It has been well established by now by every review out there - whether positive or negative (and I’ve seen plenty of both) - that Suicide Squad is a mess. Personally, I had fun with it, but the issues are far too jarring for me to recommend it, or argue with anyone who thought it was utter dog-shit.
The issues are glaring from the off, with the film opening with not one, but two scenes of Amanda Waller explaining her plan to a room of military officials; with the first interspersed with a few quick character bios almost as clumsy and forced as Batman’s Justice League email in BvS. The trailer featured a line from Rick Flag describing the characters - “Shoots people; burns people; eats people… Crazy person” - that does a far better job of establishing the characters than the opening ten minutes of the actual film.
This clumsiness is prevalent throughout film, with poorly placed and repetitive flashbacks, nonsensical character beats there purely for the sake of plot movement, lazy exposition, terrible pacing...and so on (it’s like a bad Arrow episode).
The list of problems is long and, as I said, already well-established, but I’d like to highlight one in particular. It’s something I’ve previously mentioned, that I’ve been concerned about since the film was first announced, and a prime example of which we saw in BvS: Who are these people?
Way back in the days when The Dark Knight had just been released, and Marvel’s Avengers experiment was just starting to come together, Warner Bros. announced they would be making a Justice League movie: not kicking off a Justice League cinematic universe - establishing the characters and the world they inhabit - but jumping straight in with Justice League, complete with new versions of all your favourite characters.
It was a terrible idea, and it wasn’t long before internet backlash seemingly made WB see sense, shelve the project and instead allow Christopher Nolan to finish off his Dark Knight trilogy, before bringing him on to oversee a new Superman film that would set the stage for the rest of the Justice League, just as Iron Man did for the Avengers.
Unfortunately, under the hamfisted fan-boy direction of Zack Snyder - that had served him and us surprisingly well on Watchman and 300 - Man of Steel was a dour, tedious, inconsistent, underwhelming mess.
Rather than scratch this off as a false start and hope for better from new Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman origins, WB panicked and jumped straight ahead with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
And we all know how that turned out.
One of the few highlights (and possibly the biggest surprise) of BvS was Ben Affleck as Batman - contrary to fan-boy fears the world over (including my own), he proved a good fit for the roles - but that didn’t mean the character himself wasn’t weakly established and poorly represented. This was a bitter, angry Batman, pushing his violent nature to the extreme, to the point of no longer caring whether he kills. In one scene, we’re shown a Robin suit, apparently graffitied by the Joker, suggesting Batman’s anger and bitterness stem from the death of the Boy Wonder, as in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns - an idea confirmed (to some extent) by the presence of the anti-Superman Batsuit from said book - but even in that, when Batman is at his most detached, desperate and willfully violent, he never crosses that line.
Not that you can’t have Batman killing people - if anything, showing the Dark Knight pushed over the edge to a point where he’s perfectly willing to break his one golden rule is an interesting piece of character development - but the issue in BvS is it is not shown. Yes, we’re given a glimpse of the reason behind his mindset, but how much did that event really change him? Has this always been a more violent Batman? Was he closer to Tim Burton’s version, Joel Schumacher’s or Christopher Nolan’s? Did Robin’s apparent death push him just an inch too far, or completely flip his personality?
The same is true for every character in Suicide Squad. Amanda Waller calls them ‘The worst of the worst’, but that doesn’t hold up. All we see of them in the movie is Deadshot is an assassin-for-hire who loves his daughter, and never kills women or children, Killer Croc lives in the sewers, and seemingly only attacks people who attack him, El Diablo is a pacifist,Captain Boomerang is a bank robber and Harley Quinn is a mentally-ill gymnast with Stockholm syndrome. Hardly the worst humanity has to offer.
In fact, other than Enchantress - an evil spirit awakened from a 2,000 year imprisonment, so understanderbly miffed - the only character who truly shows themselves to be a cold, calculating sociopath is Waller.
The most glaring example of this lack of background, however, is Jared Leto’s much-touted Joker. After all of the behind-the-scenes reports of how scarily ‘method’ he got with the role, the Joker’s entire on-screen character is that of a violent, but strategic gang boss with a weird growl and an obsession with Quinn. The elements are all there for this to be an interesting new take on the character - how did he establish himself? what’s he done to earn his reputation? why is he so obsessed with Quinn far beyond the simple pleasure the character’s previously taken in having a loyal attractive pet around to play with and abuse as he fancies? - but we get none of this, and as a result, he’s little more than a caricature.
Leto has stated that a lot of his scenes wound up on the cutting-room floor, but no matter what’s in them, I struggle to see how a few deleted scenes would cover the gaping holes in the character.
Again, this isn’t just an issue with Suicide Squad. We’re now three movies into the DC Cinematic Universe, and the only character with a true origin story is the one character who, not only everyone knows - comic-book fan or not - but whose entire character relies on being consistent and immovable. In other words, the only character in this whole enterprise who doesn’t need an origin story.*
*I realise we also get Batman’s (wholly unnecessary by now) origin story, but that’s just
why he became Batman, not what turned him into this version of Batman.
In WB’s rush to catch up with Marvel, they’ve completely missed what has made the MCU so successful: namely the balance struck between staying true to the characters’ comic-book origins, while making them accessible enough to a new, cinema-going audience.
That said, at least Suicide Squad has added a sorely-lacking element of fun to the franchise.
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