The world doesn’t need another bad review of Suicide Squad. By now you have heard that the film is a disaster. I add my voice to that refrain. Suicide Squad is a failure. That happens. Making movies is hard.
So let’s pivot out of film critic mode and broaden our conversation. Suicide Squad is the third film in the DC Film Universe, following as it does, Man of Steel and Batman V Superman. David Ayer is the first director not named Zack Snyder to contribute to the DCU. Next year, DC will release Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman and another Zack Snyder picture, Justice League.
Much was made of the critical bashing of BVS over at DC/WB. A course correction was in order, we heard. Geoff Johns came in to redirect the tone and vision behind the DC Universe. Things would lighten up, Johns said. The world read such comments as “we’ll make things more like Marvel”, a prospect that in its own right is not promising.
But none of that re-direction came in time to affect Suicide Squad. Hopefully the suits will let Patty Jenkins make her World War 1 drama without needing to ‘lighten up’ the tone. Which means that the Johns-touch will probably not be felt until Justice League. And no matter what Johns has in store, can anything lighten up a Zack Snyder picture? That seems unlikely. Which means despite recent comments and footage from Comic Con, Justice League is still likely to be a thundering, pulsing juggernaut of a film, bearing down on audiences like a 10-ton anvil.
So despite reports to the contrary, the DC Cinematic Universe will probably not become the light-touch fun-zone some audiences and WB marketers want. There’s something distasteful about that whole prospect, anyway. Let’s not pretend that Zack Snyder, and now David Ayer, are not making the films they intend to (though Suicide Squad was apparently re-cut to conform more to its early marketing campaign, a sickening reality for creatives, no matter how bad the film might turn out). When someone says a Zack Snyder movie isn’t fun (and I tend to agree with that ), I imagine Snyder bristles. This is what a fun superhero movie is if you are Zack Snyder.
As one of the few critics who found, in the midst of that overwrought trainwreck, reasons to like BVS, I find this problem of tone fascinating. What Zack Snyder built in BVS bears little resemblance to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Ayer’s film has no center; its story swims aimlessly, unfolding in fits and starts, simultaneously incomprehensible in the details but completely predictable in the broad strokes. Squad is also full of bad people doing bad things. The traditional heroes are the real villains: the military are nameless meatheads, the prison guards are abusive racist torturers, and the government official in charge of the operation is a unflappable, corrupt killer.
By making the ‘good guys’ into morally vacuous wasteoids, Ayer, who also wrote the screenplay, finds too much freedom in the concept of bad guys working as good guys. Thus Ayer assembles the worst of the worst and lets them use their worstness to be racist, misogynistic fools. Why? Well, bad guys talk badlike. The result is retrograde and insulting cinema, of a kind we have not yet seen in the DC universe. Squad’s most galling failure is not that its characters are vile, but that Ayer expects us to love them because they are vile.
Suicide Squad’s baselessness pushes hard against Zack Snyder’s take on the DC . Like Suicide Squad, Snyder’s stories tend to fall under the weight of their momentuous scale (though it takes longer). And like Suicide Squad, BVS is full of underdrawn characters who have no interiority.
But say what you will about Zack Snyder, as a director, he has a vision. Snyder has a view of the world, and its one he wants to explore in cinema. Turning Superman’s motives upside down, Snyder has eroded the Man of Steel’s purity and found a question mark that looks a lot like fascism. Snyder seems to think the world is a place that simultaneously needs saving but doesn’t deserve it. That wants heroes and wants to kill them.
The answers that Snyder finds tend to be repulsive to me, sure. But he’s mucking up the water with at least a question to be asked: What are we supposed to do with all these stupid superheroes?
I can’t find anything in Suicide Squad that is as interesting as that question. Squad is a panic-mode picture. Full of thrills that fall completely flat, embarrassingly see-through plot devices and problem-solving exposition that is so dumb it made the audience laugh out loud. Underneath those failures, Suicide Squad debases its characters and creators for a few sexist jokes and abuse at the expense of the only halfway interesting character it creates.
If this is the road we are headed with the DC Universe, a few years from now we might just long for something as interesting as Batman v Superman.
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