Suicide Squad
Suicide Squad was the DC live-action movie that I was more excited about. I mean, Batman vs Superman's whole concept is awesome as all hell. Batman fighting Superman? Founding of the Justice League? Wonder Woman? It's all great, but the trailers and whatnot don't seem to deliver that much of a good story though I certainly enjoyed myself with the simple novelty of seeing beloved characters bought to live on the big screen.
With Suicide Squad, though, it was a wholly different thing entirely. Putting aside my being pissed off at Warner Brothers taking the piss on the CW-DC-TV-verse by putting a clampdown on all characters remotely related to the Suicide Squad, it's a movie that I have been eager to see come to fruition. I honestly guessed from the cast and trailers that the plot's going to be lifted wholesale from the old cartoon-movie, Assault on Arkham, but that's okay. That's what adaptations do, right?
As it turns out, it was definitely a pleasant surprise that other than some broad strokes (Deadshot and Harley Quinn being the two main Squad members that get the most screentime; Captain Boomerang and a big tough animalistic villain being two prominent members of the team; one of the villains get blown up almost immediately; Batman and Joker being in it) the plot is more about the formation of the Squad itself.
See, a lot is riding on Suicide Squad's shoulders. After Batman versus Superman was panned almost universally by critics -- rightfully so, as I enjoyed myself watching the movie but acknowledge so much problems with its writing that not even an Extended Edition that restores a crapton of cut subplots can save it from being mediocre at best -- Suicide Squad was going to be that break that the DCEU movies needed, that awesome, light-hearted-yet-somewhat-dark movie to finally prove that DC coimcs can compete with Marvel comics' movies. Thus, in addition to competing with BvS and the whole pantheon of Marvel movies, Suicide Squad had to compete with a relatively well-received animated adaptation in the past, and that's not counting the comparisons that will be inevitably drawn between other live-action portrayals of Joker, Katana, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, etc. From how the reviews of this movies were, you'd think this was a total rehash of BvS, except with more jokes crammed in.
That's not exactly fair. This movie isn't a solid 9-out-of-10, but it's definitely a very fun movie, and not entirely the disaster that a lot of reviewers put it out to be.
I think there are three big problems with this movie that make its pacing feel so haphazard, and let me go through them all: pacing, plot and amount of characters. The pacing honestly felt very odd. The first twenty or thirty minutes of the episode was absolutely awesome, with catchy intro calling cards and a listing of random factoids of our heroes (well, villains) while showing them in their element, with Amanda Waller pressuring the government into forming her Task Force X, while going into wacky hijinks with recruiting the squad members. And honestly, any scene with the titular squad just interacting and just being douchebags is hilarious. But around after they got airdropped into the city, things just kind of went kind of downhill and predictable, turning the movie's climax into... well, I won't say that it's as bad as Doomsday from BvS, but it felt honestly kinda boring compared to how the tone of the movie.
Which, part of it, I think is the fault of the plot itself. Amanda Waller losing control of her most powerful metahuman, the Enchantress, and having her create Cthulhoid eye-faced minions out of Midway City's population and create a giant portal to a psychedelic dimension doesn't feel like it should be the plot of a Suicide Squad movie, whose whole point is to go where the government and superheroes cannot go, to do the government's dirty deeds and whatnot and be the blame-able, disposable patsies and scapegoats should they die. The 'scapegoat' bit was brought up a little, but here it just felt kinda off. Yeah, the Suicide Squad was sent in to rescue Amanda Waller from Midway City (the big twist is that it's Waller and not someone else) but the final threat ended up having the Squad face off against the world-eating abomination and blowing the two of them up with C4. Which is still an entertaining enough plot, but it just felt... off compared to the excellent introduction to the movie and the concept of the Suicide Squad itself. Assault on Arkham handles the plot beautifully by having the Squad face off against the Arkham guards and Batman, plus the Joker as a wild card on the other side, which felt like a more appropriate plotline for a disposable black ops team.
How could it have been improved? Well, maybe in the middle of the episode we could've seen the Squad actually operate in several short Black Ops missions. Actual assassinations and taking down metahumans or whatever, and cut out some of the useless 'fight against abominated humans' scenes. It would give the Squad some breathing room and make it more believable for them to develop a bond with each other and make Enchantress's betrayal and her constant 'join me, my comrades' speech more sensible. But I dunno.
The weirdest moment was when the squad has clearly said 'fuck it' and is drinking in that bar, and Rick Flag's shit excuse of a pep talk somehow managed to get the whole squad to go off and fight the Enchantress? Deadshot and his desire to meet his daughter, plus Harley being just that crazy, I can totally buy. And Katana's still a good guy, I suppose? But we get no explanation for why Killer Croc and Diablo end up tagging along, or why Captain Boomerang returns to the team after running away with the beer. A couple of 'yeah, I don't wanna get destroyed with the rest of the world' or something along those lines would've definitely helped out.
Also other than their introduction, they don't feel like villains other than Harley Quinn and maybe Captain Boomerang. A bunch of mercenaries press-ganged into serving the country, sure, but they don't really do much while part of the Squad to really justify the audience understanding why Waller would want them locked up again.
The third problem is the overload of the cast. Don't get me wrong, I loved how they plucked several B-listers and C-listers off the DC villain list and added some of the most obscure villains, one of which I have never heard of before despite being a gigantic DC geek since my childhood. But what they actually did with them... well... the movie, thankfully, wasn't quite the Will Smith and Margot Robbie show, although Deadshot and Harley Quinn do get the biggest roles out of the Squad they don't quite dominate the show and it still feels like a decent ensemble cast... with some of them, anyway. El Diablo (the villain I didn't know existed in the comics) is the breakout star for me, being absolutely awesome with a great personality and a tragic backstory, Waller got a lot of great, dark character moments, and Rick Flag had enough screen time on his part even though I don't care about him. Killer Croc being a brute is expected and I didn't mind, and honestly who expected Slipknot to survive longer than five seconds after being left out of Waller's initial intro? I knew who Slipknot is, he was a very shitty Firestorm villain whose super-skill was... tying a knot really fast. Firestorm is a walking nuclear reactor. Yeah. Slipknot, you shitty supervillain, you.
The biggest misses, I think, were Captain Boomerang and especially Katana. The Captain is built up to be some kind of the third-main Squad member after Deadshot and Harley, with Killer Croc being the quiet brutish muscle and Diablo being a technical pacifist. And Captain Boomerang does get a lot of screentime, and whenever he opens his mouth it's a hilariously-delivered line... but they don't do enough with him. They toned him down from his traditional portrayal as someone with a chronic backstabbing disorder so there isn't the Deadshot-vs-Boomerang rivalry that we see in Assault in Arkham, yet he's still an asshole and a coward, so he isn't a good team player like he is in some incarnations of him among the Rogues... so he ultimately felt very flat. Plus there isn't enough boomerang action scenes and he felt more like a knife nut more than anything.
Katana... I don't know why she's in the movie, honestly. She steals a couple of scenes to herself -- her introduction as Rick Flag's bodyguard and the promise that a (non-metahuman) superhero is going to be watching the Squad's back, and we get to learn a bit about her Soultaker Sword... yet she does absolutely nothing. She goes off with Deadshot and the other criminals to get a drink for no reason despite supposedly being one of the good guys, she has a random moment where she cries and talks to the spirit of her husband, but she's just a huge anomaly and even moreso than Captain Boomerang, because all throughout the movie she's just another fighter, and you can cut out all her scenes and nothing will be missing from the movie. At least with Captain Boomerang we have some fun dynamic between him and the other Squad members.
Anyway, though, despite all that rambling, I still enjoy this film. It's not going to be the best superhero film ever, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Personally the debate between the fans of the DC live action movies and Marvel live action movies are a bit silly. I think both sides could afford to take a step back from embracing their tones too wholeheartedly.
I like to go through movies by talking about characters one by one, so let's start with...
Deadshot! I honestly am worried that he's going to be a generic Will Smith character when I saw who they casted for him. I didn't mind the race lift, but I was worried that he'll be turned into a super-heroic character. And while there's definitely a bit more heroic tendencies than you'd expect from Deadshot, it didn't really detract that much. Deadshot's villain backstory (despite the whole 'I don't kill no women and children' thing) is shown in clear detail, how he's a paid mercenary who kills other people and swindles his clients. We get an honestly impressive show with him in the opening, and a rather sad moment as Batman swoops down while he's shopping with his daughter. And Deadshot's attachment to his daughter serves as a cliched but quite effective morality/motivation line throughout the movie. He's definitely the most heroic out of the villains in the Squad, but his constant butting of heads with Rick Flag is portrayed well, even if you end up definitely sympathizing with Deadshot after witnessing Waller's bullshit. His little code of honour among thieves, like refusing to shoot Harley Quinn (well, 'missing' the shot anyway) is pretty cool. I liked this portrayal of Deadshot, that's for sure.
Harley Quinn didn't quite steal the show as I expected she would, but it's definitely a great adaptation of the character. Part of me am a bit pissed off that we didn't have her running around in her original skin-tight jester costume, but I guess the ponytails-shirt-shorts combo is easier for her to move around in? It's nowhere as slutty as a lot of modern portrayals of Harley Quinn are, and for the most part Margot Robbie does deliver a great balance between cheeriness and disturbing psychopathy. Harley gets a couple of flashbacks throughout the movie showing her fucked-up relationship with the Joker (which is actually a bit less darker than the source material). I still think we're missing a scene where we learn just why Harley is so smitten with the Joker when she's working as a psychiatrist, but the flashbacks from the two meeting in Arkham Asylum, to Joker electrocuting Harley, to the moment when Joker got Harley to jump into a vat of ACE acid before eventually jumping in after her, to the sheer moment of joy the two have being the 'king and queen of Gotham', it's a more upbeat version of Harley Quinn's traditional story where she's a victim of domestic abuse and Stockholm Syndrome, because the movie's incarnation of Joker seem to actually care about Harley. Yeah, maybe it's partly driven by possessiveness, but it balances between the twisted nature of their relationship (the electroshock therapy in their earlier meetings) and actual love (Joker being absolutely depressed in the present day and simply hellbent on rescuing Harley).
But Mr. J himself isn't the single driving force between Harley's character arc, because while it's a fair chunk of plot during the second act of the movie, Harley still holds her own as she eventually accepts herself as being part of a team. Despite her big insane moments there are several bits of deeper character moments, like the uncharacteristic bursting of emotion during the bar where she unloads a lot of nasty words on Diablo and telling him to 'own up to your shit' and noting that 'normal' is not an option for them, ever. Which is very heartwrenching when Enchantress does her silly your-greatest-wish illusion thing and Harley's greatest wish is a normal married domestic life with a normal Joker. Harley's quite fun, and has a fair amount of badassery that I normally wouldn't associate with the character but I welcome wholeheartedly.
Let's talk about the Joker first before I move to the rest of the squad. Jared Leto's Joker is prominently featured in the trailers and it seemed that he would be the main antagonist... which he is not! It's really surprising. It's a very disturbing portrayal of Joker, leaning more on the psychopathic side compared to Heath Ledger's anarchy, but thankfully nowhere too over-the-top like how a lot of modern portrayals of the Joker are. Joker's a lot more scary than funny in this one, but it's definitely a fun portrayal of the Joker. He appears a lot in Harley's flashback, before we get to see a small sub-plot of him in the present day feverishly being depressed until he gets a lead on Harley's prison and starts to go and pull all the stops to hunt her down, eventually hijacking a helicopter and rescuing a very glad Harley. Of course, the helicopter containing the Joker gets hit by a blast from the Enchantress's weird magical portal thing and very awkwardly gets rid of the Joker and his henchmen in a huge explosion while Harley falls down... and I honestly am confused... the Joker's involvement in all this certainly could have been played out a little better. For his short amount of screentime, though, Joker definitely stole all the scenes he shows up in, quite naturally, and he shows up in the end to bust Harley Quinn out and presumably set the stage for the two being the big bads of the next Batman film.
I liked the Joker, but I honestly wished the trailers didn't focus nearly 50% of its screentime on the Joker and seemingly build him up as the Big Bad.
The rest of the squad... El Diablo has the best-looking tattoos ever, and he's definitely the most interesting of the squad, and he just might be my favourite among them. Despite his scary name and his fire-shooting powers (other than the rogue Enchantress, Diablo's technically the only one with actual superpowers in the team) when Rick Flag and Waller recruit Diablo for the team, he's a huge pacifist and refuses to fight, and this gets called out several times by the other members of the squad, leading to Deadshot antagonizing the dude at a point in the movie to have him unleash his flames and, yeah, the movie shows off just how absolutely devastating fire-controlling can be. Diablo's later story that reveals just why he wants to go on a road to redemption, how he thinks he's better off dead and whatnot, which resulted in him accidentally burning down his family in a fit of rage, is told very well. It's a bit cliche, of course, but between how he acts and interacts with the other members of the squad I end up caring for him quite a bit. He's the biggest gun that the Squad had in the confrontation between the Suicide Squad and Incubus, and holy shit, unleashing all his flames looked really awesome especially when he transforms into that giant Aztec Ghost Rider thing. Of course, poor Diablo gets to be the only character (Slipknot doesn't count) of the Squad that dies. Which is quite effective, honestly.
Killer Croc looks great, gets introduced in quite a fun way, and he's absolutely fun. A brute like Killer Croc doesn't need a lot of sob stories and backstories, he's just a big crocodile man that goes around ripping abominations apart. Killer Croc gets very little lines, but what little he got were hilarious as all hell. "I'm beautiful." "I like her." "Y'all are just tourists." "Cable." It would've been a bit too much to sneak in a fourth sob story about how Killer Croc is ostracized and driven into being an ultraviolent cannibal due to his skin condition, I think, though they could've easily put it in. I dunno. I just loved Killer Croc, always have had, and I'm so happy he didn't die. He felt like the obvious choice out of the main Squad to bite the dust.
Captain Boomerang, like I mentioned above, only really exists to be the resident douchebag. Harley's crazy, Deadshot wants to assert control, but Captain Boomerang is just a douchebag. They didn't get to do too much with him other than that moment where he seemingly bolted when the neck-bombs are deactivated, but ended up returning for no reason. The Captain proves to be honestly quite average in combat, especially compared to other 'normal but skilled' fighters like Deadshot, Harley and Katana. I dunno. I just felt like he's a missed opportunity.
I talked about Katana already, and Slipknot, poor poor Slipknot, is obviously going to be the random unimportant character that dies ever since the promotional materials revealed the lineup. So yeah, no surprise that he got blown up real good. .
Amanda Waller might not be morbidly obese, but she definitely channels the ruthlessness of her comic book counterpart. While at first she just seems like a more fanatical and severe military leader who wants to fight fire with fire, her demonstration of how she forces Enchantress to do her bidding -- stabbing her disembodied heart to make her obey -- using Rick Flag to gain the trust and love of Enchantress's human host, and threatening to basically put dr. Moon in a drug-induced coma if Rick Flag steps out of line... and, y'know, the whole 'form a team of super-criminals with bombs that will blow their heads off, and blame them for any destruction caused'. It gets even worse from then on, though, when it's revealed that the Squad's first mission is to go into Midway City, where the Enchantress is wreaking havoc, not to stop the threat, but to rescue her.
And the biggest point against her favour? Murdering the entire room filled with her subordinates dead just because they might have learned too much. Waller gets shot down by Enchantress halfway through the movie, gets kinda mind-raped, she gets off scot-free in the only way that Amanda Waller can, basically puts the entire Suicide Squad back under arrest and presumably still under her employ (the ending leaves this ambiguous)... though apparently, y'know, causing a witch to create a magical superweapon and destroy half a city put her in enough trouble to get her to seek help from one Bruce Wayne. That was a weird but fun little stinger with her forming an unholy alliance with the Bat himself, noting with no uncertain terms that she definitely knows of Bruce Wayne's secret nightly excursions.
Rick Flag, mr. soldier boy, is a character I loathed from the comics. He's a pretty generic soldier boy here, the good guy that exists to keep the Squad in line with the help of an Apple Watch that blows up their heads if they step out of line. The movie attempts to give him a bit of a character arc by having him end up disgusted with Waller's bullshit and sympathizing with Deadshot and the others, as well as the weird chemistry-less romance between him and June Moon, but ultimately Flag just felt really flat and more of a plot device than anything.
The main villain of the movie is the Enchantress, which isn't actually part of the Squad as initially advertised. She was supposed to be the first member, and we get a nice little backstory of this slightly-more-obscure DC character, where archaeologist June Moon accidentally unleashes an ancient creepy ghost-witch-spirit that possesses her, and causes her to transform into this absolutely creepy stringy-haired mud-covered glowy-eyed 6000-year-old witch with ambiguous teleportation and magical powers. The initial transformation in front of the bunch of military leaders is horrifying with Enchantress's hand sprouting out and flipping over, and prior to being transformed to her 'proper' form with that eyeball-crest-crown, she just felt like she walked out of a horror movie.
Unfortunately, though, we don't get to explore much about Enchantress's hatred against Amanda Waller for using her. Maybe if we had a couple of scenes showing Waller utilizing the Suicide Squad as an actual black ops team, and have the Enchantress hate being used as a weapon? But no, she's just this destructive demonic force that felt like a generic superhero villain dressed in a bikini, and right up until the end it's odd why the Enchantress felt such a need to toy around with Suicide Squad and attempt to make them her allies. Earlier in the movie we see her teleport, transform into smoke, use telekinetic powers, creating illusions, use her big magical weapon to lightning-bolt military bases and battleships into rubble, yet in the climax she spends half of it dancing in a ritual, before jumping in with two swords and just fighting in melee? She can teleport, but she can't stop the slo-mo bomb bag from being detonated in her weird magical weapon thing?
And of course we need a happy ending with the Enchantress demon dying and June Moon being freed. That felt kinda choppy, really, and I would rather have the climax be June Moon's persona briefly gaining control for the few seconds that the Squad needed to blow up her plot device.
Enchantress frees her brother, the even-lesser-known villain Incubus (who is the only character other than Diablo I'm not aware existed prior to this movie) who... is an oddly-designed CGI character that basically serves as a big brute in the fight against the Suicide Squad. He's got a couple of impressive scenes, and that scene where he just sprouts spiky metal tentacles and stabs the doctor and the security guard in the train station and just falls as a heap of writhing limbs into the train tracks is going to give me nightmares. Shame that his 'true' form looked hilariously bad.
Deadshot! I honestly am worried that he's going to be a generic Will Smith character when I saw who they casted for him. I didn't mind the race lift, but I was worried that he'll be turned into a super-heroic character. And while there's definitely a bit more heroic tendencies than you'd expect from Deadshot, it didn't really detract that much. Deadshot's villain backstory (despite the whole 'I don't kill no women and children' thing) is shown in clear detail, how he's a paid mercenary who kills other people and swindles his clients. We get an honestly impressive show with him in the opening, and a rather sad moment as Batman swoops down while he's shopping with his daughter. And Deadshot's attachment to his daughter serves as a cliched but quite effective morality/motivation line throughout the movie. He's definitely the most heroic out of the villains in the Squad, but his constant butting of heads with Rick Flag is portrayed well, even if you end up definitely sympathizing with Deadshot after witnessing Waller's bullshit. His little code of honour among thieves, like refusing to shoot Harley Quinn (well, 'missing' the shot anyway) is pretty cool. I liked this portrayal of Deadshot, that's for sure.
Harley Quinn didn't quite steal the show as I expected she would, but it's definitely a great adaptation of the character. Part of me am a bit pissed off that we didn't have her running around in her original skin-tight jester costume, but I guess the ponytails-shirt-shorts combo is easier for her to move around in? It's nowhere as slutty as a lot of modern portrayals of Harley Quinn are, and for the most part Margot Robbie does deliver a great balance between cheeriness and disturbing psychopathy. Harley gets a couple of flashbacks throughout the movie showing her fucked-up relationship with the Joker (which is actually a bit less darker than the source material). I still think we're missing a scene where we learn just why Harley is so smitten with the Joker when she's working as a psychiatrist, but the flashbacks from the two meeting in Arkham Asylum, to Joker electrocuting Harley, to the moment when Joker got Harley to jump into a vat of ACE acid before eventually jumping in after her, to the sheer moment of joy the two have being the 'king and queen of Gotham', it's a more upbeat version of Harley Quinn's traditional story where she's a victim of domestic abuse and Stockholm Syndrome, because the movie's incarnation of Joker seem to actually care about Harley. Yeah, maybe it's partly driven by possessiveness, but it balances between the twisted nature of their relationship (the electroshock therapy in their earlier meetings) and actual love (Joker being absolutely depressed in the present day and simply hellbent on rescuing Harley).
But Mr. J himself isn't the single driving force between Harley's character arc, because while it's a fair chunk of plot during the second act of the movie, Harley still holds her own as she eventually accepts herself as being part of a team. Despite her big insane moments there are several bits of deeper character moments, like the uncharacteristic bursting of emotion during the bar where she unloads a lot of nasty words on Diablo and telling him to 'own up to your shit' and noting that 'normal' is not an option for them, ever. Which is very heartwrenching when Enchantress does her silly your-greatest-wish illusion thing and Harley's greatest wish is a normal married domestic life with a normal Joker. Harley's quite fun, and has a fair amount of badassery that I normally wouldn't associate with the character but I welcome wholeheartedly.
Let's talk about the Joker first before I move to the rest of the squad. Jared Leto's Joker is prominently featured in the trailers and it seemed that he would be the main antagonist... which he is not! It's really surprising. It's a very disturbing portrayal of Joker, leaning more on the psychopathic side compared to Heath Ledger's anarchy, but thankfully nowhere too over-the-top like how a lot of modern portrayals of the Joker are. Joker's a lot more scary than funny in this one, but it's definitely a fun portrayal of the Joker. He appears a lot in Harley's flashback, before we get to see a small sub-plot of him in the present day feverishly being depressed until he gets a lead on Harley's prison and starts to go and pull all the stops to hunt her down, eventually hijacking a helicopter and rescuing a very glad Harley. Of course, the helicopter containing the Joker gets hit by a blast from the Enchantress's weird magical portal thing and very awkwardly gets rid of the Joker and his henchmen in a huge explosion while Harley falls down... and I honestly am confused... the Joker's involvement in all this certainly could have been played out a little better. For his short amount of screentime, though, Joker definitely stole all the scenes he shows up in, quite naturally, and he shows up in the end to bust Harley Quinn out and presumably set the stage for the two being the big bads of the next Batman film.
I liked the Joker, but I honestly wished the trailers didn't focus nearly 50% of its screentime on the Joker and seemingly build him up as the Big Bad.
The rest of the squad... El Diablo has the best-looking tattoos ever, and he's definitely the most interesting of the squad, and he just might be my favourite among them. Despite his scary name and his fire-shooting powers (other than the rogue Enchantress, Diablo's technically the only one with actual superpowers in the team) when Rick Flag and Waller recruit Diablo for the team, he's a huge pacifist and refuses to fight, and this gets called out several times by the other members of the squad, leading to Deadshot antagonizing the dude at a point in the movie to have him unleash his flames and, yeah, the movie shows off just how absolutely devastating fire-controlling can be. Diablo's later story that reveals just why he wants to go on a road to redemption, how he thinks he's better off dead and whatnot, which resulted in him accidentally burning down his family in a fit of rage, is told very well. It's a bit cliche, of course, but between how he acts and interacts with the other members of the squad I end up caring for him quite a bit. He's the biggest gun that the Squad had in the confrontation between the Suicide Squad and Incubus, and holy shit, unleashing all his flames looked really awesome especially when he transforms into that giant Aztec Ghost Rider thing. Of course, poor Diablo gets to be the only character (Slipknot doesn't count) of the Squad that dies. Which is quite effective, honestly.
Killer Croc looks great, gets introduced in quite a fun way, and he's absolutely fun. A brute like Killer Croc doesn't need a lot of sob stories and backstories, he's just a big crocodile man that goes around ripping abominations apart. Killer Croc gets very little lines, but what little he got were hilarious as all hell. "I'm beautiful." "I like her." "Y'all are just tourists." "Cable." It would've been a bit too much to sneak in a fourth sob story about how Killer Croc is ostracized and driven into being an ultraviolent cannibal due to his skin condition, I think, though they could've easily put it in. I dunno. I just loved Killer Croc, always have had, and I'm so happy he didn't die. He felt like the obvious choice out of the main Squad to bite the dust.
Captain Boomerang, like I mentioned above, only really exists to be the resident douchebag. Harley's crazy, Deadshot wants to assert control, but Captain Boomerang is just a douchebag. They didn't get to do too much with him other than that moment where he seemingly bolted when the neck-bombs are deactivated, but ended up returning for no reason. The Captain proves to be honestly quite average in combat, especially compared to other 'normal but skilled' fighters like Deadshot, Harley and Katana. I dunno. I just felt like he's a missed opportunity.
I talked about Katana already, and Slipknot, poor poor Slipknot, is obviously going to be the random unimportant character that dies ever since the promotional materials revealed the lineup. So yeah, no surprise that he got blown up real good. .
Amanda Waller might not be morbidly obese, but she definitely channels the ruthlessness of her comic book counterpart. While at first she just seems like a more fanatical and severe military leader who wants to fight fire with fire, her demonstration of how she forces Enchantress to do her bidding -- stabbing her disembodied heart to make her obey -- using Rick Flag to gain the trust and love of Enchantress's human host, and threatening to basically put dr. Moon in a drug-induced coma if Rick Flag steps out of line... and, y'know, the whole 'form a team of super-criminals with bombs that will blow their heads off, and blame them for any destruction caused'. It gets even worse from then on, though, when it's revealed that the Squad's first mission is to go into Midway City, where the Enchantress is wreaking havoc, not to stop the threat, but to rescue her.
And the biggest point against her favour? Murdering the entire room filled with her subordinates dead just because they might have learned too much. Waller gets shot down by Enchantress halfway through the movie, gets kinda mind-raped, she gets off scot-free in the only way that Amanda Waller can, basically puts the entire Suicide Squad back under arrest and presumably still under her employ (the ending leaves this ambiguous)... though apparently, y'know, causing a witch to create a magical superweapon and destroy half a city put her in enough trouble to get her to seek help from one Bruce Wayne. That was a weird but fun little stinger with her forming an unholy alliance with the Bat himself, noting with no uncertain terms that she definitely knows of Bruce Wayne's secret nightly excursions.
Rick Flag, mr. soldier boy, is a character I loathed from the comics. He's a pretty generic soldier boy here, the good guy that exists to keep the Squad in line with the help of an Apple Watch that blows up their heads if they step out of line. The movie attempts to give him a bit of a character arc by having him end up disgusted with Waller's bullshit and sympathizing with Deadshot and the others, as well as the weird chemistry-less romance between him and June Moon, but ultimately Flag just felt really flat and more of a plot device than anything.
The main villain of the movie is the Enchantress, which isn't actually part of the Squad as initially advertised. She was supposed to be the first member, and we get a nice little backstory of this slightly-more-obscure DC character, where archaeologist June Moon accidentally unleashes an ancient creepy ghost-witch-spirit that possesses her, and causes her to transform into this absolutely creepy stringy-haired mud-covered glowy-eyed 6000-year-old witch with ambiguous teleportation and magical powers. The initial transformation in front of the bunch of military leaders is horrifying with Enchantress's hand sprouting out and flipping over, and prior to being transformed to her 'proper' form with that eyeball-crest-crown, she just felt like she walked out of a horror movie.
Unfortunately, though, we don't get to explore much about Enchantress's hatred against Amanda Waller for using her. Maybe if we had a couple of scenes showing Waller utilizing the Suicide Squad as an actual black ops team, and have the Enchantress hate being used as a weapon? But no, she's just this destructive demonic force that felt like a generic superhero villain dressed in a bikini, and right up until the end it's odd why the Enchantress felt such a need to toy around with Suicide Squad and attempt to make them her allies. Earlier in the movie we see her teleport, transform into smoke, use telekinetic powers, creating illusions, use her big magical weapon to lightning-bolt military bases and battleships into rubble, yet in the climax she spends half of it dancing in a ritual, before jumping in with two swords and just fighting in melee? She can teleport, but she can't stop the slo-mo bomb bag from being detonated in her weird magical weapon thing?
And of course we need a happy ending with the Enchantress demon dying and June Moon being freed. That felt kinda choppy, really, and I would rather have the climax be June Moon's persona briefly gaining control for the few seconds that the Squad needed to blow up her plot device.
Enchantress frees her brother, the even-lesser-known villain Incubus (who is the only character other than Diablo I'm not aware existed prior to this movie) who... is an oddly-designed CGI character that basically serves as a big brute in the fight against the Suicide Squad. He's got a couple of impressive scenes, and that scene where he just sprouts spiky metal tentacles and stabs the doctor and the security guard in the train station and just falls as a heap of writhing limbs into the train tracks is going to give me nightmares. Shame that his 'true' form looked hilariously bad.
Oh, and Batman and, surprisingly enough, the Flash, make short appearances! Batman is just this figure in the background that apprehended both Deadshot and Harley Quinn (and is briefly mentioned in Croc's backstory), and we get a cool little car race scene between Batman and Joker. The movie definitely remedies some of the criticism leveled against the merrily-murdering-criminals Batman from BvS, showing him to be compassionate enough to not beat Deadshot to a pulp in front of his own daughter, and immediately diving into the water to fish out Harley Quinn instead of leaving her to drown. Flash gets a short cameo in full costume one-shotting Captain Boomerang in his intro.
Overall? I enjoyed myself in the movie though the third act definitely suffers a lot. The movie definitely had a great cast, but some pacing and plot revisions would've elevated this movie from the 6-7/10 range into the 8's and 9's. And giving Katana and Captain Boomerang something to do, plus using a less flat villain than the Enchantress, definitely would've made them a hell lot more relevant.
But I enjoyed it. It's not great, but it's good fun and better than BvS, that's for sure.
But I enjoyed it. It's not great, but it's good fun and better than BvS, that's for sure.
DC Easter Egg Corner:
I'll try not to list all the origins of the supervillains and concepts and stick to the Easter eggs for this one, or we'll be here all week.- Deadshot's suit-and-hat getup that he was using while out in town with his daughter before Batman arrests him was actually Deadshot's original look in his very first Silver Age appearance, before his second one gave him the look we're familiar with now.
- Harley Quinn's original jester costume from Batman: the Animated Series make several appearances, first in a flashback where she's dancing with the Joker in it (a homage to a famous Alex Ross cover) and second as part of the equipment that was brought out for them. Her mallet, which is her signature weapon in the cartoon and several other adaptations, was briefly picked up and waved around as well. Her "Mister J" and "Puddin" catchphrases also make a return from TAS.
- Midway City is traditionally the hometown of the superheroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl.
- The ACE Chemicals building is seen several times in the movie, and during her flashback Joker gets Harley to jump into a vat of ACE chemical acid. While not mentioned anywhere in the movie, being dropped into a vat of ACE chemicals is what bleached the Joker's skin and hair in his traditional origin story. The scene where Harley freefalls down into a pool of the goo is inspired by a scene in the New 52 rebooted comics, Joker pushed Harley into a vat of ACE chemicals to bleach her skin. New 52 Joker isn't nice enough to jump in afterwards or give Harley any sort of say in the matter, unlike this movie's Joker.
- Captain Boomerang fooling Slipknot into escaping just to test out whether the bombs are real is lifted from the original Suicide Squad run where Boomer did exactly the same thing, though Slipknot loses an arm in the comic instead of his head.
- Joker's henchman, Jonny Frost, as well as Harley Quinn posing as a stripper in a bar and causing the death of one of Joker's lieutenant after the Clown Prince of Crime is broken out of jail, are references to the dark one-shot graphic novel Joker.
- Harley Quinn's intro card has the text 'accomplice in the murder of Robin', which references how Joker murdered the second Robin, Jason Todd. Not sure which Robin gets killed in the DC movie universe, but we did see Robin's costume in the batcave in Batman vs Superman.
- In addition to Batman and Flash's short appearances in the movie, in the dossier that Waller gives to Bruce Wayne we get a brief glimpse of Aquaman.
- Waller's speech about Superman tearing off the roof of the White House is probably a reference to Superman II, where it was General Zod who did that exact thing.
- The John F. Ostrander building where the Squad goes to rescue Waller is a reference to the author who revamped the Suicide Squad into a black ops team of unwilling villains ran by Waller.
- Actor Ted Whittall, who played Rick Flag in Smallville, shows up as a cameo as a random military dude during Amanda Waller's presentation.
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