‘You are evil!’ bellows Will Smith’s Deadshot before firing a gun at a small bomb that’s meant to destroy a poorly rendered witch-goddess-thing and her recently constructed McGuffin-machine that does…something for…some reason?
I’ll be the first to admit I’m clueless, and so apparently were those responsible for the making of this patronising, aggravating product of a ‘film’.
In Suicide Squad, a secret organisation brings together a group of ‘bad guys’, i.e. antagonists of the D.C. universe to defend the Earth in this new world of gods and monsters. Conveniently, it all kicks off more-or-less the next day (actually largely because of the organisations program), and the Suicide Squad are sent in to neutralise the threat. Anyway, what follows is the most tedious, nonsensical filmmaking I’ve seen for a long time.
Comic book adaptations, in particular superhero films, are often viewed and judged on a different level of criteria by those who go out of their way to enjoy them. That’s to say that fans of the genre are often more concerned with shallow matters of whether or not their favourite characters do or do not adhere to the looks and behaviours that they expect or are used to from the comic books. In Suicide Squad, DC (I refrain from blaming a singular director or producer for this, it is clearly a product slapped together by committee) seem to have cynically cottoned on to this and have set about muddying the waters by shifting focus onto surface-level issues of how the characters ‘look’ etc.
There is no doubt that Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Jared Leto’s Joker are above-par in their performances, however, this is immaterial. It is almost admirable that a film has been made where the film itself seemed to be the last thing on the agenda, but to Warner Bros. this doesn’t matter. After the first few trailers, the work was done, the cheques cashed. Those who were and weren’t going to like the film had already decided, and they aren’t going to let something so silly as the film itself get in the way of their opinions.
Suicide Squad is not a film that exists on the screen, in a film canister, nor will it in peoples’ minds, memories, or hearts. Suicide Squad is almost conceptual in its charmless vacuum of disappointment. Neither good nor bad enough to be fun, the film merely exists as a simulacrum of potential entertainment where none was ever intended to exist, like the child-catcher’s lollipops in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. And we’re the poor little bastards who’ve been caught.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m clueless, and so apparently were those responsible for the making of this patronising, aggravating product of a ‘film’.
In Suicide Squad, a secret organisation brings together a group of ‘bad guys’, i.e. antagonists of the D.C. universe to defend the Earth in this new world of gods and monsters. Conveniently, it all kicks off more-or-less the next day (actually largely because of the organisations program), and the Suicide Squad are sent in to neutralise the threat. Anyway, what follows is the most tedious, nonsensical filmmaking I’ve seen for a long time.
Comic book adaptations, in particular superhero films, are often viewed and judged on a different level of criteria by those who go out of their way to enjoy them. That’s to say that fans of the genre are often more concerned with shallow matters of whether or not their favourite characters do or do not adhere to the looks and behaviours that they expect or are used to from the comic books. In Suicide Squad, DC (I refrain from blaming a singular director or producer for this, it is clearly a product slapped together by committee) seem to have cynically cottoned on to this and have set about muddying the waters by shifting focus onto surface-level issues of how the characters ‘look’ etc.
There is no doubt that Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Jared Leto’s Joker are above-par in their performances, however, this is immaterial. It is almost admirable that a film has been made where the film itself seemed to be the last thing on the agenda, but to Warner Bros. this doesn’t matter. After the first few trailers, the work was done, the cheques cashed. Those who were and weren’t going to like the film had already decided, and they aren’t going to let something so silly as the film itself get in the way of their opinions.
Suicide Squad is not a film that exists on the screen, in a film canister, nor will it in peoples’ minds, memories, or hearts. Suicide Squad is almost conceptual in its charmless vacuum of disappointment. Neither good nor bad enough to be fun, the film merely exists as a simulacrum of potential entertainment where none was ever intended to exist, like the child-catcher’s lollipops in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. And we’re the poor little bastards who’ve been caught.
By Jonathan Falconer
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