Anti-Hero: SUICIDE SQUAD

Suicide Squad is an ugly, shapeless, and noisy pileup of bad ideas and sloppy execution for so long it’s almost a relief when it gives up the pretense of doing something remotely new with the superhero genre and collapses into the same predictable CG autopilot required of every movie of this kind. The concept sounds terrific on paper: a Dirty Dozen made up of lesser-known villains from Batman’s rouges gallery. A tough security adviser (Viola Davis) gets permission to recruit the worst of the worst from a maximum-security prison to send on certain-doom longshot missions against supervillains. Who can say, her reasoning goes, if the next Superman will turn out to wish us harm? And who, if that happens, could stop him? That’s a clever hook, theoretically able to look at a superhero world from a different angle. And yet this movie can barely figure out how to tell its story, loaded up with false starts and weak characterization, roping in endless exposition and tonal whiplash until finally it just turns into a CG shooting gallery.

There’s trouble right at the start as the movie introduces the Suicide Squad haphazardly and repeatedly. First, there’s a prologue tour of the prison where we meet a few of the big stars, including Will Smith as preternaturally accurate hitman Deadshot and Margot Robbie as mentally unbalanced crime jester Harley Quinn. Then we follow Davis to a dinner meeting where she pitches her idea for a team of super-powered criminals. She reads their names and describes their abilities, which are repeated in on-screen text popping up next to freeze-frames in extended flashbacks. There’s a guy who’s really good at throwing boomerangs (Jai Courtney) and a firestarter (Jay Hernandez), and a guy who looks like a reptile (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Then we’re with the squad’s military leader (Joel Kinnaman) meeting the bad guys all over again, even repeating some footage we’ve already seen. Yet then we’re still finding out about new people – a witch (Cara Delevingne), a masked woman with a sword (Karen Fukuhara), a guy who is really good at climbing (Adam Beach) – with a tossed off explanation or belabored flashback as they show up. Surely there was an easier way to establish the ensemble than all these convoluted repetitions.

Writer-director David Ayer’s previous film, World War II tank actioner Fury, was also a men-on-a-mission ensemble effort, but it allowed its cast to build a rapport in a plot that had a streamlined sense of purpose with real weight. Suicide Squad feels hacked to pieces and carelessly stitched back together with whatever bits were easiest to pick back up. It’s airless cacophony, sloppily constructed out of competing impulses, less a movie, more a collection of moments indifferently assembled. It’s badly lit bad behavior trying very hard to be adolescent edgy, casually dropping PG-13 profanity and endless rounds of gunfire, random murder, and police brutality. The movie trades on images of cruelty and smarm, sexualizing or tokenizing its women and stereotyping its characters of color. It revels in unpleasant violence and mayhem, carrying on with machine gun assaults and squirmy intimidation, eventually introducing an army of faceless zombified citizens with craggy rock faces blown to bits in headshots and decapitations lovingly displayed. This may be the most violent PG-13 I’ve ever seen, not only for its explicit nastiness, but also for the general nihilistic spirit.

The heroes are villains – one of the intended Suicide Squad is the arbitrary nonsensical Big Bad – and the villains are heroes. And yet it’s a muddle with no true north on its moral compass. Good and bad don't mean anything. It features an assassin we’re to like because Will Smith is charming, and Viola Davis – our rooting interest, mind you – ruthlessly murdering innocent colleagues. Good guy Batman (Ben Affleck, making a stop between Batman v Superman and next year’s Justice League) briefly appears to punch a woman in the face. And Thirty Seconds to Mars’ frontman cameos as the Joker (surely among the most breathlessly overhyped performances in movie history), massacring dozens, but we’re supposed to go easy on him because he’s doing it for love (of the woman he’s abused). Some of the characters’ origin stories are so horrific – like Harley Quinn, a psychiatrist tortured to insanity by an inmate – that it’s sad to see them ground under the movie’s flippant approach. Robbie, a fine actress, is tasked with playing Harley as a walking quip in hot pants objectified in every frame, a difficult thing to reconcile with the coy references to her trauma. Yet still others go entirely uncharacterized, like the boomerang thrower who has a gargling Australian accent and that’s where his character traits end.

Because there’s no clear perspective beyond rank “ain’t I a stinker?” self-satisfaction and the whole thing grinds to an inevitable, if indifferently set up, conclusion of metropolitan carnage with a CG creature summoning apocalyptic beams of light shooting into the sky, nothing connects or makes an impact. There’s no sense of shape or momentum to the story. The team never makes sense as a unit, and the characters never come to life beyond whatever fleeting moments of personality the better actors can manage. In the early going, scenes are placed next to each other in what might as well be random order. By the time it settles down it’s dreary and predictable. It certainly doesn’t help how misjudged it is on every aesthetic level. The dialogue is flat and half-aware. The smeary cinematography is dim. The production design is like an explosion at a Hot Topic. It’s scored with a busted jukebox puking out snippets of obvious tunes (a bad attention-deficit copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy mixtape). The whole thing is one futile attempt after the next to make boring or baffling or distasteful moments something like entertainment. So loud and obnoxious, overstuffed and undercooked, it’s ultimately just tiring. It definitely puts the anti in anti-hero.

Head-On: CONCUSSION

Ironically, for a movie intending to raise awareness for the dangers of football-related brain injuries, Concussion proceeds to beat the audience over the head with the trauma. We see montages of hard hits, often with jocular sportscasters’ commentary and ominous medical slides and scans, thudding horrified score sawing away underneath. There’s no doubt football is a dangerous sport, and the NFL, clinging to a lucrative and popular business model that makes a lot of people very wealthy, has done all it can to downplay, deny, and intimidate anyone who’d raise serious questions about long-term health effects. The movie includes harrowing scenes of several former football players succumbing to mental stresses of one kind or another: rage, severe depression, self-harm, and suicide. It’s a scandal and an outrage that the corporation minting money off of their physical strain continues to ignore, obfuscate, and abdicate any responsibility for this strenuous work.

It’s nothing you couldn’t read about in any number of places – The New York Times, Sport’s Illustrated, GQ, and so on – but Concussion does what only a Hollywood production can to signal boost the important information. The resulting film has good intentions, carrying a message with moral outrage, but does so with a narrative muddled and grey. It tells the story of Dr. Bennett Omalu, the man whose research led to the discovery and diagnosis of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). It’s a rare brain disorder disproportionately affecting professional football players, brought on by long-term and repeated concussions which leave those afflicted with brain damage causing all manner of psychological and mental problems, contributing to untimely deaths. Omalu, an optimistic, hard-working Nigerian immigrant with several medical degrees working as a coroner in Pittsburgh, is presented as a man who simply did the right thing by reporting what he discovers. He can think of no more American thing to do, and is sad to discover an organization out to discredit him because of it.

Omalu, played by Will Smith with a gentle accent, is presented as an outsider capable of seeing the game for the violence and strain that it causes on the human body because he has no stake in the game itself. We see a team doctor (Alec Baldwin), NFL officials (Luke Wilson, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Hill Harper), and even medical professionals who are simply huge football fans (Mike O’Malley) who bristle at the idea that anything could be wrong with these players, especially if that problem arises from their sport. Evidence mounts, and it becomes harder to deny. Helpful supporters are targeted for intimidation, like Omalu’s kind but tough boss (Albert Brooks), while the good doctor is run out of town and then ignored. It’s all rather downbeat, as it should be, slowly and sadly contemplating a self-interested system of bureaucracy, capitalism, nostalgia, and politics conspiring to ignore scientific evidence for the sake of keeping a sport going unchanged at the expense of the health of its players.

For the passion and importance behind the film, it’s lifeless in execution. As it hits its marks, while leaving strange half-complete implications (why did an NFL chairman resign?) in its wake, actors don’t have much to room to maneuver. Smith plays well off all the white men in suits, projecting exhausted decency, while occasionally playing out a malnourished romantic side-plot with Gugu Mbatha-Raw. She’s asked to be a figure of warmth and compassion helping him onward, but is really just there so he has someone not in his profession to talk to between scenes of autopsies and intimidations. Somehow they both left their charisma behind the camera, deciding to play scenes of light flirtation, deep compassion, and heavy heartbreak with the bare minimum of energy.

Interesting without involving, writer-director Peter Landesman crafts a movie that leaps through the investigations on display to get to conclusions faster, shortens processes for the sake of staring at outcomes. Little time for character nuance, the people speak in informational exchanges. Omalu discovers CTE in a montage. Minds are changed, or not, in the space of wonky expositional dialogue. Tragedies play out on the sides of the frames, hinted at by the damage left in their wake – player’s deaths felt with the grim march of news footage and mourners. This is no Spotlight, patient and methodical in portraying the steps by which a cover-up was exposed. Instead, we get dribs and drabs of information, and are left to fill in gaps. What, exactly, did the NFL do to dismantle Omalu’s professional life in Pennsylvania? And what are we to think has been accomplished by the end, with notes of victory and uncertainty placed side by side?

Landesman’s approach to the material lands it squarely between impassioned op-ed and inspirational biopic, leaving it unsatisfying and unfinished any way you look at it. He doesn’t juggle the jargon with any precision, relying on rapid-fire montage and assumptions to power that plot of professional discovery and moral urgency. Meanwhile, the characters don’t come to life in any meaningful way, spouting facts and discussing right out in the open what other filmmakers might leave as subtext.  The subject matter is dispiriting enough without the movie feeling so incomplete, heavy-handed and full of miss-matched synaptic connections and half-finished thoughts. Maybe the movie itself has been concussed one too many times. Omalu’s story is far more intriguing, and his research far more vital, than the movie manages to portray.

Do You Like Movies About Gladiators? POMPEII

Hardly the first bit of fiction to spin a yarn about the final days of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city infamously swallowed up by its nearby volcano’s eruption, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is a sturdy evocation of old B-movie energy and pleasures. Its ties to cinema past – a little prestige Roman epic here, a little trashy sword-and-sandals actioner there – are earnest and sometimes exciting. This is a film with actors walking around lavishly fake sets in flowing togas and militaristic leather, speaking in vaguely English accents to denote their existence in the past. It features a love-at-first-sight slave boy/rich girl romance, Ancient Roman Empire intrigue, plots for revenge, threats of slave revolt, gladiatorial combat, and a subplot involving the funding for a new construction project. There’s something for everyone. Because Anderson never condescends to the material, throwing himself into making fine use of widescreen spaces and crackling effects work, it’s an empty diversion that comes by its schlock honestly and unpretentiously.

In the past fifteen years or so, Anderson has become one of our most reliably vivid visual storytellers, whether it be in a horror film (Event Horizon), an actioner (Death Race), a swashbuckler (The Three Musketeers), a sci-fi splatterfest (Alien vs. Predator), or all of the above (the Resident Evils). Now, those aren’t all great films or even good films, though I have a soft spot for some of them. But what they have is commitment to style and design that turns out terrific genre imagery and occasional fluid sequences of impressive action. They’re hardly what you’d call prestige pictures. They're the kind of mid-range studio fare that’s easily ignored or written off indiscriminately as nothing but garbage. But there’s a difference between lazy trash and artful trash and Anderson almost unfailingly brings the spirit of artful visual play to any project. In Pompeii, he designs a gloriously fake ancient city, a mix of shiny CGI equivalents of matte paintings and studio sets not too far removed from the kind Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper used for their Last Days of Pompeii in 1935. Within this overtly movie-ish setting, he lets his framing and staging pop with enjoyable momentum, pleasing symmetries, and striking shots.

One striking shot occurs right at the beginning, when a young Celtic boy wakes up after being knocked out cold while Romans slaughtered his entire village. He finds the corpses of his father and other rebels dangling by their feet from a lone tree in the center of a vast field. The boy grows up to be an enslaved gladiator (played by Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington) who is taken to Pompeii to compete in their tournament. He’s the slave who’ll catch the eye of the rich girl (Emily Browning). She’s the daughter of Pompeii’s leaders (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss), and spends her time fleeing the unwanted advances of a Roman senator (Kiefer Sutherland). That senator happens to be the man who led the massacre of the slave boy’s village (small world) and happens to now be in Pompeii to pay an imperially threatening visit to the town which is simmering with potentially rebellious undercurrents.

These plots are all stock elements put together by screenwriters Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, and Michael Robert Johnson with dutiful coincidences. After all, how better to make us care about the town that’s about to get buried in lava than populate it with characters engaged in colorful cardboard historical melodramas? I haven’t even mentioned the champion slave (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who will get his freedom if he kills the boy in combat. There’s a lot of conflict in this little town. Something bloody was going to go down here even without the volcano blowing its top.

The characters and plots are engaging in a rote way, but what really makes them click is the casting. Harington walks into the picture abs-first, swaggering down a dungeon corridor and into the arena in a fine entrance. He’s a chiseled hero and good match for his foe, who Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays as a tough guy you just know will come to team up with the man he’s forced to fight and attempt to get back at their enslavers. It’s a long time coming, but fairly satisfying when it does. Then there’s the romantic co-lead, Browning, who doesn’t speak so much as breathes every line from between perpetually parted lips. Harris, all gravitas, and Moss, all tough caring, lend a fine sense of parental authority to the proceedings, while Sutherland is all patrician slime. They do good work with thin material, much like their director, who makes them look great and, working with cinematographer Glen MacPherson in their fourth collaboration, brings his considerable visual interest.

It’s the rare movie that’s never fully convincing, sometimes almost laughable, and yet grows more urgent and involving every step of the way. It ends on a high downer note as the gladiator movie turns into a rumbling disaster movie. Rolling walls of acrid smoke, oozing lava, collapsing pillars, crumbling ground, and crashing waves fly off the screen (the 3D is flinchingly good in this department) as extras stumble around, smacked by debris, spilling down cracking staircases, and flailing about in flames. Pompeii is falling apart like there’s no tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of time for the stock subplots to finish off in predictable but largely satisfying ways in sword fights, chariot chases, thundering comeuppances, sacrificial acts, and a kiss. There’s not much to Pompeii in the end – or much to Pompeii in the end, come to think of it – overall nothing more than shiny schlock. But because Anderson stages the material earnestly, confidently, with a nice cast and visual appeal, it’s endearing schlock all the same. 

Misfire: BULLET TO THE HEAD

A trigger-happy shoot-‘em-up that also happens to be casually racist towards its second lead and boring as all get-out, Bullet to the Head represents a sad attempt at recapturing former action star glory for star Sylvester Stallone. The pieces are here for a fine R-rated actioner with often dependable B-movie stylist Walter Hill in the director’s chair and a good enough premise involving an evil developer (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who wants to bulldoze a slum to put up condominiums and somehow that involves hiring a hit man (Stallone) and then a second hit man (Jason Momoa) to double cross the first one and then a semi-rogue cop (Sung Kang) from out of town shows up to investigate and Christian Slater’s hanging around the villains for some reason. But hold on. I’m already getting ahead of myself by plunging right into the simplistic confusion of the plot. What you really want to know right off the bat is if it’s worth trudging to your nearest multiplex, through a blizzard in all likelihood, simply to catch a glimpse of Stallone’s action movie presence in a non-Expendables form. The answer is no.

When I showed up for a matinee over the weekend, the only other people in the theater were two older guys sitting in the back row. While I sat near the front, waiting for the trailers to start, I heard them talking.

Guy 1: I wonder why there aren’t more people here?

Guy 2: It’s ‘cause Stallone isn’t too popular anymore. Now it’s all about The Rock.

Guy 1: The Rock?

Guy 2: Yeah, Dwayne Johnson.

Guy 1: Oh, the Rock!

Guy 2: Yeah, and Jason Statham, too.

So, there you have it. That’s the state of the modern action star in a nutshell. There are the younger guys (relatively speaking) who get by on their charisma and the occasional good script. And then there’s the old guys trying to make movies that comment ever so slightly on their age while still allowing them to go around kicking just as much butt as they used to. Just a couple weeks ago there was 65-year-old Schwarzenegger as the nearly retired sheriff in The Last Stand who, when kicked through the glass door of a bar, answered a “How are you?” with “Old.” Now in Bullet to the Head, 66-year-old Stallone holds a gun on a man and asks to settle their disagreement quickly because “my arm’s getting tired.” It’s a nice wink to reality, I suppose, as is the scene where the interloping cop ogles a tattoo artist (Sarah Shahi) and mentions her looks to the old man who responds, “She’s my daughter.”

Endless expository dialogue like that gem makes up most of the scenes. Hill fills the New Orleans-set film with local color atmospherics, joylessly bloody violence, and executes every dull twist of Alessandro Camon’s script with sturdy professionalism that does nothing to bring any interest as it slowly and inevitably crawls from one predictable beat to the next. It is as lumbering an anachronism as Stallone himself, a gravely, stiff attempt to revive a sort of slicked back, pumped up, flippantly bombastic violence machine of a movie of a kind that was none too enjoyable in the first place. The Expendables movies manage to more or less pull off this trick by A) inviting the next generation (Statham, Hemsworth, Adkins) to join the macho 80’s reunion and B) having a decent sense of how silly the whole thing is in the first place.

Bullet to the Head is self-serious blunt force cheese that follows its lead’s lead, a character who grimly shoots down anyone and everyone who is a threat or who has wronged him, always knowing the right place to go, always a step ahead, and always acting like a jerk about it. He’s constantly firing condescending, usually racist, remarks at Kang as punchline punctuations. He’s constantly cruel and we’re supposed to cheer. After blasting away a helpless captive, Kang says that one isn’t to do stuff like that. Stallone’s response? “I just did.” It’s not funny, but also not surprising. But in a movie with so much backwards, reductive, dusty dumbness to rankle and irritate, its biggest crime is how boring and predictable it is. I went into the theater wide awake in the middle of the day and I soon felt myself wishing I could take a nap and wake up after the movie was over. It would’ve been a more productive use of my time.