Suicide Squad (2016)
Directed by David Ayer
From DC Comics comes the Suicide Squad, an antihero team of incarcerated supervillains who act as deniable assets for the United States government, undertaking high-risk black ops missions in exchange for commuted prison sentences.
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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.”
While that idea doesn’t make a lick of sense — especially since the U.S. wouldn’t be facing a meta-human threat if overzealous federal agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) hadn’t unlocked these bad guys to form Task Force X in the first place — implausibility alone doesn’t make it any less enticing to imagine how a director of David Ayer ’s caliber might pluck nine of the most ill-behaved characters from the DC stable for an intense spandex-clad, super-powered spin on “The Dirty Dozen.”
Instead of an irreverent, wisecracking version of “The Dirty Dozen” or “The Magnificent Seven,” you get a chaotic CGI/special effects jamboree whose only aim is to take down (not unlike the equally disappointing “X-Men: Apocalypse” ) two ancient underworld spirits pissed off they’re no longer considered gods by mankind.
Imagine “The Dirty Dozen” with super-villains.
It begins as a DC Comics version of “The Dirty Dozen,” slips into “X-Men” territory with talk of “meta-humans,” and ends up feeling like a dress rehearsal for future installments.
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.
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.
(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.”
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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.
Joe Johnston’s aw-shucks homage to adventure serials and American can-do, The Rocketeer , invoked the mafia-Navy story a quarter century ago.
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In Superman, Christopher Reeve made us believe a man could fly; in Suicide Squad, Davis will remind you that bureaucrats sometimes just do things to stay busy.
Unfortunately, the assortment of bad guys is almost laughable reminding one of the misfit heroes in the almost successful 1999 film “Mystery Men,” but without the self-deprecating comedy.