Suicide Squad

[mirth]

Ghostbusters bombs and it's because of misogyny. Suicide Squad succeeds and it's because of marketing over good taste  ::)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/movies/making-suicide-squad-a-smash-despite-withering-reviews.html

Suicide Squad is not a very good movie, but it is an enjoyable summer diversion that is easier to take than the last two overblown, self-serious, sepia-toned pieces of Zack Snyder nonsense that DC tried to cram down our throats. And it is more enjoyable than a made by committee Ghostbusters reboot that the PC police have insisted is good because it has female leads.

[bayonetbrant]

I was underwhelmed with SS.  But that's in large part b/c of my insane love of the old Ostrander comics (I did like his name on the Federal Bldg)

I'll post more detailed thoughts later, but I thought there was a lot more that could've been done.  My opinion is not nearly as glowing at B_C's was over on FB

[mirth]

I thought there was a lot more that could've been done

I can't argue with that, but I didn't think it was anywhere near as bad as many of the reviews made it out to be. And I liked it more than Man of Steel or Batman v Superman (not a high standard, I realize).

[mirth]

https://heatst.com/entertainment/suicide-squad-was-way-better-than-ghostbusters-but-with-much-worse-reviews/

[BanzaiCat]

I'll post more detailed thoughts later, but I thought there was a lot more that could've been done.  My opinion is not nearly as glowing at B_C's was over on FB

I don't know what crack rocks y'all were smoking before seeing this movie, but I thought it was fantastic. I'm with Angry Joe on this one; I don't get the hate for it, but if you didn't like it, that's your prerogative of course.  :D

[JasonPratt]

And now we wait for the crappy video game and/or the decent-to-amazing Rocksteady Arkhamverse version. (Which they kind-of already did for an animated Arkhamverse movie, but still.)

[JasonPratt]

(Unfortunately, I went with the nieces to The Secret Life of Pets which was, eh, disposable but worth a few laughs here and there. Would have liked it better if I liked dogs at all.)

[Barthheart]

.... Would have liked it better if I liked dogs at all.)

Git the pitchforks lads, we gotta run this here guy outta town.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

[BanzaiCat]

In all seriousness, I really don't get the hate for this movie. I understand what y'all are saying, and what the haters are saying, but it wasn't disjointed to me at all. I keep wondering if I saw the same movie all of you did.  :)

[JasonPratt]

Angry Joe & Crew seemed to really like it. Was that mentioned upthread? Bears repeating even if so.

[bayonetbrant]

I had a few different problems with the movie, any one of which wouldn't have been a big deal but collectively added up to an underwhelming experience for me

1) I understand why they needed the front-loaded exposition of who the bad guys were and how they came to be. But none of the Marvel movies had comparable obvious introductions for any of their characters in either the main Marvel universe, or the X-Men universe and we still figured out who everyone was just fine

2)  sacrificing Slipknot was supposed to raise the stakes on the possibility of people dying on the mission but it felt overly hokey given that you knew there was no way they were killing off anyone else important. Moreover since Slipknot wasn't introduced in the initial exposition, you knew he was the one to get whacked as soon as he came on screen

3) part of the whole point of The Suicide Squad was to be able to showcase the villains as actual confident dangerous menaces to society that needed the heroes to defeat them on a regular basis. If you go back to the original Comics, The Penguin appears very early on to plan a mission in and out of Russia and you get a sense of just how smart and dangerous he can actually be. You never get that with this crew.
You never see Deadshot set up an important long range shot, you just see him empty a lot of lead downrange.
You never see Harley's craziness completely unhinge the people she's facing down with to the point where they have no idea what to expect from her. Even the final scene is pretty contrived and not Harley truly baffling someone by just being batshit crazy.
You get some of Diablos conflicted emotions as he thinks about his family, but Killer Croc should really have been much more reticent to help people given that they have been shunning him their whole lives.
Boomerang is played merely for laughs, and not actually shown to be the ruthless trick shot artist he really is. Even the attempts at Boomerang's laughs are watered down compared to the source material where he is a total misogynistic asshole who never met a woman he couldn't insult.
Enchantress is tough to really rationalize given that she's supposed to be some sort of ancient otherworldly type creature, but her constant writhing as though the director had a remote controlled vibrator shoved up her ass was treated as some sort of defining characteristic rather than the real annoyance it was

4) once the shooting starts with her magic Army, the movie loses any semblance of being a superhero flick and simply becomes another Escape From New York meets The Walking Dead minion killing flick with no real danger to the main characters. We already know there is a 0% chance of anyone getting hurt by those faceless blobs and there's absolutely no reason we should care about those blobs because we never see who or what they were before Enchantress changed them.  A major missed character opportunity here would have been for Flagg or Katana to not engage them because they felt sorry for what was underneath, whereas the villains would have no problem at all mowing them down.

5) why the hell is Flagg carrying around letters from Deadshot's daughter on a mission?

6)  I'm sure they are working on a sequel given the commercial success from the first weekend, and I really hope that it focuses more on the infiltration of Argus by the Joker's guys

7) Flagg's minions are clearly cannon fodder, but that's kind of the whole point of The Suicide Squad so why have them both out there? If you really want to make the rest of the Argus field operatives more in line with the source material, put the Checkmate costumes on them and let them go be their independent operators, which is actually much more in line with how Diggle's ex wife operates in the Arrow TV show

Someone made a comment  on a Facebook discussion about the movie  that they expect comic fans will like it more than non-comic fans. I have the exact opposite opinion. I think comic fans are frustrated by the ham-handed attempts at character development that just devolve into tropes, the lack of any real tension between the team members (heck, there was more animosity among The Avengers in the first movie and they were all good guys theoretically fighting for the same side), and the entire second half of the movie that felt like Escape From New York happened to accidentally stumble into the final scene of the first Ghostbusters movie.

It's not that it wasn't fun, and I didn't feel like my money was wasted.  It just didn't feel like they made a movie for fans of The Suicide Squad comic.  They made a Zack Snyder movie (with someone else supposedly directing) that was trying to appeal to whatever dark and gritty  superhero fans they think still exist after the last 2 DC attempts at big screen movies flopped as worthwhile stories

[BanzaiCat]

I could make a comment on each of your points (nothing bad or argumentative), but overall I can say I don't have a problem necessarily with anything you're saying. I'm just going to say that none of it really bothered me at all.

I can see how this would anger a comic fan, or someone a lot more familiar with the source material, but meh, it's a movie.

[mirth]

I could make a comment on each of your points (nothing bad or argumentative), but overall I can say I don't have a problem necessarily with anything you're saying. I'm just going to say that none of it really bothered me at all.

I can see how this would anger a comic fan, or someone a lot more familiar with the source material, but meh, it's a movie.

+1

[bayonetbrant]

but meh, it's a movie.

if everyone had that attitude, then no one would've had a problem with the Ralph Bakshi LOTR movie.