Fool Me Twice: Thoughts on Suicide Squad

Tuesday I finally got around to watching Suicide Squad, the end of the big summer movies.  Like the whole summer movie season it was pretty blah.  I'm sure most people who want to have already seen it, but just in case--spoiler alert!

My biggest problem was simply that I didn't really care about the characters.  If you think about it, the story kind of borrows from The Avengers.  In the same way that losing the Tesseract prompted Nick Fury to call up the Avengers, Amanda Waller losing control of the Enchantress prompted her to call up the Suicide Squad.  That being said, why did one work and the other really didn't?  Thinking about it, the Avengers had all been in at least one movie--though technically Mark Ruffalo hadn't but the Hulk had--and the characters were all pretty well known to start with.  None of the Suicide Squad had appeared in a movie, though a different Deadshot and Waller appeared on Arrow and Harley Quinn and Killer Croc were on the Batman Animated Series and probably other shows too.  But these versions of the characters hadn't appeared anywhere and really they weren't A-list characters.

More to that, a lot of the characters weren't really developed much.  As the highest-paid, Deadshot and Harley Quinn had fairly developed backstories.  El Diablo was really the only one with an actual character arc it seemed like.  The rest were pretty much just there.  I mean Captain Boomerang is what:  an Australian guy who robs banks and uses boomerangs for...reasons.  Killer Croc is a lame-looking monster (his head looked too big for his body most of the time) who likes BET for whatever reason.  What was the point in having Katana there at all?  The Rick Flagg/Enchantress thing was given lip service but not enough to really make anyone care--maybe if Tom Hardy had played Rick Flagg they would have developed the character more.

As far as characters go, I never liked Harley Quinn, and I still don't like her.  I guess a lot of guys are like the guards at Belle Reve:  they like her because she's that combination of sexy and crazy.  Really she just seems pathetic to me.  I mean she jumps into a vat of toxic chemicals and becomes a criminal just to be with her psycho boyfriend?  Wow, a real symbol for strong, independent women.  Incidentally, maybe it was just the half-filled theater I was in, but Harley's Looney Tunes antics got pretty much zero laughs.  Not even the giggly teenage girls laughed.  Maybe people were just being polite?

Jared Leto as the Joker was pretty lame.  He seemed like Tony Montana in clown makeup.  Meh.  His presence made me wonder what the fuck Batman's been doing all these years.  Maybe instead of worrying about Luthor and the White Portuguese, Batman should have been looking for the pscyho clown running crime in his city?  Nah.  He should be much more worried that Superman might someday break bad instead of the dude terrorizing the city right now.

And then there was poor Slipknot--the man who can climb anything.  Why wasn't his costume a red shirt from the original Star Trek?  Reading some of the early reviews, it was pretty clear the poor guy's only purpose was to demonstrate that the bombs in the necks worked.  Because really all the other characters were people I'd heard of...and then there was that guy.  They couldn't have telegraphed it more if he had been wearing a red shirt.

The weakest aspect of the movie was the villain.  First, Amanda Waller looks like a chump.  I mean she talks up how important it is to recruit metahumans (or apparently nut jobs with absolutely no powers like Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang) and then she promptly loses control of the most powerful metahuman out there.  Derp.  And the whole initial function of the Suicide Squad is to bail her out because she stayed too long in Midway City.  Plus then her brain is used to target military sites around the world.  It's pretty hard for her to have fucked it up any worse.

In general the Enchantress is a pretty weak choice for the big bad.  I'm sure the DC Universe has a lot better villains than that.  Obviously a lot of people thought the Joker would be the main villain.  Maybe even Jared Leto thought that when he signed the contract.  And really when the Suicide Squad gets there, why is she engaging in fisticuffs with them?  She has magic for fuck's sake!  I could see her as a villain in a Justice League Dark movie because they're the magic users, but since El Diablo was the only one with magic, it seemed like a mismatch. It was like in BvS:  Doomsday is a good match for Superman and Wonder Woman but what the fuck is Batman supposed to do?  The answer was apparently to be bait.  By the same token, you have a witch for the villain and an assassin and crazy girl with a baseball bat are supposed to challenge her?  Makes no sense.

And then the non-stop music cues.  Were they making a movie or an ad for the soundtrack?  Yeesh.

Not really a lot of good things I can say about it.  It wasn't boring, so that's something.  Meh.

The sad thing is I wasn't really excited by BvS or this movie and yet seeing the trailers for Wonder Woman and Justice League I was still excited.  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you; fool me four times...?

Here's the original post for today!  Sims I Like:  The Farmer's Daughter

Maybe you've heard of the farmer's daughter?  I remember an old C64 game where you were the stranger who ends up on a farm and tries to seduces the farmer's daughter without the farmer knowing.  Anyway, I wrote a story based on that called I've Become My Farm Girl Fantasy!  In the story a guy's car breaks down on the road and when he finds a house to ask for help, the lady who lives there is a witch who turns him into her hot daughter and then he ends up having sex with his best friend.  Hooray?

She looks ready for a Farmers Only.com ad with the cowboy hat and flannel shirt.  From the close-up she doesn't look that slutty, except for the exposed bra, but it's different when you see the full-body view and all that bare skin.