Suicide Squad

Nice things first: The marketing campaign for this film was brilliant. The trailers were fun and punchy, but the real star were the fantastic illustrated posters. It’s very rare to get illustrated posters these days and these looked amazing.

1.5 / 5 Bones

Directed By: David Ayer

Written By: David Ayer

In Theaters: August 4, 2016 

Studio: DC Pictures, Warner Brothers

My brother used to rewatch movies constantly. I don’t remember what umpteenth time it was when Peter Pan flew across my screen that I started to hate him. I don’t remember how old I was when I started hoping that the movie would end differently just once, and maybe, this time, Captain Hook would win. Maybe just this once, he could get what he so desperately wanted.

But every time, the film ended the same way: Captain Hook running across the water to escape a salivating crocodile with a speed that surely would’ve impressed Big J himself. So ended most of the Disney films. Watch them on repeat enough, and maybe, like me, you’ll start to feel that itch. The urge to rebel against the gears of the story, the formula assuming you’d cheer for the character they’ve decided is dull enough to be the protagonist - after all, you have to like them - they’re the good guys. They’re going to win. And you, dear audience -  you like winners.

Only...most people don't feel like winners. Sometimes we can kid ourselves into thinking we are the protagonists of our stories, maybe sometimes we can even trick ourselves into thinking all of space and time came together just so our story could unfold. At the end of the day, though… it can feel as if the person writing your script doesn’t feel the same way. Maybe that's why, as a fallible kid, I related to the constant failures and character flaws only villains seemed to share with me.

This is relatable to me for some reason. 

Disney villains are an iconic lot and some of my favourite characters. But it’s not just the incredible designs, the earworm theme music, the irrepressible marketing machine that keeps them on a t-shirt near you - I truly believe that the confines of a Disney movie make for some of the best villains of all time, although its conventions keep them from being truly great.

The limitations of a children’s film lend them quiet, unspoken tragedy - we know from the beginning that it’s impossible for them to win. Their struggles will always be in vain, their death, comeuppance, their failure a destiny they cannot outwit. Yet in many Disney films, villains are the driving action -  the heroes merely reaction. Cruella deVil wants that coat and kidnaps puppies that need rescue, Maleficent curses a baby and the race is on to prevent it, Scar orchestrates his brother’s death to take the throne and the rightful king must be restored. They’re often the most active characters, and because they’re not bound to be the moral spewers of the story, they’re freer than the other cast members, able to do wicked things, be the butt of a joke, have a defined personality. But they are going to lose. They will most likely die alone, probably from a long fall, optional lava or vultures at the bottom. To like the Disney villain requires a certain amount of masochism.

Superhero comics are a lot like Disney movies. For the same reasons, they’ve also made some of the most iconic and memorable baddies of all time. But in comics, there is a chance to tell the story again, to reimagine, to reset, to revisit. Making the Suicide Squad is beyond a good idea - it’s a necessary movie, and this was a great time to make it. Right when people (i.e. Mostly me I guess) are starting to hate superheroes.

But, lo and behold… the tape starts, the tape ends, and Captain Hook is still being chased by a ticking crocodile. Maybe this time the crocodile is a crocodile man and the ticking is a bomb and not a clock, but the story is the essentially the same.

“We’re bad guys….it’s what we do!” preens Harley Quinn at one point. I wanted to shout at the screen: “By all means...start being bad guys!”

Because this was not a movie about the bad guys.

This was a movie about anti-heroes.

This film doesn’t get villains. It doesn’t get why people like villains. It doesn’t understand how to villain, let alone villain well. This movie should’ve been about comic book villains - you know, the BAD GUYS, doing the stuff we love bad guys doing. Wearing garish outfits, bringing some flair, some pomposity, the BIGNESS of them, the caricature of humanity, stealing the show, surprising you, giving an awful grin or disturbing laugh, disrupting the day, and then maybe, for an instant, a crack where you can see the person behind the persona. Maybe it’s a formerly good person driven to madness. Maybe it’s madness itself, darkness inside darkness. Comic book villains have got this down to a T.

This movie, on the other hand, is filled with bedraggled, dour sourpusses. Occasionally there’s a flash of colour, a pink unicorn stuffed into a coat or a pigtail dyed neon blue. Most of the cast look like someone is eating their puppy in front of them. Only Harley Quinn seems to be enjoying watching her puppy being eaten in front of her. And even she is missing...something. I want to say ‘dignity’, but that’s not it. She’d be the best character, but she’s missing a page somewhere. She’s half amazing character, half playboy fantasy, and when the fantasy takes over, she turns into action figure gyrating for fans instead of someone I want to rebel with. Being sexy isn’t rebellious anymore, by the by. Controversy is wearing too many clothes these days.

Villains are mysterious - often you never discover their pasts, or their futures. That helps make them unpredictable and keeps you curious, eager to know more about them. This film either gives you enigmas with nothing to go on or excite - i.e. Killer Croc or Katana - or else gives you everything, and everything turns out to be pretty dull - i.e. Dead Shot, Rick Flag, The Enchantress. Suicide Squad gave us predictable sob stories. It gave us straightforward answers. It denied imagination.

But there's one aspect the film got right - Villains are lonely.

Villains are challengers to social norms, they operate outside mundane life and behaviour. Often they watch normal from the fringes, and even when invited to join...find that who they are prevents them from ever truly connecting.

Meet the Robinsons is a movie I can never have the same opinion twice about, but one scene has always stood tall.  At the end of the film, Lewis wants to offer Bowler Hat Guy (the villain) a chance to be a part of his family, to give him some of the happiness and companionship BHG always wanted. But even after making amends with Lewis and seeing the error of his ways, BHG can’t accept being happy. Being unhappy has been his driving force for so long. Unlike Lewis, he doesn’t know how to move forward - the best he can manage is away.

The last you see of BHG is his abandoned To-Do List.

Pretty simple scene, but the quiet animation and uncertainty rang true here. It’s one of the quieter send-offs I’ve seen for a bad guy - a moment of reflection and honesty. What next? What for? What if?

This movie attempts to have that and succeeds to some extent. Each character really does feel isolated and self-involved and unable to move past events or people. But their tragedies are not quiet. They are delivered via Wikipedia summary & bullet-pointed. There’s no between the lines, no quiet moments. They never overcome their loneliness. The squad never becomes a team. They don’t have their Avengers moment where they pull together, they don’t have their little moments where they find the human slivers in one another. There're attempts made, most notably the bar scene. But it all rings hollow. Everything is said and not meant, inflicted and not felt.

Villains are “Trickster”. The trickster figure in mythology is often the agent of chaos and the instigator of the story. They play the comedic relief, the tragic hero, the evil menace and the rebellious child simultaneously. See ‘Anansi’, ‘Prometheus’, ‘Coyote’, ‘Crow’, ’Loki’, ‘Reynard’. They are chaos, they are giant toddlers loose in New York, they are a monkey wrench in the workings of the banal. They get the hirsute Thunder God to cross-dress as his mother, steal fire from the sun, and usually get burnt and mocked for their trouble. It’s a crime that this group of supposed villains instead find themselves in such a mundane plot. They’re called in to stop a groovy goddess using a magic machine and her crew of mutant Gushers henchmen to destroy the world. It’s not a plot tailored to them as characters or as bad guys. It's overdone and dull and not suited to characters who are supposed to shake up the status quo. It's not even suited to the characters in terms of ability or personality.

This is exactly what the zombie henchmen look like.

At least I laughed a lot when remembering these horrifying commercials.

Why does a crazy woman with a hammer stand a better chance than a trained SWAT officer or an actual superhero with powers? Why does the Enchantress think doing the Electric Slide is a character trait? Why did you call villains to do a hero’s job when there are so many jobs that need a villain?

In truth, only one character truly stands out - the real, honest-to-badness villain of the piece.

Viola Davis’ ‘Amanda Waller’ has everything a villain needs. She’s mysterious, focused, driven, charismatic, cunning, frightening, but still with flashes of humanity. The film positions her as the villain of villains - seemingly thinking that in order to make us like the right bad guys, it needs to make a badder guy for us to root against. That was a mistake, because she’s far better at piquing that villain appeal and just makes the main cast look like amateurs.

This woman both terrifies and inspires me. The only thing worth salvaging from the DC Universe thusfar.

What they needed was an unconventional story that required villains to step up as the main characters, or else just tell a conventional story from the POV of the bad guys. We want to like the bad guys - we’re rebellious. We always secretly have. You don’t have to make them sheep in wolves’ clothing. I always cheered for the Big Bad Wolf, too.

Other Notes

This ended up being mostly about my love of villains. That’s because Suicide Squad was pretty boring to watch and write about. I can talk about my love of baddies all day though.

So, in honour of how it presented its characters, here are my other notes on the film.

• Someone take away the editor’s iPod. He seems to have accidentally recorded an entire playlist over the film.
• The posters were really refreshing compared to the dull photoshopped closeups we get these days. I hope we get more iconic marketing designs like this in future. Also, it matches my website colour scheme freakishly well.
• The film, unlike the posters and trailers, is pretty dull and washed-out looking in terms of colour and lighting.
• The editing is hard to follow. There’s not a lot of effort put into making sure a line of vision is put into the shot sequence. I often got lost and didn’t know where to look. I suspect this was re-edited many times until the original flow was lost.
• Jared Leto was fine in my humble opinion.  His screentime was equivalent to Hannibal Lector’s in Silence of the Lambs, so he got plenty enough to make an impression. That said, he would have been a more interesting adversary for the film than the ditchwater bellydancer we got.
• The flip-hand reveal of the Enchantress was one of the best and most creative introductions I’ve seen in a long while.
• I watched Meet the Robinsons again as research for this and rediscovered my love for Bowler Hat Guy. I just love the classic villain design and overly silly sinisterness. He’s the most GIFable character I’ve seen in a long while.

He makes me feel the feels and laugh the laughs Suicide Squad could not.

His movements are a master class in animation. Oh, how I love those sinister fingers. And those yellowed piano teeth. Disney, please give us more over the top villainous characters. I miss this.