Harley Quinn/Suicide Squad

[verushka70]

So I finally watched Suicide Squad on my HBO-only cable& internet subscription.

So...

Marriage AND babies with the Joker.
THIS is the secret desire of Joker's crazy, lethal, killer stripper gf?

This is the deepest desire with which Enchantress tried to trick her...?

Mmmkay.

Comments

[verushka70]

Yeah, wrt to Harley -- I'm not familiar with the comics, but I was like, wth, they just skip over the torture as a contributing factor to her psycho-killer thing -- but the poly aspects are portrayed as decadent, perverse products of the Joker and the major contributing factor to her craziness...?! Sure, right, the torture and psychological deconstruction/reconstruction had nothing to do with it...!

All the telling/not showing just kept interrupting the narrative and slowing it the fuck down. I'm fine with intertwined parallel narratives where there is crosscutting between them -- but that is not how they did it. The narrative of building the team was constantly interrupted by flashbacks loaded with backstory. Any time the main narrative gained momentum, they interrupted with another flashback and slowed it back down and lost the thread. Sure, like you, I was impressed with the casting (but it's only "progressive" to have a Latino play a Latino or a Native American play a Native America if the system is set up to have whites play them, fer chrissakes, which is de rigeur for Hollywood, so...). That was about the only thing it had going for it.

Viola Davis was great, like she usually is, but her talents were wasted on the script and a stereotypical government/PTB villain role for her.

And after all the pre-release publicity about Jared Leto's weird Method-acting preparation, which I tried but couldn't entirely successfully avoid, his performance ended up being less psycho and scary than Heath Ledger's largely because it was so constantly interrupted, it lost all momentum too. And the Enchantress ended up seeming basically very Queen of the Damned. Yes, Harley's best chemistry was with Deadshot and a couple of the other Suicide Squad, not so much with Joker.

I'm kind of glad I didn't see SS on the big screen -- and how terrible is that to say about a superhero villains movie?? -- only because I would have regretted paying full price for it! The annoying thing is that the group of characters and the building of the squad had SO MUCH narrative potential, but it was all totally squandered. The entire thing ended up unbelievably "meh" for me -- which is ridiculous for a superhero villain movie! We should have been either hating them from jump until the narrative flips us into sympathizing or empathizing with them (eg as lab rats) -- or liking them from jump for their gray-area ethics (like Deadshot's "no women/children" ethics).

But the way their stories were built, the audience doesn't get to do either, and you can't really sympathize with many of them except Deadshot. SS was a real disappointment. (For example, Watchmen, though far from perfect, grabbed me way more than SS, though it had similar narrative issues.) The whole thing had a feeling of "designed/written by committee (with an eye to franchise/vertical marketing);" that just ruined it for me. The story and characters should come first -- the fucking tie-ins/ toys should come AFTER. I mean, by comparison, Deadpool was WAY better, but it had a very clear narrative and the backstory interruptions were way better integrated into the main narrative and themes. Admittedly, that's easier to do with a single protagonist, but it's not impossible to do with an ensemble, either. You just need good writing. SS didn't have it.

Yeah, it's not looking too good for WW. And you just can't trust trailers these days, especially not when they are released months before the flick itself hits theaters.