SUICIDE SQUAD (2016) Breaking Weekday Records

[AndyDursin]

Jared Leto is the Joker.

Oh look, he's "edgy" now with all the ink!

DC is lost, folks. LOST. Between this and BATMAN V SUPERMAN, it's like...WTF

[Monterey Jack]

Screw Leto...give me a shot of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn!

[AndyDursin]

That's about the only thing that could make me interested in seeing this film.

From the director of SABOTAGE...piece of garbage!

[AndyDursin]

Robbie looks like the real deal. Between this and playing Jane in TARZAN she ought to have a big year in 2016 (to say nothing of her in the gossip rags as the woman who allegedly fostered Affleck's divorce lol)...

This looks more exciting than BATMAN V SUPERMAN to be honest. At least the cast is interesting.

[AndyDursin]

Here's the official trailer, which looks a good deal more enticing than BATMAN V SUPERMAN.

[AndyDursin]

This has to be no surprise given...

a) the bad reaction to the glum, gloomy BATMAN V SUPERMAN

b) director David Ayer's past work is deadly serious and downbeat

On the other hand, the fact the film is undergoing SO MUCH work has to be alarming if this report is to be believed (who knows), but I wouldn't be surprised at all work is being done as a reaction to BVS.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/31/113387 ... ad-reshoot

Warner Bros. is currently spending "tens of millions" of dollars to reshoot dozens of scenes for its upcoming superhero film, Suicide Squad, according to Birth.Movies.Death.

The studio is reportedly revisiting the film to add more lightheartedness to the feature and add in a few more jokes. According to the site, after the studio saw the positive reaction the trailer got — a trailer that made the movie seem much funnier than it actually was at the time — Warner Bros. ordered script rewrites and scheduled time with the cast and crew to reshoot.

The goal of the reshoots is to make the film more fun for audience and make the characters more appealing. In doing so, there won't just be additional jokes added to the movie, but the interactions between characters will be slightly goofier at times. Most importantly, however, is that the movie won't take itself as seriously as the recently released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

[DavidBanner]

Given the panic going on at WB, I wonder if they could give this problem child the same kind of release as Ayer had for his prior inflictions, Sabotage and End of Watch.

Namely, could they just make it a direct-to-video idea with a quick in-and-out release in theaters to tee it up? Might be their best option before re-examining this entire "franchise" idea.
If this one bombs as hard as it's appearing it will, the damage could instantly undo what small profits they'll see from BS. I've heard rumors that the budget was north of 200 million. If that's the case, they need to pull in 600 to break even - a bomb would leave them even farther in the hole than they were before they inflicted BS.

[AndyDursin]

100 minute running time? What is this, the shortest superhero movie since SUPERMAN IV?

[AndyDursin]

Allegedly it's 122 minutes. Embargo lifts Tuesday afternoon which is never a good sign.

[Monterey Jack]

Allegedly it's 122 minutes.

I would have preferred 100...it would have been a sweet antidote to the now-standard 145-minute, David Lean sprawl of most superhero flicks.

[AndyDursin]

Two hours is fine. Remember 10 minutes will be credits so it's really not even 2 hours, pretty lean by genre standards these days.

They also added The Flash to this film in reshoots over the last couple of weeks!

[mkaroly]

Funny - they want to lighten up the tone of a movie about DC villains yet continue to darken the tone of the superheroes? Something is backwards here...lol...

[AndyDursin]

That's a good point Michael!

Review embargo is up shortly. The few that have broken the embargo are all negative...which does not surprise me.

This one doesn't even like Robbie!

“Suicide Squad” hits theaters as the most hotly-anticipated popcorn pic in what has been a fairly disappointing cinema summer.

Hyped as this year’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and positioned in that coveted early-August “Guardians” release window, a darkly-comic comic book movie about “bad guys who do some good,” it’s franchising friendly, a way for Warners to recapture the mojo that their darker-than-dark “Batman v. Superman” took away.

But they made that movie by fanboy request, to fanboy-dictated parameters. Keep it dark, because, you know, this is a comic book — serious stuff.

“Suicide Squad” is part of that whole dystopian DC comic universe, where Superman’s dead and The Joker (Jared Leto) isn’t. And Batman is Ben Affleck. So the studio was hemmed in there, as well.

And what they’ve given us is a formulaic, blood and bullet-riddled David Ayer (“Training Day/Fury”) superhero thriller starring a high-mileage Will Smith and Margot Robbie’s butt-cheeks.

There’s a big laugh, about 25 minutes in. Will Smith lands a couple more, and Ike Barnholz adds levity to a corrupt comic relief prison guard. But otherwise, this is a joyless exercise in paint-by-numbers mayhem. Bad guys are rounded up and flung against demons who have taken over some city we won’t call New York and who — like aliens and ghosts and others we’ve seen in too many recent movies — are dismantling the center city and spinning the debris into the clouds on an arc of psychotronic light.

Who ya gonna call? Yeah, that.

Viola Davis is Amanda Waller, the murderously unethical government bigwig who rounds up these “meta-humans” just in case there’s a situation caused by someone with Superman’s powers and without his scruples. So the ultimate sniper, Deadshot (Will Smith), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), guilt-ridden fire-flinger Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Aussie thief Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Harley Quinn (Robbie), Joker’s shrink whom he’s made over into his demented darling of a girlfriend, become “Task Force X.”

And they’re needed right away because Waller’s already lost one recruit. The archaeologist Dr. June Moone (Cara Delevingne) was consumed by an evil witch spirit (Enchantress), and she goes rogue, the first chance she gets. The rest of the self-named “Suicide Squad” seems likely to do the same.

Joel Kinnaman is Col. Rick Flag, the Navy SEAL who has to ride herd over this mob. He’s given a meta-human ninja (Karen Fukuhara) whose sword absorbs the soul of every one she slays as a sidekick.

And there’s a LOT of slaying going on in here. Deadshot litters the streets with the bodies of people turned into zombie soldiers. Harley Quinn wields a bat, but picks up a custom pistol when the need for speed arises. SEALS and demon soldiers shoot it out on subways, in high-rises and on the streets.

The one-liners must have played better on the comic book page. “Nice ta’meetcha,” Robbie’s psycho-Fran Drescher burbles. “Love your perfume. What IS that? The stench’a death?”

Deadshot negotiates for his daughter’s future, his price for becoming a good guy. Private education, all the way to the Ivy League. And if she’s not sharp enough to get in on her own?

“I need you to ‘white people’ that thing.”

Ayer is a good, gritty action director, and absolutely the wrong choice to adapt this. The action beats are taut, but the story arc crumbles under the weight of all the movies it steals from. The casting fails to pop, in most instances. The heavily-hyped Robbie doesn’t dazzle, which explains why she’s photographed from behind, more often than not.

Delevingne fails to register, at all. But Kinnaman stands out as the weakest link.

Giving every character a classic rock theme song — a touch swiped from Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” — doesn’t lighten the load. It feels like a desperate retro-fi –more pandering.

“Normal is just a setting on a dryer,” Harley Quinn declares. But the “normal” the movies in this new comic universe are pushing is bleak and not much fun. “Dark” does not equal “deep,” and even if it did, you have to wonder if all this pandering will actually be embraced by the audience it is pandering to.

If not, mental health counseling for the studio execs who bet the bank on the Dead Superman DC universe is in order. They’d be worrying candidates to become the real “Suicide Squad.”

2/4

https://rogersmovienation.com/2016/08/0 ... ide-squad/

[AndyDursin]

Ugh. As good as SUCKER PUNCH? Maybe I'll stay home after all!

...for reasons beyond Ayer’s control, he’s beholden to the corporate vision of other recent DC adaptations, most notably Zack Snyder’s sleek-surfaced and oppressively self-serious riffs on the Superman legend. While it would have been amazing to see the director (fresh off WWII-set suicide-mission movie “Fury”) push his own nothing-to-lose anarchic boundaries, he’s ultimately forced to conform to Snyder’s style, to the extent that “Suicide Squad” ends up feeling more like the exec producer’s gonzo effects-saturated “Sucker Punch.”

http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/su ... 201825911/

A puzzlingly confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of supervillains and then doesn’t know what to do with them.

Part smart-ass genre sendup, part grimy noir that wants to be as dirty as Deadpool but remains constrained by its PG-13 rating, and part short-falling attempt by Warner Bros. to get a big-budget DC Comics mashup right, the film starts with promise but disengages as it loses its creative bearings.

...The action of the film’s middle and latter stages is largely set in a gloomy murk that recalls far too many previous dour sci-fi/fantasy films, and by that point, vestiges of the opening stretch’s humor and snap long have fallen by the wayside. Suicide Squad may not quite commit harakiri, but it certainly feels like it’s taken far too many sleeping pills.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review ... ce=twitter

[jkholm]

But they made that movie by fanboy request, to fanboy-dictated parameters. Keep it dark, because, you know, this is a comic book — serious stuff.

This is the mentality that is killing comic book movies, especially DC adaptations. All these middle-aged fanboys are permanently stuck at age fifteen, whining to their peers, "Comics aren't just for kids, you know. They're serious! " They think that for adults, "serious" equates to dark and gloomy. At least Marvel understands that the comic book medium is a genre and doesn't have to conform to standards of realistic fiction in order to be entertaining or satisfying.