Suicide Squad - Why Care About DC's Sinking Ship?

[twistedmic]

And that's not even accounting for the plotholes (seriously, just bomb Incubus from the air if an explosive charge is all it takes to kill him).

There was no plot hole with Incubus, they tried to bomb Incubus from the air and he destroyed the aircraft that tried to attack him. The movie literally showed him (his extending tentacle of death) swatting down aircraft. The bomb got Incubus because he did not see/hear it coming, was directly above the shaped charge and was heavily distracted fighting Diablo.

 

[Hawki]

And that's not even accounting for the plotholes (seriously, just bomb Incubus from the air if an explosive charge is all it takes to kill him).

There was no plot hole with Incubus, they tried to bomb Incubus from the air and he destroyed the aircraft that tried to attack him. The movie literally showed him (his extending tentacle of death) swatting down aircraft. The bomb got Incubus because he did not see/hear it coming, was directly above the shaped charge and was heavily distracted fighting Diablo.

I do recall that Incubus swatted down A-10 Warthogs, but it's established that they're observing the going on via drones. Drones, in the modern day, can strike from insanely high up in the sky. It does make it harder, but it can be done.

That's admittedly a nitpick, but I'm left to ask, what was Waller's long-term plan? That she's the asset that has to be retrieved is a good plot twist. But assuming that her helicopter wasn't shot down, what was the intended COA after that?

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

And that's not even accounting for the plotholes (seriously, just bomb Incubus from the air if an explosive charge is all it takes to kill him).

There was no plot hole with Incubus, they tried to bomb Incubus from the air and he destroyed the aircraft that tried to attack him. The movie literally showed him (his extending tentacle of death) swatting down aircraft. The bomb got Incubus because he did not see/hear it coming, was directly above the shaped charge and was heavily distracted fighting Diablo.

They'd really just need some bog-standard, WW2 iron bombs dropped from high enough up. That, or mortars. Rocket launchers. Tanks...really, I figure the only reason Enchantress was sent in was so Amanda Waller could show off, and then when she fucked up and Enchantress bolted, she sent in the Squad so she could do the exact opposite.

They could have done what they did in Man of Steel, where it was pretty clearly shown that the Kryptonian ship was invulnerable to direct attack because of its weird gravity-effect. A more elegant solution would have been to explain that Enchantress/Incubus only become vulnerable when separated from their heart-phylactery, and then having the Squad tear that out of him during their fight before blowing him up. That would explain the need to get up-close with the Aztec tentacle god.

That's admittedly a nitpick, but I'm left to ask, what was Waller's long-term plan? That she's the asset that has to be retrieved is a good plot twist. But assuming that her helicopter wasn't shot down, what was the intended COA after that?

I don't really know what COA stands for, so I'm just freeballing here, but; probably bomb the city and cover everything up.

 

[Hawki]

That's admittedly a nitpick, but I'm left to ask, what was Waller's long-term plan? That she's the asset that has to be retrieved is a good plot twist. But assuming that her helicopter wasn't shot down, what was the intended COA after that?

I don't really know what COA stands for, so I'm just freeballing here, but; probably bomb the city and cover everything up.

"COA" is military shorthand for "course of action." And I could see Waller doing that (goodness knows she's morally reprehensible enough in this movie, enough to make her Arrowverse counterpart look like a nice, sweet girl), though she might have still tried to ride it out to capture Enchantress and/or Incubus (she mentions the potential for weaponizing Incubus's abilities for super-soldiers).

 

[tzimize]

So you're saying it's a DCappointment?

...

Please don't hurt me.

Nice.

Can anyone answer me one question about the movie? Why on earth would anyone put Harley in the team? She doesn't have powers, she's a decent level acrobat and that's about it, and she brings multiple maladies and instabilities into a team. Harley actively makes a team worse for her being in there. I feel like the only reason she's in the team is "Hey she's related to joker and that's the only batman villain people know so put her in"

Possible spoilers below.

She's sellable. That said, I think she has enough worry about her own health that at the very least she will fall in line untill she can get the bomb in her neck away. Thats the premise anyway, and fortunately its underscored by a villain getting his head blown off to make the point (the build up for it by Captain Boomerang is one of the better parts of the movie. In fact, shockingly captain boomerang is one of the better parts of the movie).

Harley was half-way brilliant. The casting was perfect, but the writing was a let-down. And it seemed to me that she was crazy when she needed to be, and sane when she needed to be, all for the script to work. Which is fucking lame. Instead of writing a believable story they shoe-horn her into a form which doesnt quite fit.

Also Will Smith was a disgrace as I thought he'd be. Hogging the spotlight and being the villain with a heart....god fucking damnit I wanted to strangle both him and whoever thought that making an assassin a likeable character a good guy. It seems the shoplifting moment from the trailer "we're BAD guys, its what we do", was just for show. None of these characters were bad, they were just bad-ass, sort of :\

Maybe with the exception of the witch, which ended up as the villain pretty damn quick anyway. BAH! Why DC WHY! THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD!!!! >.<

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

It seems the shoplifting moment from the trailer "we're BAD guys, its what we do", was just for show. None of these characters were bad, they were just bad-ass, sort of :\

It would've helped if they had been shooting actual people and not eyeball monster zombie things.

Or if Killer Croc had gotten a scene where he eats someone. Or if Harley had participated in more of the Joker's heinous shit, like skinning the owner of a strip club, kicking him on stage, and slapping a dollar bill on his asscheeks. Or if Deadshot had lost the "no women, no children" rule.

In the Secret Six comics, which are close enough to Suicide Squad that I'm comfortable bringing it up, there's a scene where Deadshot - on the direction of their current employer - shoots a fleeing slave on the basis that she was running away from her current slave labour. He does this without hesitation and without question. He later gets annoyed by it when it turns out it was the employer that ordered the slave to run for the fence, to test Deadshot's loyalty, but it's more because he was tricked than anything else.

Will Smith kind of half-way got there, in that the character seems to only care about his daughter and talks about killing people as if he enjoys it, but it's all talk - he never does any bad shit on screen. Even when he's told to shoot at a teammate, he deliberately misses, for no reason other than it'd be hard for them to be friends otherwise. (I was expecting him to shoot them somewhere deliberately non-fatal.)

I think they shoulda aimed for an R-rating on this one. It's not the stigma it used to be; most of the people seeing these films are adults. And if they'd really emphasised that they're bad guys in their little intro-vignette montage - like bad bad, not Ocean's Eleven bad - it would have made their character development from boxed crooks to boxed buddies much more significant.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

It seems the shoplifting moment from the trailer "we're BAD guys, its what we do", was just for show. None of these characters were bad, they were just bad-ass, sort of :\

It would've helped if they had been shooting actual people and not eyeball monster zombie things.

Or if Killer Croc had gotten a scene where he eats someone. Or if Harley had participated in more of the Joker's heinous shit, like skinning the owner of a strip club, kicking him on stage, and slapping a dollar bill on his asscheeks. Or if Deadshot had lost the "no women, no children" rule.

In the Secret Six comics, which are close enough to Suicide Squad that I'm comfortable bringing it up, there's a scene where Deadshot - on the direction of their current employer - shoots a fleeing slave on the basis that she was running away from her current slave labour. He does this without hesitation and without question. He later gets annoyed by it when it turns out it was the employer that ordered the slave to run for the fence, to test Deadshot's loyalty, but it's more because he was tricked than anything else.

Will Smith kind of half-way got there, in that the character seems to only care about his daughter and talks about killing people as if he enjoys it, but it's all talk - he never does any bad shit on screen. Even when he's told to shoot at a teammate, he deliberately misses, for no reason other than it'd be hard for them to be friends otherwise. (I was expecting him to shoot them somewhere deliberately non-fatal.)

I think they shoulda aimed for an R-rating on this one. It's not the stigma it used to be; most of the people seeing these films are adults. And if they'd really emphasised that they're bad guys in their little intro-vignette montage - like bad bad, not Ocean's Eleven bad - it would have made their character development from boxed crooks to boxed buddies much more significant.

But in this world of crossovers R rated charcaters have no buisness being anywhere near PG/PG-13 ones.

I mean I don' want Punisher and Daredevil meet Star Lord and the Raccoon.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

But in this world of crossovers R rated charcaters have no buisness being anywhere near PG/PG-13 ones.

I mean I don' want Punisher and Daredevil meet Star Lord and the Raccoon.

...

i didn't know how much i wanted that until just now

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

But in this world of crossovers R rated charcaters have no buisness being anywhere near PG/PG-13 ones.

I mean I don' want Punisher and Daredevil meet Star Lord and the Raccoon.

...

i didn't know how much i wanted that until just now

At least just to see Punisher smack Star Lord in the head every time he says something corny and quippy.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I'm really feeling the Superhero burnout. I have skipped all of the recent DC movies and it took me awhile to bother to go see Civil War. I loved Civil War but I don't think I can do that many of these movies in the same year anymore.

 

[RedDeadFred]

"Why Care About DC's Sinking Ship?"

Because the only alternatives in the genre are Marvel (average films at best, bar a few exceptions), X-Men (average films across the board, with even fewer exceptions), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (can't comment, but I haven't read or heard many good things about them), and Power Rangers (please don't suck, please don't suck...), which isn't even out yet. So at this point I care just a little, in that the DCEU has given me one average film (MoS), one bad film (BvS), and Suicide Squad. Which I haven't seen, but with this review hardly being outside the consensus...sigh...

Unless SS really impresses me, the DCEU might just be a write-off for me as well.

While it may not be the alternative you're looking for, in contrast, none of the DC TV series suck. Going by what I've heard, the worst one is Supergirl and it's still miles better than Agents of Shield.

While Agents of Shield's first season was pretty garbage, the show has vastly improved since. To put it in perspective, the 2 hour finale of season 2 had way more emotional depth and interesting plot points than the majority of the Marvel movies. The acting is also far better than the majority of the CW DC shows. Meanwhile, Arrow and Flash have done nothing but go down hill. Hell, the only season of Arrow I'd saw was genuinely good and not just guilty pleasure material was the second. The show relies far too heavily on "the liar revealed" plot device to manufacture drama. Flash at least nails it tonally, but the mind bogglingly stupid final episodes of the second season did a lot of damage. The first season was pretty good though.

OT: I definitely didn't think the movie was as bad as people were saying. The plot really wasn't hard to follow, but the real issue for me was the dialog. Whenever someone had a "we're bad guys lol" line, I cringed pretty hard. However, the characters were pretty good for the most part and the humor was decent. The action was hit or miss with an over reliance on slow motion (I don't need to see you toss a gun 10 feet in slow motion), but still pretty fun. Overall, I thought it was pretty average. However, it's not the bad kind of average where everything is bland. More that it does some things quite well and other things quite poorly.

 

[Igor-Rowan]

After I saw Did You Know movies's video about the crew's commitment to this movie before it had aired, I thought, "Wow, even if it fails, at least these people are having fun and seeing how dedicated they are, going to the edge of sanity to get in character, how can it flop?" I'll answer that with WB, WB can make it flop.

After I heard about the Special Edition of Martha v Martha: Dawn of Martha, I really thought WB would stop making big and unnecessary cuts to their movies (if I am in the cinema, that means I can stay for longer than 2 hours, movies longer than that exist you know and they are not criticized for being long either), but DC is in a rush for delivering something as big as the MCU that really is not paying attention to the choices it makes, the only thing the DCEU did right up until now was Batfleck and that was after a lot of raised eyebrows with this one, we need to get what little has been built so far and give to people that not only are competent, but give a damn about these characters, who they are and what they stand for

Here's the video for anyone curious:

 

[gorfias]

I found it flawed bu enjoyable If DC heads more in this direction with their films, then I think I will enjoy what they have to offer in future.

This. I can nit and pick all over..

Spoiler

.I hate when the "hero's" big mission is to undo damage caused by the existence of the hero in the first place: ie FF fight Doom who was created same as them, evil Mutants, heck the entire run of the TV show "Heroes". In this case, a suicide squad member that, shockers, cannot be controlled. Heck, Amanda was pretty much wrong about everything!

Even so, I enjoyed it. One thing it did MUCH better than Batman vs. Superman: there were actual surprises in this one. The trailers did not give us a point by point plot of the entire movie.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

Imagine if they'd dealt with Batfleck that way. Instead of him getting ridiculously beefy and having a crossfit routine in the film, they'd cast Robert Pattinson, and the response was "Women don't like obscenely muscled men", and the response to that was "Well, I want a Batman who could beat up the rooms full of goons he's meant to" and the reply to that was "Fuck that. I want my Batman skinny and hot".

It's funny you bring that up, because one of my favourite [http://static5.comicvine.com/uploads/original/4/46646/4361341-4384426810-1080p.png] re-designs of Justice League characters had a quite slim Batman.

It's less applicable to live-action, naturally, because having very clear and distinct differences in character design is much more important in animation. But I don't think Batman necessarily needs to be a flesh-bear. In the case of that concept art, they made him much slimmer and sharper to contrast [https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--keWCfDUR--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/17plf856t9chujpg.jpg] Superman. (The comics themselves fail to do this all the time; for a long period in the 70s, Jim Aparo drew Batman and Superman with literally the same face and hair.)

That said, for BvS specifically they were adapting the Frank Miller Batman, who - due to the limitations of Miller's distinctive art style - is more of a single rectangular muscle than a human being. And there's positives to that; it looked damn impressive when Affleck was in the batsuit, and it emphasised the unsubtle brutality of that particular interpretation of the character.

But a skinny Batman...well, I think it's entirely possible. It might actually be harder, because you'd have to get an actor who has a slimmer physique but can still be convincingly intimidating. Robert Pattinson...probably couldn't do that.

And I do think that it does say a bit about a person. The Wonder Woman presented there is still conventionally attractive. She doesn't have an ugly face, she's still well within proportions that people consider attractive, she's not overweight. They get away with even more when they depict her as a tall character.

I think it would be hard to have an unattractive Wonder Woman. It's not like she's determined entirely by how pretty she is, but an important part of the character is that she's a super-Amazon from a utopian feminist paradise where they've cured disease and aging. It would be weird for her to have cankles in that context. She definitely couldn't be fat; I'm not damning overweight people (I'm very hefty myself) but no-one with Wonder Woman's lifestyle and upbringing would be physically unfit.

Even a conventionally unattractive Wonder Woman, with scars and a hatchet face and calloused knuckles, would probably still be attractive to a hypothetical subset of people who prefer their ladies hewn from granite. In practical terms, no-one in Hollywood is actually ugly, even the actors who play "ugly" characters (case [http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/gameofthrones/images/8/89/Brienne_Mother's_Mercy.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150617011915] in point [https://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gwendolinechristie-elle.jpg]).

Except for Steve Buscemi, who's made a career out of it.

 

[Callate]

I read a bunch of the "New 52" "Suicide Squad" in the two weeks before finally seeing the movie.

And I have to say, they did a pretty decent job with the thing visually. It's kind of neat seeing the comic book characters brought to life by their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

I don't think anyone really did a bad job, acting-wise.

But the plot barely holds together, and the script is kind of a mess. Very predictable, measured, Screenwriting 101 beats, held together with dialogue that's mostly obligatory and charmless. Harley and Deadshot are the only ones who get anything really resembling character development; the rest get a few flashbacks, quirks, and dream sequences that seem less like organically making us care about characters than a screenwriter pointing to them in black and white and telling their studio boss, "This is the part where the audience cares about the characters". People express that they like each other- sometimes more or less literally saying that- but it's like a scorecard; we hardly understand why. Except that Screenwriting 101 demands These Oddballs Come Together as a Team.

And zero points for guessing that the guy who is abruptly introduced at the last minute and has a crap power-set bites it early on.

It's also no small problem that Amanda Waller is essentially responsible for the threat that sends Project X out into the field in the first place. She's always been an intentionally unlikable and morally dubious character in the comics, as far as I can see, but she's also almost always portrayed as competent. By the end of the thing, she's offering the remainder of the SS ten years off their sentences, and I'm going, "Lady, why aren't you being brought up for war crimes?!"

...And, you know, why doesn't someone just shoot her at the end, there? Harley certainly doesn't have any reason to willingly go back to prison, other than, y'know, that whole selectively crazy thing.

I didn't find it boring, I will say. Just- like so much of what DC has produced of late- a lot of regrettable missed opportunities. If even the inter-personal banter was half as good as, say, "Guardians of the Galaxy", that would have made a significant difference.

I don't know if their scriptwriters aren't capable of writing decent banter, or the guiding hand of Snyder is still quietly suppressing banter, or if the extensive cast list and executive meddling just had some poor schmuck basically going: "OKAY! DEADSHOT LOVES HIS DAUGHTER! MOVE ON! HARLEY LOVES JOKER! MOVE ON! DIABLO IS TRYING TO BE A PACIFIST TO MAKE UP FOR A VIOLENT PAST! FLAGG LOVES THE ENCHANTRESS' HOST! KILLER CROC IS... UH... PASS! MOVE ON!"