It's Just Really, Really Bad

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Don't you hate it when you lie on your C.V., get the job, realise you have no idea how to actually be a brain surgeon, and suddenly now you're a murderer?! Well, it seems that's pretty much what's happened to Suicide Squad which is so structurally fucked and tonally inconsistent that I feel like I should go back to it with a doll so that it can point to exactly where the studio interfered with it. Just look at the very first trailer which used a haunting version of 'I Started A Joke' by everybody's favourite wailing eunuchs, The Bee Gees. It looked pretty creepy, I thought. Then trailer two used 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and the world shat its collective arse out with excitement because the movie looked like it'd be so much damn fun. Perhaps I'm wrong, but when you do watch the final film, it comes across as though they were making trailer one and then changed the product to fit it closer to the more popular aesthetic of trailer two. Imagine if you organised a wake for the death of your sister's husband but it gets on Facebook that it's actually a party, and so you have to put balloons everywhere to try and fake an atmosphere of fun. Meanwhile your sister is killing that atmosphere by crying her eyes out and blaming you for the death of her husband by “pretending to be his fucking brain surgeon”.

So the film begins with Amanda Waller, a shady Government twat assembling a crack-team of villains to complete whatever secret missions she might want them to do in the wake of Superman's death. She does have a witch that could bring Superman instantly back from the dead, but that thought doesn't seem to have crossed her mind, so don't worry about it. Sadly, the witch goes rogue and starts belly-dancing in front of a giant green light like a sexy slinky with tits, and so Waller pops some bombs into her team's heads and sends them in to sort the witch out. So, to summarise the film in a complementary way, it goes: introduction, introduction, introduction, introduction.. that's Will Smith's character out of the way. Then introduction, introduction, introduction with Harley Quinn, oh and everybody else is in the corner over there but don't worry about them. Then we get action, action, action, a brief pause so we can wonder if the action will ever get good, then a bit more action. Then it ends with a big old scene of 'what the fuck is going on now.. Don't worry, I've already stopped caring'. Or if I were to summarise this film in a less than complementary way then imagine if just as John Carpenter had the idea for Escape From New York he'd tripped and fallen down the stairs, bashing his head to the point of mild-brain damage, and then landing face first in a pile of bullshit. Well, that's basically what Suicide Squad is in a nutshell.

So.. let's start with the music, I guess. The film begins with every single pop song that you've ever heard of ever because I suppose that's an easy way of tricking a person into thinking they're watching something fun. Or an easy way of making a film seem more fun than it was intended to be when your second trailer proved to be a fuck-tonne more popular than the first. I mean, it worked for Guardians Of The Galaxy and Deadpool, so why wouldn't it work for this.. even though they were quite upbeat pop-corn movies.. and this is one in which a main character murdered his wife and children by burning them alive?! Forgive me if I sound cynical, but the music was so forced and strained that I was reminded of when I was a child and I had to shit out an adult-sized, four course meal's worth of poo. Is Amanda Waller compromising her values for the sake of protecting the world? Best play Sympathy For The Devil. Is Harley Quinn an uncontrollable femme-fatale that's locked in a prison? Best play You Don't Own Me ft. G-Easy... whoever the fuck that is. It's honestly so unsubtle and on the nose that it's like the soundtrack equivalent of being punched in the face.

Which is a coincidence because if I saw a woman punched in the face by a bloke who was four times her size I'd be pretty fucking disgusted. Unless of course you were about to play something uplifting by Creedence Clearwater Revival.. in which case, punch away motherfucker. Nil By Mouth might be as grim as fuck, but throw a bit of fucking David Bowie over the soundtrack and I'll practically start masturbating as I'll be feeling such a confusing mixture of emotions. Or at least that's what this film seems to be thinking, anyway. Because there's at least one occasion in which a woman is punched for laughs, and another in which one is threatened with it. What a giggle. At least the film is upfront about it's hatred of women, so I guess it gets points for honesty. Because when it's not hitting them for fun, then it's busy having them wear so few clothes that it may as well have gone the whole way and had their super-villain uniforms be a couple of nipple-tassels and guff-less pair of knickers. I mean, literally just look at the villain Enchantress and the way in which she plans to destroy the world.. for some reason. Is it through brute force? Nope. Is it with intelligence? Nope. She literally just stands on a podium like a themed pole dancer and jiggles her way through the film. Honestly, Suicide Squad is so reprehensible in its depiction of female characters that I'm surprised it didn't go one further and stick a mop up her vadge so that whilst doing her stupid dance she'd also be cleaning the fucking floor.

Not to say that the other characters get much better treatment, really- it's just that the male ones lack the extra layer of misogyny and sexualisation. I mean just look at Will Smith's boring character whose sole defining characteristic seems to be that he has a gun and a daughter. Wow. Do you know another comic book character that has a gun and a daughter? Nicholas Cage's Big Daddy in Kick-Ass... and yet to compare the two would be like comparing two completely different cakes. They're composed of the same basic ingredients and yet whilst one cake looks bland and boring, the other is strange, weird, exciting, original, and for some reason doing a bizarre but hilarious impression of Adam West. I'll let you work out which cake is which. The problem being that despite being an ensemble movie, Smith's paper thin character is the closest thing it has to a lead really, and so you can imagine how undeveloped somebody like Killer Croc is. I mean, did he know he was in the fucking movie or did they just have a particularly scaly work experience guy that the camera man couldn't help but keep getting into shot from time to time. I mean literally, you could take ninty-five percent of the characters out of this movie and nothing would change in terms of its story at all. And when I say story.. I just mean stuff thats taking time to happen.. a bit like having a dump. You just sit there, stare into space, and wait for it all to be over.

None of this is a great claim obviously, especially when one of your characters happens to be The fucking Joker. You know, one of the most terrifying characters to flash a smile since Cherie Blair stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street?! Despite featuring pretty heavily in the marketing, Leto's attempt at the Clown Prince of Crime is bizarrely absent, and almost has a big old anus-shaped zero effect on the story. Before seeing the movie, we all heard the rumours about how Leto had gotten so into the role that he'd started sending his fellow actors some slightly twisted gifts to help get them into a mindset for dealing with him. Some of them got pet rats and others got used condoms.. which is not only gross but also sounds like the 'possession hand-over day' of a tramp's divorce. So firstly you have to wonder how pissed off you'd be if a colleague sent you a jizzy condom.. now you have to imagine how pissed off you'd be if you got that and you don't even share a single fucking scene with them. Because unless I've forgotten something, I'm pretty sure he only really interacts with Harley, and even that's barely. People have already judged his performance with some praising it and others thinking it was about as cringey as hearing your Mum tell you about the time she went to a Hotel and 'got an amazing facial'. FACIAL'S GOT TWO MEANINGS MUM.. STOP SAYING IT! However considering his screen-time here is less than it takes for me to have a particularly heavy piss, I think I'll reserve my judgement for now.

Despite all of this however, it really is the tone and structure that's the film's biggest problem. Maybe the studio didn't force changes on the film to clunkily make it more like the second trailer than the first. However if I was director David Ayer, that's certainly what I'd be telling people had fucking happened, whilst hiding my face behind a giant wall of shame. The music itself seems to be proof of this by not only using the song 'Spirit In The Sky' which has essentially been made re-popular by Guardians Of The Galaxy... as though trying to make us like it by association. Kind of like the school dweeb repeating the joke of a cooler kid in an attempt to gain popularity whilst everybody near thinks “what a massively dull twat you are”. However all of the overbearing pop-music disappears by the second half, as though spunking it all inappropriately upfront would be enough to convince us that this is the film the trailers told us we'd be seeing and now it can crack on with whatever boring bollocks it was planning to do in the first place. At the beginning I said that this film was like lying on your CV, trying to become a brain surgeon, and then accidentally lobotomising somebody. Well, obviously the CV was a metaphor for the trailers, and the lobotomy was a metaphor for the mess that the final film became as they attempted to keep up with the initial lie. However on the bright-side, if you did end up doing that and accidentally plonk the scalpel into the cognitive part of somebodies mind.. if they survived the operation, you'd still be left with somebody who could probably write a better script than whatever the fuck they were working with here. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.