Suicide Squad: Five Things We Hated About It

DERIVATIVES

There have been a handful of reviews that have called Suicide Squad one of the worst superhero movies ever made and -- likely because of how recent it is and so how fresh in memory -- many of those used phrases along the lines of "Worse than Fantastic Four."

I don't think that's even close to true -- but you know what I wasn't quite as exhausted by in Guardians as I was here?

The freaking black hole in the sky surrounding by swirling debris and lightning.

We've seen it in Marvel's The Avengers. We've seen it in Fant4stic. We've seen it on The Flash. We've seen it in X-Men: Apocalypse. We saw a version of it in Man of Steel. And on. And on. And on.

Hell, this is a trope that's been used at least as far back as Ghostbusters (1984), and so of course we saw something pretty similar in that recent reboot as well.

Let's retire the swirling doom vortex for a while, shall we? We'll touch on another aspect of why this didn't work in Suicide Squad down the line, but...no more black holes. Is that so much to ask?!

Also: for a movie that's all about the bad guys, that's filled with dark and damaged characters, the idea that when the vortex closes Midway City just appears to return to normal, with most of the damage undone, feels like a cop-out. It worked in Ghostbusters because that was a fairly low-stakes comedy, but in a movie that shares the world with Man of Steel, it feels weird that Ayer made the choice that a supervillain team that wages war on a god would have less collateral damage than Superman's origin story.

And while we're on things that feel like they were borrowed from one too many other movies, this soundtrack...didn't quite work.

The most jarring was when they used "Spirit in the Sky," which was actually freaking used in Guardians of the Galaxy. It's hard to counter the message that the black comedy, upbeat soundtrack, garish color palette, and irreverent promotional campaign aren't piggybacking on Guardians (and to a lesser extent Deadpool) when you actually use one of the same songs.

DIRECTION/EDITING

The talented, experienced cast of Suicide Squad all had nothing but the highest praise for filmmaker David Ayer, which gave us the impression that we were in the market for a movie that was as focused and intense as Fury or End of Watch.

What we got was a movie with a lackluster villain, plodding pacing, and editing that was frankly baffling.

It felt -- as a filmmaker friend of mine pointed out after we watched it together -- as though they had just lined up the best take for each scene end to end and then rendered the movie, without any thought to transitions between scenes or narrative flow.

There was some criticism of the first act of Batman v Superman -- that all of the various establishing story threads jumped around and were so tenuously connected so much that it almost felt like you were watching a number of unrelated vignettes -- and Suicide Squad feels that way (not confusing or unrelated, but jumpy and random) for much of the film.

By the same token, the action sequences here were pretty unspectacular. Part of that was a function of, essentially, the way the movie was shot. Given the fact that the antagonists were essentially zombies and that the protagonists were bad guys, there should have been plenty of opportunities for the Squad to tee off on the Eyes of the Adversary. Instead, most of the action was muddy, perhaps a function of trying to give time to each member of the team, but ultimately the whole affair was a bit underwhelming. Compare it to something like The Avengers or Batman v Superman, where splitting the "team" up made the final battle seem less like a scrum and more like a series of sparring matches, and you see how simply they could have addressed this.

THE VILLAIN

Even among bad reviews for Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, most reviewers were mostly kind to the villains.

Michael Shannon's Zod was compelling, menacing, and a number of his footsoldiers -- especially Antje Traue's Faora -- were equally interesting. Lex Luthor was polarizing, but he was given plenty to do and a wide range of emotion, which was played well by Jesse Eisenberg. Even Doomsday -- rage and violence embodied, so not a particularly layered creature -- was genuinely terrifying, even if not everyone was on board with his look.

That runs counter to the Marvel Studios movies, where critics often point out that everything works...except the bad guys. Even in the best of the Marvel films, characters like Ronan the Accuser and Alexander Pierce have been pretty consistently criticized as being dull, monochromatic characters that have little in the way of real motivation and even less character development.

With Suicide Squad, though, Incubus feels...kind of just like he's there to give the team something to hit. He speaks in grunts and doesn't even get an onscreen name, to my knowledge. Yeah, you can argue that the real mastermind -- and certainly the one who does all the talking -- is Enchantress, but even she's barely interesting. The most compelling part of her story is the way June struggles to deal with her other half and keep The Enchantress under control...but that's basically forgotten as soon as The Enchantress manages to "let herself out."

You also have the larger issue -- and this is a script issue that isn't necessarily "the villain," but it certainly relates to the Enchantress/Incubus pairing -- that a team of largely street-level supervillains probably didn't need to face a world-ending threat in their first story.

Don't get me wrong: on one hand, I kind of love the idea that DC introduced magic, and by extension took these characters way out of their comfort zones. It offers the possibility of a lot of interesting storytelling, some great character moments, etc. And we even got payoff on some of that.

But much like the sky vortex thing, the ever-present threat of the end of the world is starting to feel like something we've seen too many times. Many of the best superhero movies -- from The Dark Knight to Deadpool -- have had smaller-scale, more personal stakes. The best parts of Suicide Squad from a character point of view came when Deadshot spent time with his daughter or Harley was grieving the apparent loss of The Joker. Those were things that could have happened even if the threat they were facing was something more localized.

This is a flaw that we've seen in Arrow recently, as well, and one that the creators have hinted they're looking to fix for Season Five. So maybe with a little luck, we'll start to see a few more movies and TV shows where the threat is less one-size-fits-all and more tailored to the (anti-)heroes.

THE CG

Another thing about that bad guy? He just didn't look that good.

There was actually quite a bit that didn't look like it was fully-finished CG in this movie. Incubus's face was a great concept -- I liked the idea of actually being able to see the human inside of him instead of turning him fully into an armored, glowing monster -- but it felt like it was just pasted on.

Similarly, when we see the sky vortex start to open up, that first image of the tear in reality is....strange. I get that Enchantress keeps referring to it as a "machine," and so they were going for a kind of clockwork/gear design blended with a kind of Lovecraftian tentacle monster-style horror.

It failed to get that techno-organic feel, though, and instead felt like one of Green Lantern's hard-light constructs from the Ryan Reynolds movie -- not a favorable comparison to draw in 2016.

What's ironic is that Ayer feels like the kind of filmmaker who's a bit more at home with practical effects, and many of those looked great. While the magic in the movie was a bit iffy on the effects side, I thought that the items "grazed" by magic and transformed into some kind of weird organic crystal thing looked really cool. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of that.

THE JOKER

I wasn't one of those people who was particularly bothered by Jared Leto's tattooed, punk-rock Joker. Each new cinematic interpretation of the Clown Prince of Crime has been a boots-up reinvention anyway so introducing a new one didn't seem like a bit deal.

As the movie got closer and we started hearing more and more about Ayer's take on the character, I became more skeptical. It sounded like The Joker had been reinvented as a fairly stock take on an organized crime figure. High fashion, stone cold, etc.

And that's not an entirely fair assessment of the movie, but here's the problem with Suicide Squad's take on The Joker: There was either too much of him, or too little, and I really can't tell which.

Jared Leto has said that a lot of his material was cut, and it seems as though The Joker had a much more clearly-defined journey in the script. Could that have helped a bit? Probably. If it were me, I would have gone the other way and had him be a phantasm, spoken about but generally not seen, until the third act. Imagine how much more intense his entrance would have been if we hadn't actually seen him outside of Harley's flashbacks until he showed up in the helicopter.

Either way, Suicide Squad gave us a lot more on what makes The Joker tick than on what makes him special -- and that's the exact opposite of what has been working in the comics for years. One of the things that makes The Joker work is the sense of mystery that surrounds him, and if we're seeing things from his perspective more than we're seeing others' perspective ON him, I think we're heading down the wrong road.