Monday at the Movies - October 27, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  After being disappointed by last week’s sojourn into so-called horror, it’s time to return to what we do best – something we haven’t done, believe it or not, since July!

Batman: Assault on Arkham (2014) – First of all, the title of this film is an abject misnomer.  Assault on Arkham is unequivocally a Suicide Squad movie in which Batman makes a few appearances.  But because of the Dark Knight’s marketability and a welcome performance by Kevin Conroy (who so thoroughly owns the character at this point), the title misleads.  The Suicide Squad, working on the deceitful orders of government official Amanda Waller, is tasked to break into Arkham Asylum in order to recover a stolen piece of data; being that the team is comprised of supervillains working off their sentences – led by the master assassin Deadshot (Neal McDonough), with Harley Quinn (Hynden Walch) stealing the show with her repeated cries of “Yahtzee!” – the team can barely keep from betraying itself to stay alive.  I really enjoyed this film, for precisely the reason that might turn off a lot of viewers:  Assault on Arkham is probably the edgiest animated film out of DC, replete with a fair amount of gore and PG-13 brushes of nudity.  It’s a welcome relief to see that the studio is willing to take a risk here and there with some of their lesser-known properties, even if that gamble is counterbalanced by the presence of the ever-bankable Batman and a tenuous tie to the wildly popular Arkham video games.  That said, to long-time fans of the comic book source material, there’s little to surprise in Assault on Arkham; anyone with a casual knowledge of the Suicide Squad knows exactly who’s telling which lies, and so the real joys of the film are to be found in the edgy appropriation of character relationships (especially the manic way Harley Quinn tries to bait her former lover, The Joker).  With a Suicide Squad movie en route from DC’s live-action division, this is a good introduction to the concept.  (Recommended also:  the “Task Force X” episode of Justice League Unlimited, which finds a similar roundup of rogues breaking into the Justice League’s orbital Watchtower.)

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!