with "Thunderbolts*."
Marvel finally assembles its own team of antiheroes, nearly a decade after DC's atrocious Suicide Squad…
There have already been comparisons to the Suicide Squad movies (including one in-movie quote)…
…making this lineup feel like Marvel’s answer to the Suicide Squad.
In other words, Marvel’s version of DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad.”
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Directed by James Gunn
influenced Suicide Squad (2016)
Themes Music Plot
It could have been the scrappy, colorful, irreverent bastard cousin to Zack Snyder's lumbering, sludgy Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ; it could have been a funny, nothing-at-stake joy like Guardians of the Galaxy , Ant-Man , and Deadpool were for the Marvel Universe.
It's stitched together by an endless jukebox of everything from "House of the Rising Sun" to K7's "Come Baby Come," a soundtrack gimmick taken straight from "Guardians of the Galaxy" (which more successfully gave the superhero movie new moves).
In following the misadventures of a group of super villains who are forced to work together to defeat a powerful enemy, “Suicide Squad” is actually trying to be fun, or at least it’s trying to find the mix of daring and cheekiness that made “ Deadpool ” and “ Guardians of the Galaxy ” such twisted delights.
“The House of the Rising Sun” or “Seven Nation Army”), the songs helping to ground these superfreaks in the world as we know it (while, less helpfully, also confirming suspicions that the movie is DC’s response to “Guardians of the Galaxy”).
Then again, Vin Diesel gave life his animated character in “Guardians of the Galaxy” by repeating “I am … Groot.”
It chases after the nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool” and the anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” but trips over its own feet.
Lacking the single-minded intensity of Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon , which did a cleaner job of trapping its audience inside a tank, this is still undeniably stirring stuff, buoyed by Steven Price’s boisterous score which builds toward an end-credits theme reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s demonic Ave Satani from The Omen .
In fact, the premise recalls the superior Lebanon (2009), which took place entirely inside the claustrophobic confines of a tank.
It's this part of the drama that most closely resembles Samuel Maoz's 2009 Israeli film Lebanon, which detailed what it's like for men to occupy a fetid, claustrophobic metal vault on wheels while being bombarded by hard-to-see foes.
There was more clammy tension in two minutes of Lebanon, the gripping 2009 film set entirely inside an Israeli tank, than there is in the whole of Fury.
Echoing Samuel Maoz’ Lebanon, Fury is a movie about a lone tank and the soldiers who man it.
Fury doesn’t come close to the achievement of those edifying cinematic ordeals, let alone to Samuel Maoz’s harrowing Israeli film Lebanon , which summoned a claustrophobic psychopathy by setting virtually all its action inside an Israeli tank.
The claustrophobic tank setting brings to mind such notable submarine dramas as Das Boot and Run Silent, Run Deep, right down to the inhabitants' frayed nerves and constant bickering.
What Wolfgang Petersen did for submarines in "Das Boot" more than 30 years ago, Ayer has done in a Sherman tank.
“Fury” may aspire to be the “Das Boot” of tank movies.
"Fury" is not a genre landmark like "Das Boot" or "Saving Private Ryan" — but its perspective is distinctive.
Fury is to tank warfare what Das Boot was to the dread of life on a German U-boat.
Odd as it sounds, Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods were loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s classic mystery “And Then There Were None.”
Patterned after Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None," Sabotage follows an elite DEA special ops team led by Arnold who start getting picked off one by one after their $10 million in stolen drug cartel money goes missing.
Sabotage makes the bold attempt of re-imagining Agatha Christie’s seminal murder mystery novel And Then There Were None as a modern crime-thriller about a DEA special forces team that attempts to rip off a cartel, only to find their stolen loot missing and big target on their backs.
(Or, to be more accurate, it originated as Ten Little Niggers, the 1939 Agatha Christie whodunit whose title was quickly changed to And Then There Were None.)
The plot lifts from Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," but neglects the mystery.
Once it gets into And Then There Were None territory, the movie stalls.
The Platoon parallels are the most obvious, right down to the final shot, while an early scene depicting a recent battlefield was reminiscent of everything from Patton to The Big Red One.
In a way, Fury and 1970's Patton could be considered companion pieces.
The Godfather (1972)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Tax Collector (2020)
Themes Characters Plot
But once the film continues past its first day and expands into a more tempered gangster epic akin to The Godfather, it begins to lose some of its luster as it proceeds to move both too fast and too slow.
Gangster movies and TV shows like “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos” made much of playing off the violence of its perpetrators with the seeming normality of their family lives.
Trying to channel his inner Francis Ford Coppola, circa ‘70s-era The Godfather (he can’t because he doesn’t have the talent, self-awareness, or insight), Ayer basically tries to turn David into a Michael Corleone stand-in, conflicted by the choices he’s made and even more conflicted when choices force him to make one compromise after another, eroding whatever soul he has left when we first meet him in The Tax Collector’s early scenes.
It’s basically a “Godfather” set-up—the old man goes down, and the young successor has to decide if they go to war—but this kind of narrative appropriation is never a good idea because it mostly just makes you want to watch “The Godfather.”
A Navy man himself, writer-director David Ayer smartly moves away from the feverish cop and urban crime dramas he's written and sometimes directed (Training Day, S.W.A.T., Dark Blue, Harsh Times, Street Kings, End of Watch) to channel his dramatic ferocity into a story of the Allies' final ground assault on the Third Reich.
David Ayer, who has written (and sometimes directed) several films about the L.A.P.D. (Training Day, End of Watch), smoothly transfers that set of skills to the war genre while focusing on the same themes of brotherhood, loyalty, and righteousness.
Writer-director David Ayer ("End of Watch," "Harsh Times," he wrote "Training Day") loves to get down to the ugly nitty-gritty in films, and here he absolutely rolls in the dirt.
That's everything you need to know to appreciate the obsessions Ayer eventually channeled into films such as Harsh Times, Street Kings, Training Day and End of Watch.
Writer-director Ayer specializes in tough, unsentimental movies about societies of violent men trying to live by unwritten codes of ethics, a theme that reappears in his scripts for U-571, Training Day, The Fast And The Furious, Dark Blue, Harsh Times, and End Of Watch.
David Ayer, the writer-director, has traversed similar territory before, but in a contemporary setting on America’s city streets, in his script for “Training Day” and in “End of Watch.”
Few cop dramas even try to equal Sidney Lumet’s classic Serpico, made in 1973 and still the leader of the pack as an exploration of police corruption.
It’s an interesting idea, and it certainly has some real-life precedent; Serpico (which is referenced during some dialog in this movie) is just one example.
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)
Directed by Cathy Yan
influenced by Suicide Squad (2016)
Characters
Following the events of 2016's Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey starts off with our favorite antihero Harley Quinn as she adjusts to life after breaking up with Gotham City's clown prince of crime, the Joker.
It certainly has generated its fair share of buzz, what with Margot Robbie returning to the role of the Clown Princess of Crime after being the only thing anybody liked from Suicide Squad , and with Yan taking the director’s chair on such a large project.
The last time audiences saw Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, she was being freed from Black Gate prison by The Joker (Jared Leto) in David Ayers’s Suicide Squad.
Directed by Cathy Yan and written by Christina Hodson, Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey picks up shortly after Suicide Squad wraps: When the Joker throws her out, a newly single Harley, no longer protected by her ex’s famous name (and infamous reputation) becomes the most hunted woman in Gotham.
An inevitability following the breakout success of Robbie’s Quinn in 2016’s “Suicide Squad,” this year’s first comic book film takes her supporting character and places her right in the middle of the action with “Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.”
But unlike its cinematic cousins “Wonder Woman” and “Suicide Squad,” “Aquaman” is akin to a trove of borrowed treasures instead of being its own thing.
Whatever the case, Aquaman falls into an uncomfortable try-hard dead zone that leaves it in better shape than, say, Batman v. Superman or Suicide Squad , but just shy of the gleefully anarchic predecessors whose ranks it could have joined, like Jupiter Ascending or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets .
The disastrous Justice League and the hodgepodge known as Suicide Squad ?
Sure, the critically panned but financially successful Suicide Squad was part of this interconnection, but it wasn’t until the almost universally admired Wonder Woman film in 2017 that people began to think that maybe DC had it figured out.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced Suicide Squad (2016)
Characters Themes
(Meanwhile, the Joker — who in this iteration is more a slick, flamboyant Mob boss than the deranged anarchist of The Dark Knight — is working to free Harley Quinn, a subplot we lose for vast stretches of time.)
While putting a slightly different spin on the maniacal villain, he's every bit as magnetic as Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight".
But Ayers doesn't do anything with that, political comment having drained away from comic book movies since The Dark Knight.
Ever since the critical and commercial success of “The Dark Knight” in 2008, DC has tried to replicate the epic intensity of Christopher Nolan’s film.
In Ayer's film, Jared Leto plays the Joker with the voice Heath Ledger cooked up back in "The Dark Knight," and a grill borrowed from Gangstas Anonymous.
— After months of online hype that threatened to bring the internet to its knees, Jared Leto’s Joker (while somewhat creepy and menacing) doesn’t come close to scraping the surface of the memorably spine-chilling work done by Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight.”
And when our anti-heroes storm the abandoned city to take down the Enchantress, Ayers reveals that he apparently managed to break into Ivan Reitman's shed and steal his awesome "Ghostbusters" special effects.
Taking a cue from its title, "Suicide Squad" self-destructs in a furiously frenzied, freakishly flat action film with an ending so reminiscent of "Ghostbusters" that Columbia Pictures should sue.
If the movie begins with a hardcore action premise along the lines of Escape From New York, it ends up resembling Ghostbusters, and that stuff falls out of Ayer’s wheelhouse.
And even when the team members are hustled into the field, their first assignment turns out to be a small-scale Escape From New York-style extraction that involves completely ignoring the monumental, world-threatening Ghostbusters-style supernatural event going on in the background.
Ayer is clearly a big fan of The Dirty Dozen, Escape From New York and Ghostbusters, which sounds like a fun mix, but once the first couple of solid action set-pieces are done and dusted, the film’s engine dies.
• Jared Leto as the Joker, who seems to be channeling Jim Carrey in The Mask.
Also, considering how much the advance press for Suicide Squad has focused on Leto, he appears in it far less than you might expect, though more than you’ll want once you see him strutting around like he took all his performance notes from Jim Carrey’s work in The Mask.
He plays Joker like a louche bad boy on PCP—Justin Bieber meets Jim Carrey in The Mask.
Leto seems to be channeling, consciously or otherwise, Richard Widmark in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death—that’s the one where Widmark’s truly creepy-evil character pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs.
When you combine this sensibility with the film’s hyperbolic visual style, the result turns into something like an episode of Dragnet that looks like the first five minutes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.