The Suicide Squad (2021)

Superhero movies are like ice cream. I like ice cream. I like most kinds of ice cream. I have favorite flavors, but there are also certain flavors or toppings of ice cream on which I’m not terribly keen. I don’t like chocolate in my ice cream, for example, and too much of it ruins dessert. 

I think James Gunn is chocolate ice cream. I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy well enough but found Vol. 2 to be overly laden with Gunn’s trademark gross-out schoolboy humor, a fascination with bodily functions and jeering insults. Vol. 2still had the Marvel heart, but The Suicide Squad has boasted that it is Gunn’s unvarnished foray into the DC (Extended) Universe. If this is Gunn undisguised, it is crude, and it is cruel, and it is certainly not my favorite flavor of ice cream.

 

In The Suicide Squad (not to be mistaken with its predecessor, Suicide Squad), Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has assembled another crew of miscreants to undertake a top-secret mission with clandestine ill intent. She sends the assassin Bloodsport (Idris Elba), the fanatical Peacemaker (John Cena), the depressive Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), young Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) and King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone) into the island nation of Corto Maltese to find mad scientist The Thinker (Peter Capaldi) before his Project Starfish is exposed. Meanwhile, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Squad leader Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) are stranded on Corto Maltese, with Harley doing her Harley thing while Flag tries to get control of the increasingly manic situation.

 

From its opening scenes, The Suicide Squad is aiming for a fun and zany tone, but instead it lands somewhere just south of virulently misanthropic. If audiences complained that Zack Snyder’s comic book movies boasted too high a body count, wait until they get a load of The Suicide Squad, in which human life does not matter while the film regards each death as a punchline, an opportunity to convince the audience that Gunn’s sick, bloody nihilism is something to be cheered. As a comic book fan, I was over the moon at the cast list, scraping the bottom of the barrel for characters like Mongal and Savant, The Thinker and King Shark (never mind that the latter two had already been on the CW show The Flash). After all, Gunn had successfully introduced audiences to Z-list Marvel characters like Groot and Yondu, and we fell in love with them.

 

Not so here. At every turn, each time a character debuts, someone else on screen verbally assaults them, calling them names and mocking them. Only Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is spared this unpleasant introduction, likely because it would beggar believability to think that anyone might get the drop on Idris Elba. There is nothing redemptive like the “We are Groot” moment and nothing heartfelt like Yondu’s remark, “He wasn’t your daddy”; the only thing that comes close is the clear and predictable relationship that forms between Bloodsport and his proxy daughter Ratcatcher 2, who is herself carrying her father’s complicated and tragic mantle.

 

When the film is not actively ridiculing its protagonists or treating them like mere cannon fodder, The Suicide Squadcontinues that Gunn tradition of kneecapping its emotional moments with lowest-common-denominator humor; worse yet, just when the characters get a moment in the sun, they’re often exterminated in brutal, abrupt fashion – and these moments are, again, so predictable, lacking only the subtlety of a bright neon sign to announce a character’s imminent mortality. It is hard to imagine any of these faces becoming breakout characters because the film doesn’t often seem to care if they live or die. In a sense, Gunn might seem to have the most in common with Amanda Waller, who sees her Squad draftees as expendable grist for her own manipulative mill, yet Gunn appears to have some degree of loathing for Waller too, especially given how the film treats her in its third act.

 

But I didn’t hate The Suicide Squad. There is so much in the movie that works. Elba is a gem, and Daniela Melchior is the closest thing the film has to a real protagonist, even wading her way with aplomb through a film school student monologue about her origin story. King Shark is the closest to the film’s Groot, though Gunn makes the curious decision to write the character, the comic book son of a sea god, like a brain-damaged toddler deserving of his colleagues’ derision. Capaldi is perfectly cast as The Thinker, even though the film never gives him an opportunity to flex his augmented brain. And of course, Margot Robbie continues to be a light in the darkness as Harley Quinn, a spot-on interpretation of an unapologetic if errant feminist. It’s only too bad that the film never quite knows whether it wants to be a true Suicide Squad movie or another Harley Quinn movie (in the vein of the delightful and underappreciated Birds of Prey).

 

But as much as I wanted to like the film, and as much good material as there is somewhere in The Suicide Squad, there is a core ugliness at the center of the film, an underlying contempt for its source material and its characters. There should be zaniness and joy, especially with a cast of misfits like this. The Suicide Squad was an opportunity to tell the schoolyard bullies that they were wrong, that Polka-Dot Man isn’t proof positive that comics are inherently stupid. “This is dumb,” the film says, “and you’re an idiot for liking this.” There is nothing redemptive about The Suicide Squad, nothing but condescending spite and scorn until an emotional climax that is never really earned.

 

And yes, I am aware of the delicious grim dark irony of complaining that a movie like The Suicide Squad is mean-spirited. If you put a crew of supervillains on a helicopter together, they probably wouldn’t get along; they’d cuss and sneer and betray each other. But as much of a mess as David Ayer’s Suicide Squad was, studio interference or no, there was always a sense that Ayer liked these characters and wanted us to like them too. Gunn’s Suicide Squad is like a serving of ice cream at the Abuse Café, and it is not for everyone.

 

The Suicide Squad is rated R for “strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use, and brief graphic nudity.” Written and directed by James Gunn. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Peter Capaldi, and Viola Davis.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

I’ll admit to being something of a Star Trek novice, having only seen the most recent JJ Abrams reboots and one or two of the Picard-era films (the latter, when I was too young to comprehend fully that they weren’t Star Wars). It’s a glaring absence on my nerd-bingo card, one I’ll get around to rectifying one of these days. But for now I’m content with the sporadic relationship I have with Star Trek, mostly because the new franchise hasn’t disappointed yet: Star Trek Beyond is the hat trick for the series, an engaging and exciting romp.

Several years into their “five-year mission,” the crew of the Enterprise are feeling directionless. Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is looking for a way out of his purposeless command, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) are having a bit of a tiff over the former’s anxiety about mortality. An opportunity to mount a rescue mission into deep space rallies the Enterprise together, only to find them falling into the hands of the murderous and mysterious Krall (Idris Elba).

Despite my misgivings about the final act of Star Trek Into Darkness, I predicted that the next film would be “a real hoot,” and I’m glad to report that I was right. Even without JJ Abrams at the directorial helm this time (you may recall he was off directing a little film about forces awakening), Justin Lin proves adept at science fiction and keeping the momentum of the film going between action sequences and conversation pieces.

Indeed, the real success of the film is the chemistry between the cast. Of course, it’s been seven years in our world, and the cast really seem to have bonded in that time, approximating the tensions and dynamics of a deep-space voyage. Everyone continues the caliber of work they’ve done previously (save Simon Pegg, who pulls double-duty on screenplay but seems more isolated from the rest of the cast), but it’s Quinto’s interactions with Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy that steal the film wholesale. The juxtaposition of sassy physician with cold logic is something I don’t recall dominating the other two to this extent (Bones was memorably paired with Kirk as POV characters for Star Trek in 2009), but I’d watch a whole movie about these two.

I would have liked to see more of Idris Elba as the antagonist, and while that’s a sentence I usually say about most movies it’s especially apt in Star Trek Beyond because I remember having a distinct feeling near the beginning of the third act that I had no clue what his motivations were. It’s a step in the opposite direction from Into Darkness, where Kirk knew that John Harrison was evil because Old Spock told him so, and Krall’s motivations are abundantly clear by the end of the film in a way that ties together a number of disparate plot threads with surprising aplomb. I don’t quite know how I might have addressed this element without giving away the twist, other than to say Elba deserves more screen time, but it strikes me as a slight tension in the film.

All told, though, the greatest compliment I can pay Star Trek Beyond is to say that it isn’t a poor impression of Guardians of the Galaxy, much as the early trailers attempted to convince us. It is purely its own thing, the first wholly original plotline that doesn’t derive its narrative momentum from the concept of an alternate timeline. In this sense, Star Trek Beyond boldly goes where no Star Trek reboot has gone before, into fresh and original storytelling that is no longer beholden to what came before.

Star Trek Beyond is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action and violence,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Pacific Rim (2013)

If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone else play a video game, or if you’re one of those people who thought Transformers could have used a little more Godzilla, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is exactly the movie for you.  As for me, I think I need a little more from a movie.

After the government decommissions the giant robot “Jaeger” program, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) seeks out former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) on the eve of the next big kaiju attack.  The kaiju, enormous monsters, have been rising from the ocean and attacking coastal cities for years, leaving humanity desperate to turn the tide.  As Becket is paired with skilled rookie Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), the kaiju attacks increase in frequency, with multiple monsters rising at once.

Readers know that I’m always a bit uncomfortable dismantling expensive passion projects from behind my keyboard, so I’ll say this about Pacific Rim – it’s entirely unpretentious, inoffensive, and governed by an obvious sense of the creators’ enthusiasm.  And as far as big-dumb-loud movies go, Pacific Rim is undoubtedly the most earnest and the most triumphant.  The trailers promise big machines punching big monsters, and you get that promise fulfilled to the nth degree; once you surrender to them, the action sequences are fun and imaginative – at least, within the parameters of “How could one CGI thing beat up another?”

So for a film that had to have been storyboarded by playing with action figures and making sh-boom noises, Pacific Rim is about as diverting as the trailers make it out to be.  It passes that lower bar of “summer popcorn flick” but in a summer where we’ve seen action films that grapple with important issues alongside stellar beat-’em-up sequences Pacific Rim pales by comparison.  Upon leaving the theater, the one adjective that dove to mind was “distanced.”  At no point did Pacific Rim convince me to care about what was going on.  Instead, it relies on the assumption that the audience already thinks that the premise is cool and, by extension, worthwhile.  Yes, the premise is mind-numbingly cool, but the film never convinces the audience to invest in the concept.

For one, you can forget about character development beyond Michael Bay levels of cliché and central casting stock.  It’s a shame that the characterization in the film is so poor, because it’s almost a waste of Idris Elba.  Elba, an actor so good he convinced fans of The Wire that he wasn’t British, does the best he can with the script, even when lines like “I’m a fixed point” draw attention to the script’s dearth of personality.  I don’t begrudge the film its five minutes of introductory exposition; I do, however, shake my head at characters who make Ellen Page’s “exposition queen” in Inception look like Molly Bloom.  Charlie Day’s only plot function is to shout science at us, and Kikuchi – who is, like Elba, doing the best she can – actually yells her character’s motivation, even though the script’s already given intelligent audiences that answer.  (Hint:  she’s an orphan.)  Why do we root for the main character?  Because he’s the main character, duh (and total first-act trauma, duh).  We deserve compelling protagonists, and Hunnam ain’t it.  (Sidebar:  was Garrett Hedlund busy?)

Then there are the tonal inconsistencies, which make me wonder if this isn’t actually a Michael Bay film signed by Guillermo del Toro in some weird Howard Roark/Peter Keating pact.  The introductory montage sets up a grim future for mankind against the kaiju, while the first action sequence plays like a tragic buddy picture.  Enter the exposition scientists (Day and Torchwood’s Burn Gorman), a pair comprised of a Justin Hammer knockoff and a grotesque caricature of a foppish snob; as my father remarked, “What movie do these two really belong in?”  Finally, I’ve said nothing about Ron Perlman’s black marketer Hannibal Chau, in part because he’s another tonal inconsistency (included, I’m sure, because of Perlman’s Hellboy history with del Toro); Perlman has compelling screen presence, and his character is just the right amount of bizarrely-out-of-place, but Pacific Rim becomes an entirely different movie whenever he’s on screen.

It’s not that I went into Pacific Rim looking for brilliant character studies and subtle storytelling; I went in looking for characters and plots – y’know, the things we expect from a movie.  What I got was a big, dumb, loud movie about pixels punching pixels.  If that’s your thing, Pacific Rim is right up your alley.  Me?  I’ll pick substance over style any day of the week.

(Go ahead, take to the comments and tell me I’m missing the point.  Just be sure to tell me what the point of the movie actually was.  That’s not a joke.  What is the point of this film?)

(Also, if you know the point of tofu, that’d be helpful, too.)

Pacific Rim is rated PG-13 for “sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief language.”  Giant monsters fighting giant robots:  the former bleeds fluorescent blue flubber, while the latter get torn apart like papier-mâché.  A few civilians get eaten (bloodless), and an F-bomb gets dropped amid other milder profanities.  Oh, and my eardrums hurt.

It turns out that there are people in this world who liked Pacific Rim better than Man of Steel.  I can’t fathom such a poor life decision, but be sure to click back here on Friday for my list of “The Top 10 Reasons Why Man of Steel Is Better Than Pacific Rim”!