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.

Bots Against the Current: TERMINATOR GENISYS

Yet again the timeline turns loop-de-loops through the meddling of future warfare between robots and humans in Terminator Genisys, the fifth in the thirty-year-old franchise. We return to a distant future where the machines of the world have risen up and nearly exterminated us. John Connor, the leader of human resistance, sends soldier Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor, from an unstoppable robot Terminator tasked with killing her before she can give birth. The robots want the Connors dead before they can lead the human armies. Meanwhile, the future people would very much like to stop the tech company Cyberdyne from inventing the evil robo-consciousness Skynet program in the first place. What started as a way for writer-director James Cameron to stage an epic sci-fi conflict in a small actioner on the streets of 1984 has now ballooned into a complicated story of crisscrossing time travelers forever circling the same key events, attempting to stave off the future Judgment Day.

Once time travel is involved, the series has so many alternate possible futures and pasts that there’s a lot of freedom in recasting the roles and shifting the plot variables each time. But in this series, we’re invariably doomed to face the future conflict. The best the characters can do is push back the day the robots take over. Each film makes the path there increasingly complicated. No one ever prevents future doom in the way they’d hope. It is infinite repetition, an ouroboros of franchise storytelling. In Genisys, screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier make use of temporal flexibility to repeat, remake, remix, retcon, and recombine elements of every previous Terminator movie. It’s fun, but predigested, like watching the other four all at once.

We start in a dire apocalyptic future much like the one from fourth entry Terminator Salvation, which is otherwise mostly ignored here. John Connor (Jason Clarke this time) leads an army into the robot’s secret time travel bunker, where he sends Kyle Reese (now Jai Courtney) on the mission we saw in the first Terminator. Upon arrival, Reese quickly learns the 1984 that greets him is not the one he’s been prepped for. This Sarah Connor (a wonderful Emilia Clarke) is already the tough battle-ready woman of Terminator 2, having been rescued from certain death as a child by yet another time-hopping Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), this one programmed to protect her. They’re ready to fight back. In a satisfying stretch of clever franchise reflexivity, Genisys posits changes made by all the timeline tomfoolery in amusing and sometimes exciting sequences, including a clash between this new Terminator and the younger model with digitally modified footage from the original.

But other Terminators are on the hunt, including a T2-style liquid metal shape-shifter (Byung-hun Lee). So our trio is on the run, with Reese the one told to come along if he wants to live. What follows is functional big explosion-heavy summer entertainment with several car chases (a series staple), headache-inducing sci-fi paradox pondering (ditto), and, after another zap through a time portal, a scrambling fight to stop the nefarious Genysis program from going online. It’s a cloud-based program that’ll allow our cell phone addictions to awaken Skynet and hasten mankind’s destruction. It certainly sounds bad. It all ends in a gleaming tech factory showdown similar to Terminator 3’s, bringing our tour through the franchise’s greatest hits to a slam-bang sparks-and-booms conclusion.

Between loud clashes, blandly dour performances from the main men mix with the welcome sight of Schwarzenegger returning to his most iconic role. It’s fun to watch him as an aging battlebot – “Old, but not obsolete,” he says – even if his behavior is only riffing on what we’ve seen The Terminator do before. A more interesting twist is Clarke’s Sarah Connor. She carries youthful vitality and believable authority as the movie allows her an interesting new way to shoulder destiny’s burden. What if she doesn’t want to have a baby? If she can stop Skynet, she might not have to. Meanwhile, the best new character is played by J.K. Simmons, bringing a blast of real comic energy to a harried detective who pieces together the gist of the conflict and is given the best line, muttered with exasperation upon seeing a trail of destruction, “Goddamn time-travelin' robots!” That seems like a reasonable response.

Director Alan Taylor (of Thor: The Dark World) and crew do industrial-strength Hollywood spectacle brightly and briskly, finding moments for some nifty imagery. A robot melts into a gooey mess in a shower of acid. Another gets pulled apart by an electromagnet. That’s cool. Familiar action sequences (a police station siege, a hospital escape, a helicopter attack) reappear in new contexts, allowing fans recognition and surprise. There are some nice twists here and there (most spoiled by the ad campaign, another series tradition), but there’s a sense we’ve been here before. It’s blockbuster déjà vu. Genisys gains interest beyond the diverting surface only through ripples of Terminators past. The series narrative is impossibly knotted, but I bet if you had a lot of time on your hands you could get out some graph paper and figure it out.

The approach here leads to playful rearrangement of the basic puzzle pieces, but they don’t add back up. For a series about actions and their consequences, the connection between past and present is fuzzy here. Who sent our main Terminator? And why’s the new liquid one there? And what happens in the future to cause the Big Twists here? Maybe it had something to do with former Doctor Who star Matt Smith, who is in so little of the movie he’s presumably mostly on the cutting room floor. These questions leave the movie feeling like just another knot in the timeline when it plays like what should be an essential addition. But I enjoyed the setpieces for their slick thrills and empty echoes. It fits into the same pessimistic loop as the others, with the same characters fighting the same battles, hoping to push back inevitable war. Your enjoyment depends on how much you enjoy futility.

Generic Dystopia Blahs: DIVERGENT

So many young adult novels have gotten so lugubrious and solemn about subject matter that’s inherently exciting pulp. They’ve forgotten that fast and fun are not adjectives that preclude serious themes. Stories of teenage vampires and teenage gladiatorial combat and teenage dystopias have become these long, slow, formless blobs of deadening trembling import, eliding any B-movie energy they could potentially kick up. It’s like they feel the need to reassure their teen readership that they’re important by placing protagonists their age in the center of every single thing of importance in any given YA world. The weight of these decisions crushes the fun. The Hunger Games adaptations have just barely managed to escape this fate by working an interesting and enjoyable vein of satire and having actual characters for adults to play. You get why moments matter in those movies.

But Divergent has no such luck. It’s empty and bland, a movie built from the ground up to flatter its protagonist. You see, the world it imagines, a post-apocalyptic Chicago that’s been dried up and cordoned off, is split into five discreet career-based factions: scientists called Erudite, lawyers called Candor, farmers called Amity, soldiers called Dauntless, and philanthropists called Abnegation. The divisions between the groups are intensely policed. Once a teen picks their faction in a choosing ceremony, there’s no going back. Flunking out of the track chosen means a faction-less life of abject poverty and homelessness. Our protagonist’s only problem is that she’s too smart, too talented, and too all-around great to fit in only one faction. She’d be perfect in any and all of the factions. She can do everything. And that’s why she’s a threat. She’s just too good for this world.

She’s Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, who is good enough at suggesting interiority to make something of a character out of nothing at all. Her primary attribute is her boldness, which leads her to drift away from her parents’ selfless charity-based Abnegation towards the law enforcement Dauntless. It’s there that she realizes the problems of being labeled Divergent, what the world of this story calls those who fit more than one category. I guess if they have a name for it, then Tris isn’t the first. How this society operates, I’m not quite sure. They claim to have existed in these five separate but equal factions for 100 years. Yet the overarching plot is about the villainous head of Erudite (Kate Winslet) deciding to overthrow and wipe out one of the other factions. Why hasn’t this happened sooner? The whole system seems unstable to me, partially because it seems calculated to avoid any explicit political messaging while providing a scenario in which the protagonist is the most special of all special people and can see their world’s grand design. Good for her, I guess.

The story follows Tris as she slowly becomes a great Dauntless and ends up involved with every major machination of the plot. The fate of future Chicago is in her hands. She meets a handsome Dauntless guy (Theo James) and has a crush on him. The architecture of his face probably has something to do with that, especially the way the camera lingers on his intense stares. Lucky for her, he eventually reciprocates those feelings. Along the way we get endless training montages and some uncomfortable militaristic hazing between barking about showing no fear from an ensemble of young heroes (Zoe Kravitz, Ansel Elgort), villains (Jai Courtney, Mekhi Phifer), and at least one wisenheimer who is not quite either (Miles Teller). Joining Winslet as the token adults in the cast are Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwyn, Maggie Q, and Ray Stevenson in a collection of helpful or harmful influences on Tris and her friends. They stand around in their awkward costumes and pretend this all makes sense, lending it a modicum of weight by reminding us of the better roles they’ve had.

Director Neil Burger’s approach is generic, impersonal, but sometimes serviceable. One nice scene involves a zip line off the top of a skyscraper and through the abandoned skyline of the city. I liked that. But most of the movie, adapted by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor from the book by Veronica Roth, involves pretty faces held in close-up. For over two hours they murmur towards each other, worried about who is going to be Dauntless, what the Erudites are up to and who is spreading rumors about Abnegation. They find it far more important than I did. All the intent declarations involving their faction titles only had me wondering why this society would choose such unwieldy adjectives for their groups’ names.

The film feels so claustrophobic and small, spending most of its time in rooms and caves and warehouses. When we finally pull back for wide shots, the sense of CGI space it tries to create feels fake and tiny, utterly inconsequential and entirely arbitrary. Chicago is a husk of its former self, but the “L” is still running and apparently automated? Okay. Maybe it works on the page (somehow I doubt it). But on screen, the whole thing just looks dumb.

Here Comes the Boom: A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s probably time to stop wishing for a truly satisfying Die Hard sequel. Oh, sure, Die Hard 2 and especially Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard are solid action movies with some fun sequences, nice special effects, and a sense of relaxed tension slowly escalating, but none of them match the elegant simplicity of the 1988 original, which matches a wry Bruce Willis performance with an airtight plot of ever rising suspense. It’s an impeccably timed nail-biter that holds up remarkably well, largely because of a smoothly unfolding plot in which every scene has a purpose and every scrap of characterization contains a sliver of setup that leads to big payoffs.  

Now we’ve arrived at a fourth sequel, A Good Day to Die Hard, which one could argue fails the least of any Die Hard sequel, but only because it tries the least. I’m not one to reward aiming low, so I’m more than ready to declare it the weakest of the bunch. It’s the shortest of the franchise by nearly half an hour, but is nonetheless a nearly instantly exhausting experience that starts with the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor and the sound effects cranked up to eleven. It’s a barrage of noise failing to distract from the movie’s essential blankness, a void of purpose and pleasure from which only competently ground out setpieces emerge.

This is the kind of action movie so relentless and breathless that the more it explains itself, the more I wondered why I cared and why the filmmakers bothered. The simple plot quickly and dumbly told follows John McClane (Willis, of course) to Moscow, after he’s told his estranged son (Jai Courtney) was arrested there. When he arrives, he finds himself pulled into a plot in which some glowering Russians want to get a MacGuffin from some other glowering Russians, a process that involves a bunch of bombs, crunchy car chases, seemingly limitless supplies of human targets and endlessly expelled projectiles. It turns out McClane, Jr. is not in trouble for the shady reasons his father assumes. He’s a C.I.A. operative trying to sneak one of the good Russians out of the country before something bad happens. What that Bad Thing is, I’m still not sure. I’d tell you more but A.) I don’t need to spoil it and B.) I don’t quite know what’s going on with this plot that thins as it goes, springing twists with all the sad inevitability of a magician who is insufficiently hiding his slight of hand. The whole thing drones along, shedding complications as it goes.

The first car chase of the film happens more or less right away and is an overheated, nearly cartoonish thing of pinwheeling debris, endless rounds of ammunition, cars driving on top of other cars, trucks crashing down to the road from off of concrete overpasses. John McClane just saw his son rescue a good Russian from an assassination attempt while fleeing from heavily armed bad guys and decides to steal a car to chase after the chase. It’s such a strange character moment for a man whose defining characteristic over four previous films has been his reluctance, his smirking, can-you-believe-this-is-happening-to-me attitude of stepping up only because he’s the only one in a position to do so. Here he throws himself into a collateral-damage-catastrophe simply because he wants to. Later, he’ll gleefully talk about “shooting bad guys” and smirking at his son as they bond over their constant stream of action related incidents.

It’s directed by John Moore, who keeps the slam-bang action coming nonstop. He has spent the bulk of his career making serviceable B-pictures for 20th Century Fox, movies like Behind Enemy Lines (okay), a remake of The Omen (fine), and Max Payne (dull). When viewing this movie as simply another modest action effort, without considering the franchise baggage, it’s a bit better. That opening car chase that’s a mess of characterization is satisfactorily crusty and goofy and a climactic fulmination at an abandoned nuclear power plant has some CG-assisted stunt work that goes so far over the top, it provides us with a long, sustained bird’s-eye-view of the top as it sits way down below. But what’s inescapably strange and off-putting about this movie of intermittently minor pleasures is the way it just doesn’t feel like a Die Hard movie. Its thinly written script by Skip Woods is papered over in superficial plot complications that fade away so that, by the film’s improbable action climax and sappy Hallmark dénouement, it’s all too clear how empty it all is. It’s as fleeting and unpleasant as the acrid smoke that quickly drifts away from all the carnage the characters leave behind.

More Than a Name: JACK REACHER

There’s a scene in the middle of Jack Reacher in which the man himself (Tom Cruise), a former military investigator now poking around in the aftermath of a seemingly random shooting, finds himself confronted by two toughs ready to clobber him over the head. Reacher falls back in a confined space and his attackers, inexperienced and overeager, swing wildly. Reacher moves precisely and quickly, giving his attackers just enough room to inadvertently beat each other up, leaving him free to continue his investigation. This is a fun scene, well choreographed and a nice blend of danger mixed with a small amount of humor. But it is also a good enough metaphor for the film itself and the way it goes about working. It’s hardly original material, but it’s well written, quick-witted (at times) and precise, ready to lean back and let the plotting fall into place with good instincts. It’s a fine thriller, crisp, quickly paced, and with a smartly plotted mystery.

It starts with a terrifying act of violence. A sniper shoots into a crowd, seemingly at random, resulting in five deaths. The man the police take into custody does not speak when interrogated. He scrawls on a piece of paper a simple directive: Get Jack Reacher. They don’t have to look very far. He’s already on his way. What’s his connection to the accused? It’s all a tad more complicated than I need to get into here. Let’s just say that Reacher agrees to help the defense attorney (Rosamund Pike) investigate the case, while navigating the evidence provided by a perceptive detective (David Oyelowo) and the District Attorney (Richard Jenkins). How this seemingly open and shut case soon involves tails and goons (Jai Courtney and Vladimir Sizov), hired toughs (Josh Helman and Michael Raymond-James), an in-over-her-head girl (Alexia Fast), and a shadowy, mostly fingerless man played by the beloved German filmmaker Werner Herzog is complexity that eventually gives way to a grim, pulpy simplicity.

What holds the film steady on its course is the constant focus of Jack Reacher. As played by Cruise, the man’s a steady rock, a determined investigator who lives off the grid and shows up to help here out of a sense of duty. He’s no-nonsense, but with some terse quips here and there that are welcome wry one-liners. This character’s already appeared in a popular and ongoing series of novels by Lee Child from which I’ve meant to read one or two for a while now. Here Christopher McQuarrie, a fine screenwriter in his second directorial outing, gives the whole production the kind of easy familiarity and relentless steady momentum that drives us inevitably forward through the tangles of mystery, inevitable precisely because of the character at the center. Reacher feels like a character who enters fully formed. We know that he will get to the bottom of the mystery precisely because he’s so determined, part Shane, part Dirty Harry, a man who’s no (or rather, rarely a) loose cannon vigilante, but a man looking for justice with comprehensive training to back up his professed skills.

Cop and lawyer procedurals have told similar stories, investigating shocking crimes that aren’t as simple as they seem thousands of times over, an hour at a time, on TVs worldwide. What’s better here is the weight given to violence, a proper sorrow and horror. The opening shootings are scary enough (especially haunting in light of the many real life random massacres we’ve seen this year), but as we return to the event as the characters try to learn more, we’re given a montage that reveals who the victims were, examining their humanity with unexpected depth. Later on in the film, when a likable side character is suddenly murdered, it’s a sharp pain of a moment, unexpectedly fast and upsetting. How often do mysteries treat the deaths involved as mere plot point? Here, they’re felt more deeply than usual, which gives a heft to the unraveling mystery it might not otherwise have.

McQuarrie has made a fine example of slick popcorn filmmaking that’s serious about its entertainment. It doesn’t shortchange its subject by cheapening it. Instead, he allows the horror of the inciting incident to inform the intensity with which the audience is able to root for Reacher to untangle the motivations and conspiracies behind it. The movie embraces genre tropes a bit too much in the climax with what was an enjoyable investigation taking a turn into a standard action movie showdown, but McQuarrie never loses his refreshingly steady eye for framing the events on screen. This is a solid, well-built example of Hollywood craftsmanship that serves up some unsettling material and then brings in a movie star hero written with the right set of smarts to settle things back down again.