Suicide Squad kills itself for character

By Katherine Monk

Back in the late 1980s, when the second version of Suicide Squad made its debut in DC Comics, one of the most influential ad campaigns of our generation hit the mainstream as the “United Colors of Benetton” pushed us to find common ground through fashion.

It was a brave moment in marketing. Black and white, the healthy and the sick, the able-bodied and the physically challenged were thrown into the same frame – a family photo of the human race, reflecting a certain moment in time.

Suicide Squad seems to pick up on that late ‘80s Zeitgeist, because this entire exercise from David Ayer and Zack Snyder feels like a post-apocalyptic Benetton campaign for the United Colors of Evil.

Wisely catering to just about every market on the planet, we get representatives from every variation of our species, as well as few ‘metahumans’ – beings with superpowers – to fill out the noir and neon rainbow for the poster ads.

They’re a motley crew. They don’t quite make a dozen, but they’re definitely dirty.

Deadshot (Will Smith) is an assassin, “a serial killer who takes credit cards.” Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agajabe) is a mutant scale-skinned man of amazing size and strength but packing a voice that’s forever muffled behind layers of prosthetics. Boomerang (Jai Courtney) uses, yes, a boomerang to be bad. Diablo (Jay Hernandez) is a Latino gang-banger with a skull tattooed into his face and the ability to incinerate his surroundings using his inner-fire.

Then there’s the Joker, the would-be familiar face in the crowd were he not Jared Leto. It’s the first time Leto has taken on the sneer made famous by Heath Ledger, and without reinventing the whole character, he embodies it in his own image, prancing around with a psychotic stare over his chrome grill and a yoga-boy’s ponytail.

He’s a villain who can actually sell moral vacancy, but if there’s one standout among this band of bad folk, it’s Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, the psychiatrist who was treating the Joker before falling under his love spell and sacrificing her body, face and mind to grotesque acts of cruelty.

Robbie steals the whole show as the unsheathed force of sex and violence because her character experiences all the horror as entertainment – which is where we are right now, as a culture, as we watch movies like Suicide Squad searching for giddy escapism at the end of a gun barrel, rooting for the baddest of the bad.

There is no moral force in this movie outside of Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the legitimate soldier working for the government’s special commander, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). Waller is Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld dipped in estrogen and fire-hardened in a clay oven of obedience. She’s the one who decides Earth needs a protective force created from its most toxic elements, and she’s the one in charge of Task Force X, or the so-called Suicide Squad.

Ayer makes the most of the real world parallels and highlights the insanity of creating alliances with our worst enemies for profit or power. Waller thinks she has things under control, but when one of her metahumans – the witch named Enchantress (Cara Delevigne) – goes rogue and reunites with her ancient wizard brother to threaten the planet, she’s forced to bury her mistakes.

It’s a messy burial, and it sends the whole film down the shaft because the supposed moral force is absent, making the likes of Deadshot – with his assassin’s creed – the de facto hero.

We seek scraps of heroic morality in every character, and we find them, because Ayer knows we need some hint of redemption to keep watching the carnage and chaos.

What drags the movie down isn’t its inherent darkness or its homage to Clockwork Orange anarchy, but the sprawling cast and the dramatic structure.

Ayer spends half the film setting up each character and the bringing them together under Waller’s icy grip. The back half is where we sink into the silly story involving the ancient Egyptian twins and their betrayal. “They used to worship us,” says one. “Now they worship machines… So I will build a machine that will destroy them all…”

It’s the same old villain shtik, only this time in supermodel Cara Delevigne’s body. With her long legs and abbreviated facial features, she pulls off something otherworldly and creepy with Enchantress. But in this blur of bad characters, picking out who’s truly threatening and who’s just working out their inner demons becomes the central distraction.

Ayer, the man behind Training Day and The Fast and the Furious, is certainly in his element. He brings some charm and empathy to this nasty group and he tries to please the fan base by inserting cameos of familiar superheroes, from Batman (Ben Affleck) to Flash (Ezra Miller).

It’s a blender full of flesh and sin served up in a sundae soda glass, complete with whipped cream and a cherry on top. It’s not original, nor is it emotionally engaging, but if you’re looking for a comic book movie that understands our moment in time and our collective distrust of authority, Suicide Squad shows you what subversion looks like when it’s marketed and packaged by corporate power.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, August 5, 2016