Suicide Squad

Saw Suicide Squad, another not very good movie.  Here was the main problem with it: incoherency.  It's part of the DC film universe and follows the assembly and deployment of a rag-tag group of not-very-villainous villains who are the only folks capable of taking out a Big Baddie (it's never explained why the conventional superheroes can't help, but I guess they can't.)

So the film has a problem to solve: how to introduce and motivate these six or so characters and introduce the baddies and the puppet-master who runs the operation without making the film 4 hours long?  Well, the way the film solves this is by mashing things together and leaving it to us to unscramble the mess in our heads.  It's like Godard's Breathless - all the connective tissue is taken out, leaving us with voice-overs and infographics.  It's all fairly fluffy and fun but nothing is allowed to breathe.  Important beats of characterization have to compete with each other and with special effects.  Of course all of the posing and one-liner-ing is left in, so there's just a ton of unearned, ain't-I-cute and ain't-I-bad-ass dumbness that mostly falls flat.

The power couple of the movie are Harley and the Joker.  Jared Leto's Joker is terrible, as you all know.  He plays the Joker as just kind of drunk and flirty which like okay I guess but you have to actually show him doing something evil at some point.  There's a scene where he intimidates and murders a random thus who, alas, is far more threatening than Leto ever is.  I guess I could see him as a Charles Manson type, but he's playing it here with grills and tattoos and the second-hand, imitation swagger of a white suburban teenager trying to look tough and this all is not really that intimidating.  Bleh.  Harley is the real winner of this film.  She's not perfect, but she's head and shoulders above anyone else here and genuinely entertaining.

The film is quite dumb though.  It's the Joel Schumacher movies of our time.  It embraces the camp and fun of the comics, but it also tries to keep the dour seriousness that fans seem to like.  The result is a self-serious mess with tons of self-conscious, comic-book-tier posing and mystique-building and all sorts of puffed-up, inflated, self-aggrandizing nonsense.  Not the worst movie I've seen but would not recommend.