Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Joker fails to balance the Ledger
The sum of the dream team doesn’t nearly measure up to the talents of its individual players
APUZZLINGLY confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of super-villains and then doesn’t know what to do with them.
Part smart- ass genre send- up, part grimy noir that wants to be as dirty as Deadpool but remains constrained by its PG-13 rating, and part short-falling attempt by Warner Bros to get a big-budget DC Comics mash-up right, the film starts with promise but disengages as it loses its creative bearings.
The alluring cast and great expectations roused by some deceptively fun trailers should spark major box office at the outset. But a sense of disappointment will soon enshroud Suicide Squad, as it did the recent Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Although the film marks a departure for writer-director David Ayer from his usual turf of combat and/or street realism ( Fury, End of Watch), its grungy, gritty texture not only feels related to his usual milieu but also to the malevolent, eternally nocturnal world conjured up by the Batman: Arkham video games. Beyond that, Ayer has made a point of shoehorning into the story the most reliably alluring of all DC villains, the Joker. What fan wouldn’t show up for his return?
Unfortunately, the result resembles a sports dream team whose combined efforts don’t nearly measure up to the talents of its individual players.
The introduction of the dramatis personae in the extended prologue or first act, whichever you choose to call it, remains by far the film’s highlight, due to the promise it holds out: Will Smith as the ultimate American sniper Deadshot? Absolutely, and this has got to be a better bet for him than that Independence Day sequel he didn’t do.
Margot Robbie as Joker’s crazed girlfriend Harley Quinn? Bring her on. Jay Hernandez as pyromaniac Diablo? Sure. Viola Davis as the government hard-ass who assembles the team? About time she got a plum role in a franchise. Jared Leto as Joker? Yeah, he’ll deliver a few new twists.
These main baddies are joined by a few too many less significant figures such as Boomerang, Slipknot, Killer Croc and Katana under the military supervision of Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman).
Problematically, the snappy, quasipop-art feel effectively emphasised in the film’s first trailers is felt only in the early stretch; if Ayer had been able to sharpen and sustain something resembling a darkly subversive cartoon style – which is what’s suggested in the interludes centring on Harley Quinn – he might have been on to something. But he’s a grim realist at heart, and it’s a sensibility that doesn’t vibe with this sort of material.
It’s too bad the mash-up of bad guys and girls doesn’t find its groove, because the format of pitting an ad hoc bunch of loners, misfits and outlaws against a greater menace has proven to be highly reliable, from Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven to their numerous descendants.
When Davis’s American intelligence honcho Amanda Waller proposes the idea of the bad-guy dream team to take on a rather vaguely described evil, it seems like a great idea: they’ll be hard to control, but it’ll be worth it. But the evil is never properly defined and, worse, isn’t personified in a way to balance the firepower of the opposition.
All that’s left is mild curiosity about relations between Joker and Harley, the two liveliest characters. Sporting tats, green hair and metal teeth, Leto brings a measure of the requisite unpredictability and evil glee to the role, but his Joker doesn’t threaten the big-screen hold on the public imagination that Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger established. – The Hollywood Reporter