In the world of “Suicide Squad,” Superman is dead and Batman is too busy grimacing at an open field under a leaden grey sky to fight crime. But the world needs more saving and DC Comics has more characters. So we turn to the “bad guys,” the ones locked up in the highest security prison full of actors purportedly playing against type.
Will Smith takes a break from his procession of films about how he’s a handsome, great father (“The Pursuit of Happyness,” “After Earth”) to play the hitman/serial killer Deadshot who is… a handsome, surprisingly great father, who uses bullet trajectory to teach his daughter about geometry.
Margot Robbie finally wriggles free from her total objectification in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Legend of Tarzan” to play Harley Quinn… a totally objectified woman, framed rear-first for two hours. As a man says approvingly about her, in a line representative of the film’s sense of humor: “A whole lot of pretty, a whole lot of crazy.”
For other squad members, you just need their names to get the gist: El Diablo, Captain Boomerang, Killer Croc. You’ve seen fully formed feature films shorter than the character introduction phase of this movie. The crew is referred to as “meta-humans,” apparently because Marvel has the patent on the term “mutants.” This is too bad for DC, just like when religious conservatives took the inarguably better-sounding “pro-life” side of the abortion debate.
Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, a good actress currently unable to escape roles as humorless functionaries) brings the team together and injects their necks with tiny, remote-controlled grenades. She leaves them in the charge of a military dudeman named Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) – guess which side he’s on.
Then there’s the Joker (Jared Leto, following Heath Ledger in the role, which is a shame because Ledger has the advantage of being dead and a much better actor) chewing scenery at the periphery of the story. Leto shoots – a gold-plated AK-47 – for a performance like Jimmy Cagney’s in “The Public Enemy” but, in his skintight tuxes and metallic jewelry, he more closely resembles John Leguizamo’s penny ante Tybalt (from the MTV-generation adaptation “Romeo + Juliet”).
Indeed, “Suicide Squad” has a Baz Luhrmann bombast about it but director David Ayer isn’t backed by Shakespeare’s verse – instead it’s a screenplay from the bards behind “The Fast and the Furious.” Elsewhere, someone compares the action to “a chapter in the Bible” – was Leviticus the book that had the streetwise crocodile man blowing up train stations?
Deadshot periodically reminds everyone, “We’re the bad guys,” but of course they are the good guys, every detail revealed makes them more sympathetic. Rather than the Joker, they mostly fight a “non-human entity” called Enchantress (Cara Delevingne, a graduate of the Eyebrow School of Acting). She does standard witch-goddess stuff: creating a zombie army, undulating before a portal to another dimension. She’s styled straight out of the sultry alien lookbook – a fusion informed, as usual, by ancient Egyptian gods and “Tron.”
Before they mount their final attack, the witch gives the not-very-suicidal squad hallucinatory visions of their lives as non-super villains. It’s an array of banal, family-first daydreams that contain none of the struggles that make them (at least semi-) human.
Fittingly, this is the same lobotomy service that’s been on offer to comic book movie audiences all summer long.
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“Suicide Squad” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13. Running time 2:03. Visit www.cinemawest.com.
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