Suicide Squad

The movie opens with our anti-heroes in a secret prison somewhere in the swamps of Louisiana.  There is Deadshot (Will Smith), an assassin with uncanny accuracy.  Next there is Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), a former prison psychiatrist who fell in love with a patient.  The patient was the Joker (Jared Leto).  Then we have Killer Croc, a fellow who looks to be half crocodile and half human.  For inexplicable reasons, his cell in under a sewer grate and whole animal carcasses are tossed down for meal time.  Uh huh.  Lastly, we see Diablo, a heavily tattooed gangbanger who happens to be a human flamethrower.

In Washington DC, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has a meeting at the Pentagon.  One attendee asks what they would have done if Superman had ripped the roof off the White House and grabbed the president.  She wants to make use of these super villains.  Of course, never addressed is the fact that her team of super villains would have been no match for Superman but let's not discuss that.  To demonstrate her point, she calls for Enchantress (Cara Delevingne).  The Enchantress retrieves top secret material from Iran in the blink of an eye.  Of note, Enchantress is not a willing pawn for Waller, who keeps her leashed by having her heart in briefcase.  No sooner is her idea approved than Enchantress goes rogue and attempts to destroy the world.  Who can save us now?

The Suicide Squad is activated and additional members arrive as they don their combat gear.  There is Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Slipknot.  Rick Flag (Joel Kennaman) of Special Forces will command the team with the aid of Katana (Karen Fukuhara) and a contingent of Navy Seals.  The mission is to rescue a VIP from the area where Enchantress is active but not to engage Enchantress.  Go!  Where are Batman (Ben Affleck) and Flash, both of whom appeared in flashbacks in this movie.

Do these villains add value to the Seal Team?  Deadshot makes sense.  The guy is murderous with a gun and has uncanny accuracy.  Yes, he is an asset.  Diablo shoots fire.  He is a walking flamethrower!  Huge asset.  Killer Croc is inhumanly strong, has natural armor, and swims like a fish.  Could be useful.  Slipknot is a skilled climber with a variety of tools to allow him to scale anything very quickly.  Potentially useful in a cityscape.  Captain Boomerang is a burglar who throws boomerangs.  Any super powers?  Nope.  Oh, but he had a boomerang with a camera that served as a drone.  The special forces didn't have an actual drone to do that?  You know, you can buy drones at Walmart these days?  Let's move on to Katana.  Skilled martial artist who specializes in using a soul-sucking katana.  Could be useful in close combat but I don't see her as more useful than a Navy Seal.  Harley Quinn is a mental case who is, for unclear reasons, unusually skilled in close combat (psychiatry training is more strenuous than I thought).  Her favored weapon is a baseball bat but she also has a pistol.  More trouble than she's worth.

The movie is just too cartoony.  Joker was particularly bad.  In the Tim Burton era, we knew that Gotham was in an alternate universe with gothic architecture and perpetual darkness.  It was a place where a villain might have a bunch of machinegun wielding clowns as members of his gang.  His was a dark version of the 60s TV show.  Chris Nolan's universe sought to be closer to reality, allowing greater verisimilitude with somewhat more realistic action and villains.  In Dark Knight, Joker's goons might wear a clown mask but a Panda Suit would be out of the question!  Suicide Squad mixes the two styles, giving a setting closer to Nolan's but characters that would fit better into Burton's.  That doesn't work.

 

Jared Leto is the wrong actor for the Joker.  He has the face of a 17 year-old.  He reminds me of David Cassidy from the Partridge Family.  He is only menacing because the script says so.  Leto does the crazy but not the threatening.  Where Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero were presentable and Heath Ledger viewed grooming as optional, Jared Leto is the metrosexual Joker.  Maybe his best work was left on the cutting room floor.

 

Now for the utter stupidity.  June Moone is supposedly an archeologist but when she finds an ancient artifact, she immediately snaps off the head and unleashes the evil spirit contained within.  Maybe we could have had it break accidentally rather than through vandalism.  Deadshot has a gun bracelet on his arm which he used at one point to make an impossible shot.  It is a stupid weapon that should be useless beyond a dozen yards.  Once the VIP is recovered, the pickup helicopter flies into the path of the big baddie rather than directly away.  Sigh.  Waller slaughters her staff.  Well, that shows how nasty she is.  Murder charges, anyone?  No?  Enchantress can teleport to Iran and back in an instant and pops in and out so fast that she nearly trounces the Suicide Squad single-handedly.  Why didn't she just grab the briefcase with her heart and thus end Waller's influence over her?  The fact that Enchantress went rogue demonstrates that Waller is incompetent.  She thought she could manage Enchantress and failed miserably, causing all the trouble that followed in the movie.  She should be tossed into a cell between Deadshot and Harley Quinn at the secret prison.

 

It has its moments but rarely rises above mediocre.  There is a lot of good material and interesting characters here but this was the wrong story for them.  Maybe Suicide Squad 2 will turn this around.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman (Ben Affleck) is the mover and shaker of this movie.  It turns out that he was in Metropolis on the day that Superman (Henry Cavill) tangled with General Zod (cf. Man of Steel) and witnessed the vast destruction.  Later, he argues to Alfred (Jeremy Irons) that Superman is too powerful to trust and that he should be treated as a villain.  To that end, he prepares for the battle.  However, Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) also has grand plans.  He has gained access to the Kryptonian ship and General Zod's corpse (a very undemanding return role for Michael Shannon); Lex has grand plans.

 

The movie spends a lot of time being over-serious.  It is as if the director is unaware that his source material is a COMIC book.  There should be some light-hearted scenes.  Nope.  It is one long serious slog.  The only point of light was Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot).  Yes, her complete lack of backstory and joy in battle made her a breath of fresh air compared to the grim warriors of Superman and Batman.

 

For me, Christopher Reeve was Superman.  He took Clark Kent in a very different direction of George Reeves.  His Clark was something of a stuttering oaf whereas his Superman was a cheerful hero with a ready quip to make light of danger.  This wide gap in personalities made the silly glasses disguise more palatable.  Whereas Cavill poses as god figure who lingers on the scene for some adulation by the peasants, Reeves was a happy savior with a ready mood-lightening quip.  "Flying is the safest way to travel," he told Lois after rescuing her from a helicopter crash.  Henry Cavill's Clark is no different from his Superman; grim and serious.  Batman already has the grim and serious covered.

 

Yes, Superman dies.  Mostly.  I was really annoyed that the movie ended by essentially announcing Superman's resurrection.  Let's just undermine the emotional impact of his death.  In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock died.  His body was shot into space and that looked to be the end of Nimoy in the role of Spock.  Or, more recently, there is Jon Snow from Game of Thrones.  Yes, there is a priestess who may be able to raise him from the dead but such is left to be determined in the next season.  Heck, Jon Snow may REALLY be dead and out of the show.  I don't know and that makes it really cool.  With Superman, there is no doubt that he is alive and will appear in the Justice League movie.

 

Affleck's Batman was overburdened with dreams and visions.  His nightmares should have been cut from the film.  The elaborate post-apocalyptic dream sequence of Batman's troops battling Superman's minions was too much.  Okay, I GET IT ALREADY!  Yes, Batman distrusts Superman.  Quit hammering me over the head with that message.  Then there was the bizarre dream in which some bat monster bursts out of his father's tomb.  Why?  And then the Flash appears via time travel to offer a warning.  Can we focus on today's story and leave Justice League stuff for those movies.  If we must hint at them, hint!  Subtly.  SUBTLY!!!

 

Lex Luthor was a criminal genius but also a manic madman.  Yes, as is often the case with most of the roles Jesse Eisenberg plays, the character is jacked up on Mountain Dew or some other caffeine-rich substance.  He might even be using amphetamines.  Hetalksveryfastanddoesnotpauseforbreath.  The man must have a second job as an auctioneer.  However, I liked him.  He made for a fine and dandy bad guy.  Also, his manic act offered some much needed levity.

 

I liked it more than I expected I would.  I had heard a lot of negative reviews which may have inoculated me from having high expectations.  There is a good story here.  More stuff needed to end up on the DVD deleted scenes.  Too much of the tone reminded me of a soap opera.  Even the happy scenes are overwhelmed by this feeling of dread.  This movie needed Heath Ledger to show up and ask, "Why so serious?"

Man of Steel

The movie opens with a woman in labor.  Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is the only person with his wife during the delivery of Kal-El.  As we later learn, this is the first natural birth in centuries.  Next we find Jor-El trying to convince the ruling council to make plans to abandon Krypton.  The planet's core is unstable and it will implode in weeks.  The council ignores him and, moments later, General Zod bursts into the chamber and takes over.  Jor-El escapes and manages to send Kal-El on his way to earth before the inevitable destruction of Krypton.  As luck would have it, Zod and his followers survived the destruction thanks to their imprisonment after the failure of the coup.  Moreover, the destruction released them from prison.

Fast forward 30 years or so and we find a bearded Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) on a fishing boat.  This is not the Clark Kent of the comics.  In flashbacks, we discover that Clark is a lost and confused soul.  He knows he is not of this world but that is all he knows.  He is searching for answers to his origins and an overheard conversation (love the super hearing), he eventually ends up at a military compound in the arctic where an ancient ship has been discovered beneath the ice.  The ship and an odd token that was with him as a baby lead to the answers he seeks.  However, activating the ancient ship also alerts General Zod.

Henry Cavill does a very good job with the role.  He is brawnier than any previous Superman.  At one point, he has a Hulk scene.  After having his clothes destroyed in a fire, the nearly naked Clark (reminiscent of Bill Bixby back in the day) steals some clothes.  Steals?  Superman?  What have they done!  At another point, a trucker pours a beer on his head and he meekly walks away but we learn he destroyed the trucker's truck.  Kind of petty, Superman.  Yeah, the audience loved it but it's beneath Superman.  Or it should be.

Moreover, Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is present when Clark enters the long lost Kryptonian ship beneath the ice.  To my horror, she discovers all of Clark's secrets before he first dons his Superman costume.  Wow, talk about turning things on their head.  And there is no Jimmy Olsen!  Lois takes her own pictures.  I thought Lois was a little too squishy for an ace reporter.  It might just be that Amy Adams has a girlish voice that doesn't have much of an edge to it.  She does sweet just fine (see Enchanted) but a reporter who had been embedded in Iraq she is not.

The big failing was Krypton.  How is it that this spacefaring race of 100 centuries is utterly destroyed by the loss of the home planet?  Jor-El explained how other worlds had been visited and that stations were posted.  Zod later proves to have a vessel for terraforming to make worlds more hospitable for Kryptonians.  So, with all this technology, nothing survives except Zod and his band of criminals.  And speaking of Zod, he was bred to be the leader of Krypton's military like Jor-El was bred to be the lead scientist and yet, when the two meet in combat, Jor-El stomps Zod.  Huh?  Well, it is Russell Crowe.

As is apparent, this is a reimaging of the character.  It is an effort to see how Kal-El's life might have played out in a real - rather than comic - world.  Well, mostly.  The big city is still Metropolis and Lois works for the Daily Planet.  Anyway, Clark would not just come out and start flying around in the super suit as the comic depicts.  Once he does in response to the arrival of General Zod, the military is as wary of him as of Zod.  Though initially doubtful, I was won over by this telling.