My Long-Winded Suicide Squad Review

I tried to keep out any major spoilers, but there definitely some in here anyway.

So I went to see Suicide Squad on Thursday night. I was really looking forward to this one, I think it was really well marketed. It gave off a strong vibe of something different, something unique. Something a bit scary and fucked up and also really funny and just not at all what superhero movies have been lately. That said, all the negative reviews persuaded me to temper my expectations to a large degree, so when I went I was still excited but, we’ll say, cautiously optimistic.

Here’s the thing. Suicide Squad is a deeply flawed film. There are weird plot elements, there are a number of characters and arc that are under served, there are clichés and overused plot elements and all sorts of other little problems throughout. There was enough wrong with this movie for me to thoroughly dislike it.

So why did I like it so much?

Honestly, for all its flaws, glaring as they were, I genuinely enjoyed myself. It didn’t blow me away. It certainly didn’t live up to my highest expectations. But I had a good time, and I’m more than willing to forgive most, if not all, the issues I had with it.

The only answer I can come up with is charm. I feel like the movie had real charm, and if there’s enough of that I can forgive just about anything. Will Smith had charm. Margot Robbie had charm. Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez, Joel Kinnaman. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, under all that Croc makeup, had charm. Narratively, I was given nothing to believe that this group had bonded over the course of the film. But they sold it to me anyway.

There was plenty more to like about the movie. The action, once it actually got moving, was decent. The movie looked great, from the costumes to the special effects to the opening and closing credits. Even the darker vibe worked for me, and I usually get annoyed by movies that are too-dark. (Of course, this is a Suicide Squad movie, not a Superman movie.)

So let’s get into some Pros and Cons:

PROS:

The Cast

This was a very well-acted film. The standouts were the obvious ones: Will Smith as Deadshot, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Jay Hernandez and Diablo, Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc.

Smith brings his signature mix of humor and pathos, playing a killer-for-hire who doesn’t feel any remorse for what he’s done, but clearly pines for his daughter in a way that, I’ll admit, got a bit heavy-handed at times, but was for the most part a strong grounding element.

Robbie is about as Harley Quinn as you can get this side of Tara Strong. She brings the manic energy and twisted sense of humor that’s made the character so popular in the comics, but just when you think Harley’s nothing but a mindless psycho, she’s able to show real heart, and even utilizes her psychiatric background to provide a bit of therapy.

Hernandez as Diablo is a somewhat underdeveloped character, especially considering the major role he plays toward the end. This might have been deliberate, but I still think they could have given him a better introduction to the audience. Still, he manages to bring it hard, and was a surprise favorite.

And Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc was just about perfect. He had only a few lines, but I think that worked best for his character. He didn’t need an extended arc, he just needed to show up when he was needed. His few lines of dialogue were perfect, and he crushed it in the actions scenes exactly as a bruiser should.

The Wall:

Yes, she gets her own sub-header. Half my excitement for this movie was specifically to see Amanda Waller. And Viola Davis was exactly perfect. She was cold, she was fearless, she was badass. And yes, I acknowledge that the entire plot revolved around Waller completely dropping the ball. That’s on her. In all honesty, though, I think that works really well for this movie. The whole concept behind Suicide Squad is that when you bring together a team of villains to do a job like this, the results are going to be unpredictable. The idea is that the whole concept is an exercise in playing with fire. That’s what Waller does.

And outside of the plot, Davis nailed the character. One of my favorite moments is an exchange between Waller and Boomerang toward the end of the movie, and I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but it’s about as Waller a moment as you can get (and, to be honest, it’s a great moment for Captain Boomerang, too).

The Soundtrack:

You remember the, like, mid-to-late 90s? When there were just a ton of great movie soundtracks. Half the time the movies were crap (*cough* Spawn *cough*), and the music wasn’t even in the movie, or it was shoehorned in with some kid listening to five seconds of it on their car radio or something, just to get it on the album. Man, I miss those. I’d love to see soundtrack albums make a comeback, and I hope this is the start of that.

I was psyched for Suicide Squad’s soundtrack specifically because it has a new Grimes song on it, Medieval Warfare, which doesn’t disappoint. But there’s much more to love on there. Skylar Grey’s Wreak Havic, Grace and G-Easy’s You Don’t Own Me. And, look, there is never a reason to cover Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s a perfect song. But. Panic! At the Disco does a pretty solid job of it. So I don’t mind it.

CONS:

Harley’s “Shorts”:

They look stupid. Like, really stupid. I can’t fathom what they were going for with that. Sexy? Wedgie? Sexy wedgie? Whatever, they look stupid and I hate them. I don’t even care if she wears the original costume or not, just put her in something that doesn’t look stupid.

Pretty Much the Entire First Act:

There’s a sequence, which probably only lasts for about twenty minutes, but feels like half the movie. Amanda Waller is talking to some General or something, who I would swear from the trailers was played by Clancy Brown, but turned out to be some other dude whose name I don’t feel like looking up right now (edit: I think it’s Ted Whittall as Admiral Olsen.) She’s basically explaining her whole Task Force X plan to him, totally Walling it up, positively giddy at the idea of getting “the worst of the worst” for her squad.

And then we go through a series of short, poorly edited flashbacks that show Deadshot, Harley, Diablo and Boomerang all getting caught. And that’s fine, including those scenes is fine, but making them flashbacks, and having another character narrating who these people are in great detail, really takes any tension out of them. They become exposition, nothing more. Most of these scenes didn’t need narrated at all, and we already knew these characters were in jail, we saw them there. We could have opened with these introductory scenes in real time, then cut to them in prison, then have Waller chatting up the military. More economical, more engaging, etc.

Add to that another sequence where Waller and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) are touring the prison, meeting all these characters once again, and it’s just a lot of bloat, a lot of time spent learning the same things over and over again. It genuinely felt like half the movie had gone by before the first realtime action scene with these characters.

The Villains:

By the villains, I mean the antagonists, since basically everyone in this movie was a villain. Cara Delevingne did a perfectly good job as both June Moone and the Enchantress. I have no qualms with that part of it. I just think everything else to do with her was poorly, I’d say lazily, done. I was never sold on the relationship between Flag and Moone. That was meant to be his entire motivation, and it just never clicked for me. There was very little time spent there, and once again, we were told, by Waller, that he was in love with her, and were pretty much just expected to believe it.

Beyond that, there was a lot of sort of lazy hand-waving around the whole plot. They never even bothered to explain what her evil plan even was, just that she had some ill-defined supernatural sky beam with a whirling vortex of debris around it. It felt like they just couldn’t be bothered to develop a real plot for her, like it was just background noise.

There’s a scene where she’s got her vortex going, and she’s just kind of doing an arm-wave shimmy thing in front of it, generic spell-casting stuff, and the team is trying to sneak up on her and put together a plan of attack. And it felt like one of those points in a video game, where the big boss battle is coming up, and you have to run around and talk to all the party members and make everyone is fully equipped and so on, and the bad guy is just off in the background trapped in some pointless repetitive animation, waiting for you to finish up and select “ready to go” to trigger the next cut scene.

Katana:

This one really bugged me. I have no problem with Katana per se, but it was never really explained what she was doing there. She just showed up, and Flag was all “She’s with me,” and there was like one bit where they explained how her sword worked and something about avenging her husband’s death, which explains nothing about why she’s on Flag’s or Waller’s or whoever’s side. And then all of a sudden she was just not anymore, everyone fucked off to have a drink, and she went with them. She had almost no dialogue, and when she did it was in Japanese. I can’t help but think she was really important in an earlier draft of the script, and then they just cut her arc out, but left her in.

And yeah, Slipknot was pretty lazily done, too, but he was only in like two scenes, and I thought it was pretty funny how he went out. Clearly he had the same issue of having more of an arc in a previous draft, but it was important for him to stay in just for that minute.

So that’s my Pros and Cons list, and I think that pretty much wraps this review. I feel like there was something else I wanted to mention, but I can’t think of what that might be. So that’s that.

Okay, okay, I was kidding, I’ll talk about the Joker.

First, I think it’s important to point out that I don’t have the same nerd-boner for the Joker that most people seem to have. I think there have been some really well-written stories featuring him, sure. But I never got the whole “he’s Batman’s greatest villain” thing. I think people just like the idea of a charismatic psychopath, which is fine, but it’s not my thing. Give me a Riddler or a Mr. Freeze or a Bane any day of the week. There’s so many fun ones to choose from.

That said, I really dug the last Joker (Heath Ledger, as if I need to remind you), like most people, and Nicholson is a classic, and so on. So I was really interested to see where this one went.

The fact is, it’s really hard to make a solid judgement on this, because he didn’t have that much screen time. I can definitely see where they’re going with the character. More of a drug-lord vibe than anything else, excess, violence. Gangland royalty. And I like it. This is a Joker that we’ve seen in the comics before. He wasn’t always just some psycho, he’s led the Gotham underground before. And I think it fits for the next generation of Batman movies. It gives you places to go.

Whether or not Leto actually pulled this off in a satisfying way is a much different question. And, like I said, it’s hard to tell. There are moments where I think it worked perfectly. There are moments where he’s truly frightening, where he really carries the air of a feared and respected gang leader, and still has that unpredictable mad streak.

There are also moments where it’s obvious he’s trying really hard to seem crazy, and he just comes off as someone trying really hard to seem crazy. And those definitely didn’t work for me. They were few and far between, but again, so were his scenes.

Of course, I know there’s a lot of talk about the Joker/Harley relationship that was seen in an earlier cut, a much more obviously abusive relationship, and honestly, that would have made more sense to me. Trying to spin that mess as anything other than abusive just rubs me the wrong way.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see where he turns up next, with or without Harley.

So that’s that. Clearly you can see that there were a lot of serious issues with the movie. But, like I said, it still worked for me. I still enjoyed it for the most part, once things got moving. And I definitely think that can be attributed to the strong performances by the cast.

Anyway, the movie’s been getting a lot of hate, and a decent amount of it I think is overblown and unwarranted. And I’ll say this, to cap things off. I didn’t care for Man of Steel. Like, at all. (And, btw, I really hated Snyder’s Watchmen, if that matters.) I didn’t even bother with BvS, it looked terrible, and when everyone said it was terrible I believed them, and I even read all the plot summaries and reviews, and everything I got from them told me it was an incoherent mess and not worth my time.

And look, I’m not all of a sudden going to run out and go see BvS or anything. But I do kind of get now why fans of the movie were getting so defensive. There are people that are clearly taking a lot of pleasure from tearing these movies apart. Hell, I was enjoying seeing it get torn apart.

(This is not to say I endorse writing petitions to have review sites shut down or anything, that’s just dumb.)

So there it is. My brief Suicide Squad note that blew up into a really long review. If you stuck with it this far, congrats! Go have a drink! (I mean thanks for reading!)

Campaigners and Crowdfunding

Here I am again, with my monthly, bi-monthly, however-the-hell-long-it's-been blog post! And no, I'm not going to talk movies, not even Civil War (though it was awesome, and yes, I loved Spider-Man in it). I'm here to talk about one of my projects, which I haven't done here in a very long time.

The project is Campaigners, and I know I've talked about it here before, for much the same reason as I'm going to today. I need your help.

As you might have noticed, the Kickstarter did not fund, which was not a surprise as it was for a much larger amount than I had any right to expect. It was just too big a project, so I decided to break it down in to pieces. Five issues, twelve pages each, digital-only. I was able to fund the first issue through indie gogo, and we've completed the first two issues now, with the third well on it's way.

(The first two issues can be found on the website, zeropresscomics.com, or on comiXology.)

The last two issues, however, require a bit more help. We have another indie gogo campaign running right now, this one is to fund issues 4 and 5 and complete the series.

For those not familiar with the story, it's set in 2076, where Presidential debates have been replaced with a no-holds-barred fight to the death. The event is hugely popular, it's like the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.

Kydra Franks is a high-school girl who hates the debates, is convinced they're the source of all the country's problems, or at least a glaring symptom of them. When approached by a reporter and asked about the election, she lashes out against the debates and declares she's refusing to vote. When her rant goes viral, she gets caught in the middle of a huge social upheaval as more and more young people latch onto her movement.

I say this every time I talk about this book, and it gets more true each time. I am immensely proud of the work we've been doing. The story is turning out wonderfully, and MJ's art is phenomenal. Mey Rude has been consulting and editing the script, and her guidance has been crucial every step of the way. And Sean's letters, and logos, and all the designs he's done have really brought everything together.

I swear this book is turning out so much better than I could have hoped. Whenever I'm worried about a scene being dull and slowing down the book, MJ comes back with some of her strongest pages, taking a simple conversation between a father and daughter and injecting such powerful emotion into it.

This is why it's so important to see this book through to the end. There's so much great work being done here it would be a huge waste not to get all the way through it.

But we CAN NOT do it without your help. This is not posturing. This is not hyperbole. If this campaign doesn't get funded, these issues will not get made. The money simply will not be there.

This is the reality of indie comics. We need your support more than anything. We don't make money off these books, and for a lot of us, we're not even breaking even. We do this because we have passion for our projects, and for the craft. We do this because these stories are too important to us not to tell them.

So please, take a look at our campaign, take a look at the rewards we're offering, and if you can pledge, it would immensely helpful, and if not, even just sharing the project would help.

And thank you for listening!

Captain America: Civil War (no, I haven't seen it yet)

Hey, guess what? Civil War is almost out! I'm hella psyched for this movie! Winter Soldier remains my favorite of the Marvel movies, and I'm really hoping this one will exceed that. I can't wait to see Black Panther, and Cap and Bucky in action side-by-side. I can't wait to see Crossbones in action. I rewatched the first Cap the other night, and it as good as I remembered (maybe even better) and I plan to watch Winter Soldier again tonight.

I just wanted to address something here very quickly, because I have, in the past, been very down on the idea of Spider-Man in the MCU, and now that it's happening, I wanted to say a couple things on it.

First off, I want to make something clear. It has never been my position that Marvel couldn't make a good Spider-Man. It's only ever been my position that Marvel didn't need Spider-Man, and I stand by that. There are any number of young super heroes out there, many designed specifically to replicate the Spider-Man formula, that Marvel could tap if they want that archetype in their movies (Ms. Marvel comes immediately to mind, for one).

I still think the Sony deal wasn't great for Marvel. I think they gave more than they got in that agreement. I won't change my mind on that.

BUT...

It's here. It's done. Spider-Man's in the movie, and his own movie is on the way.

Look, I will always root for a movie to be good. Always. I prefer a good movie to a bad one. Now that Spider-Man is officially a part of the MCU, I hope they do it right. I hope they make it work. And from what I've been hearing from early reviews, they've done just that. (I don't tend to listen to early reviews, to be honest, so I'll see for myself on Friday.) Even if his solo movie is terrible, the MCU can survive some bad movies if he's done right when he shows up in the other movies.

So yeah, I still don't think Marvel should have made the deal. But that's irrelevant now. So I'm going to root for Spidey to be good, and when he is I'm going to be happy about it.

(I just hope they don't pull some Age of Ultron BS and kill Zemo offscreen like they did with Strucker. WTF was that about?)

The Mug Story

So here's a weird, rambling little story that I'm going to post for no other reason than that I haven't posted anything here in some time, and I've been think a lot about this.

I was looking at mugs at Target yesterday, but I couldn't quite bring myself to buy one.

Let me back up. I drink a lot of tea. Like, a lot. I start my day with two cups, something dark. I like Constant Comment, I like Earl Grey, English Breakfast (or Irish Breakfast), Darjeeling. I like it strong, and I don't add sugar or milk or anything. I'll make my morning cup, and then when that's done I'll use the same bag to make another. (I also sometimes use loose tea, but it's usually more expensive than the bags so not all the time.)

At lunch I'll make myself green tea. Tazo makes a green with ginger that's really good, or just normal green tea is fine. Depending on what I have going on later, I might have a second cup of green also.

If I work my second job, at a Thai restaurant, I can drink all the tea I want there. So I'll usually have 2 cups of jasmine tea, sometimes four. If I don't have work, I have various herbal teas that I'll usually dig into, peppermint, or chamomile, I have a lemon ginger that's pretty good, or a few other blends. And then I end my night with a cup of sleepytime tea (I'm sipping on some as I write this).

I had this mug that I really liked, and I broke it a few weeks ago. It was a pretty frustrating week, and the mug was just a part of that. It was the week Bowie died, so I was pretty severely depressed all week. (I'm a huge Bowie fan, if I haven't mentioned that on here, and I was devastated to hear of his death.)

That was also the week that I almost quit comics entirely. I had a pretty serious financial setback, or rather, I was counting on bringing in a chunk of money that was going to go to a project, and that money never happened.

I was already pretty low that week, like I said, and then the mug broke, and the money thing happened, or rather didn't happen. It was one of those moments I just really felt like giving up entirely. Kind of an overreaction, I know, but anyway, I ended up launching Campaigners on indiegogo instead, so there you go.

Anyway, yeah. So, I broke my mug. I dropped something (I don't remember what) onto the handle, and it just broke. I was pretty bummed.

I should tell you about the mug. When I started drinking tea a lot, there was this Starbucks mug. I'd never really noticed it in the cupboard before, I assumed it was my wife's. I started using it. It was bigger than normal mugs, and it was the perfect size to make two cups of tea with one teabag. (I'm currently using a mug that belongs to my wife, that's also bigger than a standard mug, but not as big as the Starbucks one.)

So I asked my wife once if it was okay to use the Starbucks mug, or I may have apologized for it getting stained by the tea, or something. I don't remember, all I remember is her saying that it wasn't her mug. She didn't know where it had come from, and neither did I. Like it had just always been there.

That's what was cool about that mug. It had just kind of appeared, the perfect mug, out of nowhere. So I'm at Target yesterday, looking for a new mug, and they had a few that were about the right size, but it felt weird to just buy a mug, just at Target.

The mug I use at work is a mug I got for backing Reading Rainbow on kickstarter. The mug I'm using now my wife bought from a non-profit her sister used to work for. I have a mug I got when the Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer album went on sale, I bought it with the digital download of the album.

And, of course, the plain white mug that just said Starbucks in small letters on it, that had just materialized in our kitchen, and was the perfect size.

So I didn't end up buying a mug. I'm sure I will, and I'm sure it'll be fine. It's just one of those things. You have a thing, and it's got a cool story behind it, and you love it, and then it's gone, and you just go to the store and replace it, with something normal and boring and functional.

I used to have this pair of Chucks. A few days after I'd bought them I spilled some bleach on one. It looked really crappy with just a bunch of big flecks of bleach, so I just decided to bleach it all the way, until it was this pink-ish, orange-ish color. And I left the other shoe the way it was, so I had two mismatched shoes. It was like a signature, and I had those shoes for years. When it was time to throw them out, I thought about getting a new pair and bleaching one again. Or buying two different color pairs and switching them out. It just wouldn't be the same.

(I might still do the second one, buy different colored pairs, one of these days, when I have plenty of disposable income.)

I don't know what the point of all this is, just thinking about it a lot and I wanted to put it out there somewhere. I think I'm about done now. Time to go to bed.

Campaigners Kickstarter is Live!

It feels like I only come here anymore when I want something from you.

Ah well, if I had more time, or more to say...

Anyhow, I have another Kickstarter running now! I mention a while back about a project called Campaigners, and we've finally got the Kickstarter launched! You can find the project here.

This is a much, MUCH bigger project than I've ever tried before. This is important to me for a number of reasons. This story is incredibly important to me,. It started out as just a small, weird, almost a joke of idea. "What if candidates had to fight each other to the death?" It's one of those things you think of and laugh about. Gee, that'd be great to watch! Right?

Except would it, really? If the sort of person who would beat another person to death with their bare hands for power were put in charge of the country? That would be, for lack of a better phrase, pretty fucked up.

That was my starting point. Looking at political campaigns now, it's all just a game. How best can I convince people to vote for. Not by being the best candidate, but by putting on the best show. In retrospect, pro-wrestling might have been a better analogy for what I was trying to accomplish at that point, but MMA seemed so much more brutal.

While I was developing the idea I realized I needed a POV character. It couldn't just be about the fighters. There needed to be someone watching this and realizing how much a mess it all was.

That's when I met Kydra Franks. A teenage girl, with all the angst and confusion that comes with being a teenage girl. A little bit of an outsider, frustrated at the fact that no one else sees how absurd the system is. The more I got to know her, the more I realized that she wasn't just the POV character, she was the main character. This is her story.

There's a lot of myself in the character of Kydra. Especially the me I was in high school. Smarter than average, but not as smart as she thinks. Self-assured but lacking confidence. As she developed, the idea occurred to me that she should have a best friend. A co-conspirator.

And thus was born Bee. Bianca Faye. Pretty much Kyd's complete opposite. Outgoing. Loves clothes and music. Doesn't care about politics, at all. While I was playing with the her characteristics, I decided to see what would happen if she were a transgender girl. How would that effect the story? And, quite honestly, it opened the story up entirely.

Bee went immediately from a sidekick to practically as much of a protagonist as Kyd. It's because of Bee getting bullied that Kyd lashes out publicly against the political system. It's Bee, trying to piggyback off Kyd's sudden notoriety, who organizes a public protest. And so much more.

The last cog in the machine was the President. I honestly didn't think I needed to do much with him. Just give him a vaguely Presidential history, so I made him a lawyer who got into politics. Give him a background in fighting. He was from a rough neighborhood, poor, learned to fight young, worked his way through school with MMA scholarships.

The thing is, the crux of the story hinges on this character. If the system is going to change, he's the one that has to decide to change it. If it isn't going to change, it will be because he chose to do nothing.

The big breakthrough was a line that he says, and I'm not going to say the line, or who he says it to, or any other context, because it's late in the story and it would give too much away. But it really informed his character for me, and I suddenly understood who this man was. This was a man who defended poor teenagers, mostly black teenagers, being bullied by a dysfunctional legal system. This was a man who lost his first fight for the Presidency, nearly died, and was told he would never fight again. This was a man who fought his way back into the ring, and destroyed all comers.

Of course, it didn't become real until I came across MJ Barros online. I don't remember at this point where I first saw her work, but I knew immediately that she was an artist I wanted to work with. It was clear that she would be an ideal artist for this particular project. It wasn't until she started putting together character designs and promo art that I realized that she was the perfect artist for the project.

I can't imagine doing this book with anyone else. She's brought so much to the project. Everything she's done has been better than expected. And it's not just her art. MJ is from Chile, a country that was until recently run by a violent dictator. These issues are very real to her. She reminds me regularly how important issues like voting rights and the right to assemble are to her. Having her on the book, I think, forces me to take it more seriously than I might otherwise. It keeps me from being overly cynical. There's a passion to the project that simply wouldn't be there without MJ's presence.

And finally, Sean Rinehart, who designed the logo and has put a ton of effort into making all the promotional material look great. He's done an amazing job so far of designing everything and he'll be lettering the book as well as providing further designs (including something really interesting in the book that I don't want to go into too much detail on but am really excited about).

Everything about this project has been an incredible experience so far, and I can't wait to see this book completed. It's terrifying and amazing and I can't wait for everyone to read this story!

So please take a look, and share it around, and maybe give a little money? It's a huge goal, I know, but every cent will go toward creating the book, paying the artists, printing the book, getting the rewards made, and so-on. It's necessary, I promise. And it will be worth it, I promise that as well.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Brendan

Summer Playlist!! (there's still a little summer left)

So I know it's kind of late, since summer's just about over. But the weather is still pretty hot where I am, and there's a nice three day weekend coming up for Labor Day, so I thought I'd share what I've been listening to all summer.

(Note: I tried posting this on my tumblr, but I couldn't seem to get the actual player to embed. I think I've figured out how to do it here, which will be much better than just posting a link to their web-player. If it doesn't work, I'll probably just delete this whole thing.)




So there goes Enjoy!

New Kickstarter: Tales of the Damned

Hey everybody!

So it's that time again! I'm running a new kickstarter campaign. This is for a comic collection of three short horror comics, all written by me, with art by Kevin Enhart, Pramit Santra, and Chris Brown. This is horror in the more classic style, period pieces with creepy monsters and ghosts and so on. I'm very proud of how all these stories turned out, and I would love to share them with everyone, so I'm hoping you guys will take a look and back if you can, and share the link around as well.

Thanks!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/152668502/tales-of-the-damned-horror-anthology