Suicide Squad

DC's Nu-Metal cover of Guardians of the Galaxy loves introductions. The film is so obsessed with the power of inauguration it keeps doing it over and over again, even when it's clear the audience is fully and firmly aware of who everybody is supposed to be. Despite some incessant jukeboxing, not to mention some strongly worded notes from Will Smith and his representation, Suicide Squad's first lead-in is its most dynamic. Director David Ayer's grubby fingers are all over a leering little sequence centred around Ike Barinholtz's spiteful interactions with Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn and the rest of the feature criminals.

For a few brief sketches, Suicide Squad manages to dredge up a whiff of the poisonous hysterics felt in Natural Born Killers. As in Oliver Stone's film, we see revolting, predatory men using the power conferred to them by lawful institutions to pray on the imprisoned and indentured. It's a decent, if sour opening gambit for a film that pretends it's kin to The Dirty Dozen when it's really just a live-action interpretation of the desire to collect shiny, lacquered knives in violent video games. It seems like we're being asked to root for powerful, individualistic victims while they're being poked and prodded by arrogant cops who think they're untouchable. Comeuppance to follow shortly.

These ideas are t-boned by another prologue, apparently from a completely different version of the film, in which the mission is introduced rolling and centred around the destructive relationship between Cara Delevinge's possessed backpacker and Joel Kinnaman's bland all-American hero. This situation room draft may lead into an altogether less lively Suicide Squad but it does do one thing right, it gives Viola Davis' Amanda Waller - the film's most dangerous, contradictory character - a little more room to actively dominate her peers. As it turns out, Waller is the one genuinely chaotic element in a film that even manages to make unfathomable, prehistoric, magic seem completely routine.

Waller is capricious and terrifyingly unpredictable in a way that Jared Leto's pass at the Joker never is. He's diminished both by his ineffectual screen time and the filmmaker's (marketing department's?) peculiar choice to focus on the kind of character traits that psychopaths might deem romantic. The actor's contribution registers as fussy, overly concerned with his Martin-Shkreli-does-trap styling and a pathetic desire to treat Harley like his favourite toy. Everything about the portrayal comes across as small and self-obsessed, a rich phoney playing at being a supervillain rather than the real thing. Waller meanwhile, free of suffocating brand expectation, is allowed to be in the shit, executing colleagues the second she decides she doesn't need them. In terms of the kind of cold-blooded machinations you should hang a franchise on, it isn't even close.

Fury

David Ayer brings his all-aggression outlook to the second world war, cross-pollinating your standard push for Berlin with the kind of psychological harassment usually seen in prison movies. A squeamish clerical assistant named Norman is billeted in Wardaddy (Brad Pitt)'s tank and forced to scrub his predecessor's face off the dashboard. The bullying of this new fish begins immediately, this hazing prompted, mostly, by his inability to act and think like his comrades. Ayer posits war as a group process, one weak link in the collective and lives are lost. Ayer doesn't sell Norman short, rather than yelp and tantrum like a coward the young Private argues back with a series of reasoned and intelligent points. Unfortunately he's debating shell-shocked brutes emptied out by their experiences. Wardaddy's crew are reflexively hostile, their cruelty one that persistently circles a creeping, sexual violence.

Ayer and Wardaddy's point, illustrated through the wholesale demolition of the Geneva Conventions, is that's the kind of man you have to be to roll over someone else's country. And, in that sense, Wardaddy has successfully managed to recruit himself a Sherman packed full of true believers. Ayer shoots the ensemble as cramped, biological batteries jammed into the shivering, sputtering mechanical whole of the tank. Action is faltering and capricious, the tanks churn on, lighting up distant targets with lancing tracer rounds. Gunfire in Fury reads like laser exchanges, dirty lumbering blocks ejaculating liquid light at distant tree lines.

Nazi resistance is experienced as a series of ambushes. Children drag Panzerschreck rockets through forests, foxholes are turned into meat fountains by the advancing Shermans. Life beyond the tank is only briefly encountered, the men largely unable to change emotional tact for even a second. Cursory interactions boil with anger, an attempt at breakfast in occupied Germany threatens to devolve into a gang rape. Wardaddy's men are like apes, everything is grist for their ongoing power play. Fury's problem is that it does such a good job of sketching a fraught, animalistic war zone that when it dials the mutilation down for a star turn friendly finale the gears start to grind. Sabotage pulled a similar trick to much better success - Schwarzenegger immolating his team to inch towards a two dimensional confrontation worked because Arnold is, regardless of role, an electronic murderer. Genre and star expectations align there and are fulfilled.

Unfortunately, Fury's acknowledgement of what its audience, or maybe more accurately its studio, wants works against the film's established ruthlessness. Having Brad Pitt shrug off a full clip of sniper fire, not to mention a couple of potato mashers, without deforming his pin-up looks feels like a sop. Ayer briefly fumbling his abattoir conceit with an incongruous attempt to position Pitt as a flayed angel in a film otherwise obsessed with pancaked Wehrmacht.

Films 2014

5. Sabotage

Hidden deep within the relentless hostility is a thesis on star power and the incompatibility of our 80s relics with modern, team orientated action fictions. With this in mind Sabotage's key moment comes when Schwarzenegger's Breacher discovers his family have been kidnapped by a cartel. This information comes to light out on an airport runway with a private jet to hand. Mooks on standby, ready to be blazed through.

Schwarzenegger's team resists, they swarm him, restraining him. An 80s action narrative is bubbling up, Commando come again, but this false, self-proclaimed family won't allow it to happen. In doing so, they fail Breacher. They should have smoked those Federales on principle, piled into the jet then crashed themselves into the nearest drug compound.

That never happened and Breacher hates them for it. That's all I could think about watching Sabotage, Schwarzenegger had been denied an instinctual, suicidal impulse. His team should've wanted to die gloriously in their commander's service but they didn't. For all their bluster about brotherhood they weren't truly committed to him, or his psychotic ideals, so he stopped loving them. They ceased to be allies or even people in his eyes. Their short-comings transformed them into grist for Schwarzenegger the walking Gulag, fuel to be consumed and excreted on the way to a petty, self-destructive revenge.

Original Review


4. The Raid 2

What are we getting out of superhero films? The colourful application of overwhelming force? What backs up the anger? What emotions drive these heroes? Do they even suffer? Captain America: The Winter Soldier hits harder than the usual dross because Cap is trying to coax a friend out of a lethal, amnesic funk. It's lip service though. Neither body is broken. Cap's life isn't on the line. Nothing is lost.

In The Raid 2 Rama gives everything he has. He turns his back on his wife and newborn for a bullshitted abstract. He compromises his morality, his identity even, to stay hidden. In a finale fight with a slash happy equal his body is pummelled, gouged, and rended. Rama takes an incredible amount of punishment and still keeps coming. That's the kind of superheroism I can key into. Obstinate, illogical, and utterly devoid of any sense of self-preservation.

Original Review


3. '71

You don't hear a great deal about The Troubles over here. Despite lasting the best part of three decades you're more likely to read about a 74 day conflict with Argentina over the invasion of a distant archipelago. I suppose it's like anything. People are only directed to care about outbreaks and resolutions, the difficult, messy centre is to be glossed over with rhetoric and forgotten.

Go in with zero knowledge, as I more or less did, and '71 is almost like something out of Action or 2000 AD, a terrifying occupation war being fought on the same kind of densely terraced streets you see all over my city. Turns out everywhere that came up during the Industrial Revolution looks the same. All the people sound similar too. It happened 300 miles away and you know fuck all about it. It makes you feel ashamed.

Original Review


2. The Wind Rises

"I've become sceptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and a girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I'm able to, then perhaps I'll be closer to portraying a true expression of love." 

- Hayao Miyazaki

Original Review


1. Inside Llewyn Davis

I've read a few reviews of Inside Llewyn Davis in which the author hasn't been sure if Davis is supposed to be talented or not. Their take from the Coen Brothers' latest is a pitch black comedy in which a marginally capable person rubs up against failure and refuses to change. For them his craft is indistinguishable from the manufactured graspers he rubs shoulders with. Presumably this failure to connect makes every performance a kind of cosmic punchline in which we are expected to shake our heads and grin at the delusional man with the guitar.

For me Llewyn is obviously, painfully gifted. When he performs diegetic sound dies off, Davis is the focus. During gigs the film's soundtrack is dominated by Oscar Isaac's vocal range. Edits and shots attempt nothing more complicated than a relaxed glance around the show. The meat is always the singing, from hushed, melodic whispers to the peeling, agitated roars of Davis' solo performance of Fare Thee Well. The arrangement is like a fight film or a musical, everything stops dead to drink Llewyn in. We see him in his moment, briefly triumphant and unyielding. Inside Llewyn Davis is a beautiful film about feeling like you're banging your head against a wall. No-one cares, no-one's interested. The only consolation to people in this situation is that at least they're pulping their brains for their own ends and not compromised, in service to someone else.

Original Review

Also Liked:

Under the Skin / Interstellar / The Guest / Map to the Stars / Blue Ruin / The Wolf of Wall Street / The Grand Budapest Hotel / Edge of Tomorrow / The Amazing Spider-Man 2 / Dawn of the Planet of the Apes / Transformers: Age of Extinction

Sabotage

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a Great Ape in charge of a team of heavily armed Juggalos. Sabotage plays like an old man fantasy with Schwarzenegger's Breacher as the elder gent able to run intellectual rings around the kids. His age makes him mythic and untouchable in their eyes, an abstract idea of masculine supremacy. The kids fucked up though. Although an idea of fraternity or family is repeatedly stressed, usually by the subordinates, it's clear Schwarzenegger has other ideas. Initially Sabotage seems to be a Friday the 13th instalment with Schwarzenegger as a monstrous bogeyman ticking off his disappointing children.

Sabotage, as it turns out, is instead about how disposable everybody else in your life is when measured against loved ones. Schwarzenegger allows his team to eat itself, but doesn't actively participate. Neither does he intervene. He's above the infighting because he's locked in somewhere else, waiting. Skip Woods and David Ayer's ending was allegedly hijacked, pruned and re-arranged to shift overt villainy off Schwarzenegger. All the nervous studio interference has done though is add an air of indifference. Breacher is truly, exceptionally, callous. Schwarzenegger as a giant, flushed knuckle that'll step over the bodies of people prepared to die for him if it'll equalise a personal situation. The team might love him but he doesn't love them.

Ayers shoots Schwarzenegger as an icon. The star's age isn't avoided or concealed, it's almost fetishised. Repeated close-ups let you drink in the decades. Ayers holding on an eyeline that looks more and more like Clint Eastwood's with every passing year. Arnold is shot like he's The Dark Knight Returns' Bruce Wayne, an ageing weightlifter who gets drunk to dredge up the most awful memories he can. Even his haircut is great, a self-administered close crop that undoubtedly reeks of Brylcreem. Sabotage is easily the best post-Governor Schwarzenegger film simply because it approaches the star as a relic. He's from another time. This mechanical male doesn't fit in with his beer-swilling tat-frat. They're flawed and messy. In comparison, Schwarzenegger is steel.