I went to see Suicide Squad last night. Not because I had any real hopes of it being a good movie, but because it’s a comic book film and I will end up seeing all comic book films eventually. Even the Zack Snyder one’s, which ’cause me actual pain to watch. I will watch them, when it costs me nothing, and then I will hate myself.
Suicide Squad did not cause pain. Mostly because it’s an incredibly tedious couple of hours, by virtue of someone taking all the core beats of six different stories and throwing them in the air, then figuring “eh, good enough,” when the pages are re-assembled.
Suicide Squad is what happens if you try to make the Magnificent Seven and do the assembling the team sequence, then throw out oh, by the way, these guys are meant to be saving a Mexican village. It’s the film that happens when you kick of Die Hard with Hans Gruber taking over Nakatomi Towers, then go oh, yeah, there’s a cop trying to reconnect with his wife or something before launching into the second act.
Suicide Squad is a self-contained story, in that the conflict that drives the story is largely happening ’cause the protagonist is an idiot with insufficient reason to be one (and, despite the film’s attempts to re-frame Will Smith’s Deadshot as the protagonist, there is no way in hell that it’s anyone but Amanda Waller).
Weirdly, it would be a very easy story to fix. I’m almost certain there’s a director’s cut of this film somewhere that has things in the correct order, before the studio laid down the mandate for funnier and make sure there’s a pop song playing every six fucking seconds.
You start with the scene in the briefing room, where Waller demonstrates the need for a black-ops superhuman team. You do the scene where people express their concerns, and Waller talks about who she wants. You introduce the team, one by one, and show us their issues. How they’ll fail to work together, because they’re bad guys, and how they’ll eventually bond and do the family-dynamic thing that is currently missing (and, yet, remains central to the finale).
Basically, you cut the film like someone whose actually seen The Dirty Dozen and paid attention to what made it worked. I am 100% sure the scriptwriter and director have, because there are the bones of that movie submerged beneath the mess, but they weren’t able to enact it.
And the result is a mess. A *tedious* mess, punctuated with moments of greatness from the actors. Will Smith is a surprisingly good Deadshot and makes a lot of out very little. Margot Robbie is a solid Harley Quinn. I can totally get behind Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang. Viola Davis does okay as Amanda Waller, but she suffers from the same problem all Batman actors suffer from: just as no-one is going to compare with Kevin Conroy’s portrayal of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League cartoons, no-one is going to be Amanda Waller like CCH Pounder was Amanda Waller.
Honestly, the best reason to see this film is in an object lesson in writing: spending the two hours trying to figure out how things went wrong, and what you’d need to do to fix it, is probably the most educational thing I’ve done in years.
