Now that the real trailer for ‘Suicide Squad’ is out, I feel like I can make a better stab at predicting its ups and downs than when I was deeply unconvinced that I was actually watching a real thing made by real professional Hollywood types. (Which, don’t get me wrong, it was certainly a very good fan-made production, far better than I could do. But it did not look like a multi-million dollar budgeted movie, is all.) My basic prediction is that it’s going to have trouble finding an audience, and it may have trouble finding its voice. That doesn’t necessarily translate to being bad, but it is two big strikes against it right from the start.
The first problem, and perhaps the biggest, is that it’s coming too early. The thing that makes most of the best incarnations of the Suicide Squad interesting is that it’s about taking known quantities, and putting them into new situations where they reveal unexpected character facets. What made Captain Cold interesting in the Suicide Squad was that everyone thought they knew who Captain Cold was; he was that lame supervillain with the freeze gun who served as Barry Allen’s punching bag every six or seven issues. But when you saw him in the Suicide Squad, you realized there was a lot more to him than that.
The Suicide Squad movie does not have that audience familiarity. A few of them may know Killer Croc or Harley Quinn from the Batman cartoons/video games/ancillary tie-in material, and of course the Joker is guaranteed box-office. But most of the characters they picked are obscure even for DC fans. Apart from people who are going to see Will Smith be all Will Smith-y, there’s really nothing to get people into theaters. A trailer for ‘Suicide Squad’ should look like an inverted version of the 2012 Avengers movie, a collection of DC’s worst and darkest coming together to band against something that scares even the bad guys. This feels like a collection of scrubs and oh by the way the Joker.
This leads into the second problem–if the best incarnations of the Suicide Squad work when they’re about familiar villains revealing unexpected character beats, and they’re not familiar villains, then the character beats won’t be that unexpected either. The ‘Suicide Squad’ movie will have to spend its time establishing these characters to audiences who don’t know them, and will then have to provide reasonable-seeming motivations for them to do something out of keeping with those newly-established characters without making it seem like forced, unmotivated writerly fiat. I have some suspicions that this won’t work well.
I think that honestly, this should either have come much later in the development of the DC Cinematic Universe (assuming such a thing doesn’t die a quick death over the performance of ‘Batman v Superman’), or it should have been an ongoing TV series. A series would have given them more room to develop the characters initially and made their transition to wherever they’ll be going as personalities seem more natural. That said, I’m not writing off the movie even with these questions hanging over it. Even the muddy gray-and-brown color palette isn’t enough to make me give up on it just yet.
But if Amanda Waller says in the next trailer, “Actually, it’s more like…a squad,” I’m gone.
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Captain Cold was in Suicide Squad? Was this in the nu52 version?
As for lack of knowledge of the property, I believe Task Force X/Suicide Squad has been used in Arrow which is a kind of popular show I’d guess.
Did you mean Captain Boomerang (aka “Boomerbutt”)?
Suicide Squad numbers 16-18 — Ostrander’s run, I think ’88. Captain Boomerang was there too, though.
“Hate is cold. Hell is cold. And sucker…I am Captain Cold.”
Ostrander’s run is really the best run ever. Oh, and he kills off Grant Morrison.
I think the main reason they decided to jump to Suicide Squad so early is about tone. WB seems convinced that making their movies all share a dark sombre tone is their best hope of establishing themselves as not being Marvel AlsoRans.
This makes adapting books that already have a naturally dark tone early feel right enough for them to overlook all the reasons it might be a bad idea.
Hmm, now that I think of it, this also might be about WB realizing that the tone their aiming for is really bad for Villain mortality, and wanting to establish the suicide squad early to try and offset that as they try to build up a rogues gallery to match their hero’s.
Suicide Squad never appealed to me enough to learn more than the title and the basic idea.
And yet, Secret Six was damn good. I should give it a read.
Oh, and he kills off Grant Morrison.
Well, that’s definitely sold me on the Ostrander run at least.
A trailer for ‘Suicide Squad’ should look like an inverted version of the 2012 Avengers movie, a collection of DC’s worst and darkest coming together to band against something that scares even the bad guys.
But that’s what they have planned for Batman v. Superman!
(Also, it will be a legal drama)
I loved the 80s run of this title. I dropped out of comics in the late 1990s so I don’t know anything about the recent run with that title… but I loved the 80s one. So I really want to like this movie. But I agree, a TV show would have been a better bet.
@Gustopher: I will watch that movie twenty-seven times if all the action scenes in the movie are from the first fifteen minutes and the whole thing is really Batman taking Superman to court over the destruction of WayneCorp buildings in Metropolis.
Twenty-eight if Aquaman calls fish as witnesses.
I’ve thought about the problem of doing the Suicide Squad without established villains. I think the best way would be to use supervillain archetypes, which basically means the audience is already familiar with the archetypes and you can subvert those. So my head Squad is Deadshot (in it for the money professional), Pied Piper (classic gimmick thief), Killer Frost (psychotic), Dr. Light (cackling megalomaniac), and Knockout (honourable opponent) with Bronze Tiger working a redemption arc. You wouldn’t need to know who these characters are, because you’ve seen them before in other incarnations. Then you can subvert what the audience thinks by introducing character beats that go contrary to the archetype.
@Grazzt: The problem with that is that archetypes tend to be flat and one-dimensional. If you walk into a movie and the screenwriter is clearly saying, “These characters are all just retreads of characters you’ve seen before”, they are going to have to work ten times as hard to make the movie feel like anything other than leftovers. Especially when you have to then subvert those tropes and make it feel believable and not just, “Oh, hey, it’s the third act, everybody who’s a heel does a face turn now and everyone who’s a face does a heel turn now!”
This needs to be about characters, not archetypes, or there’s very little point in doing it at all.
That’s why you just use them as starting points to imbue the characters with familiarity, then you can start the character work to make them each unique.
@Grazzt: And when in the past decade or so have WB bothered with actually establishing characters in their DC movies?
Even The Dark Knight Rises was pretty threadbare for any character other than Bruce/Bats.
The short game was never the Squad’s selling point – it would’ve made more sense as one of the CW shows, instead of a movie. The funny thing is, that upcoming Legends of Tomorrow show seems like it’s hitting the Squad’s beats better. It even has Captain Cold and Heat Wave for a solid villain component.
It’s not that the Squad can’t work as a movie, because its inspiration wasn’t so much other comics, it was the Dirty Dozen/Wild Bunch, revisionist action genre. But there’s a reason so many of those films neared the 2 1/2 mark: they needed time to set up a big cast.
A trailer for ‘Suicide Squad’ should look like an inverted version of the 2012 Avengers movie, a collection of DC’s worst and darkest coming together to band against something that scares even the bad guys.
A major part of the problem for any SUICIDE SQUAD movie – and especially for how you describe it here is the way how comic movies tend to deal with the bulk of villains: they kill them off. AVENGERS was the film it was because, as you allude to here, you had characters who were introduce and built up in their own movies suddenly appearing all together in the same film. Warners/DC can’t do that the same way, both because the originality is spent and because they want to the ground running with BATMAN v SUPERMAN and into JUSTICE LEAGUE. However, you’re perfectly correct that they could have and should have started having antagonists (including secondary villains and any costumed henchmen) survive when possible and be taken away by the same government organization. *Then*, you have SUICIDE SQUAD after a few films where the audience sudden sees all these villains again all together in one film (without heroes) flipped as being the protagonists against a different sort of threat for more selfish reasons and you’ve both a different sort of story *and* a reprise from the other angle of that original AVENGER thrill. And, it gives a studio and comics-filmmakers a selfish reason to figure out a more creative ending that “kill off the villain, The End.”
Morrison’s avatar dies in the War of the Gods crossover. Black Adam is on the cover. I forget the number. There’s not anything particularly Morrisonesque about him, though, I don’t think.
Anyway, I disagree with John Seavey. I didn’t so much know the members of the Squad from before. I got to know them in the series. For some of us, Ostrander & Yale’s run is the definitive version of Lawton, Boomerbutt, and maybe some of the others.
If you pay attention to his dialogue, the Writer is the version of Grant Morrison who appeared in Animal Man #5-26, trapped in the DCU and unable to get out.
Well, it totally makes sense to do the team of super villains before they do the team of super heroes… because there ARE no super heroes in Zack Snyder’s DCU. There’s a “Superman” who destroys cities and a “Batman” who says things like “DO YOU BLEED!? YOU WILL!”
These people literally don’t like or believe in the heroic ideal.