Terminal

End Of The Line

Terminal
Ireland/UK/Hong Kong/Hungary/USA 2018
Directed by Vaughn Stein
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Well this could have been a lot better... I’m just not sure how because it manages to press a lot of the right buttons while still seeming to be completely dull, somehow.

Terminal is a movie I saw trailered back in 2018 at my local cinema and the trailer looked pretty intriguing so... I waited and I waited and... it just didn’t arrive. Turns out... and I only just recently found this out... it only played for a limited engagement at the Prince Charles cinema in London. I don’t know why since it has lots of the kind of elements modern cinema audiences like to see, not least a star studded cast with such luminaries as Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg and Michael Myers. However, it wasn’t until I spotted it on the bargain bucket racks at Fopp for a fiver that I realised that it had ‘come and gone’, as it were.

So, I’ve remedied that situation now and, frankly, I wish I had seen it at the cinema so I would have known not to buy a copy. The problem I have with conveying just how disappointed with it I was, however, is that it’s one of those movies that has so many great things going for it and it still, somehow, manages to fail at holding the interest throughout. Trying to pin down just why that is, though, is something I can only take a less than educated guess on. Given the obvious talent in front of and behind the camera, it seems very hard to manage to make a film like this fail on some level.

Now, I’ve gone on record saying I don’t like gangster movies and it would be true to say that most of the characters that inhabit this bizarre underworld are not people I could ever sympathise with so... I dunno that could be it, I guess. That does seem too obvious an excuse though, especially since I quite like a lot of the main players performing in the film.

Okay... so let’s start with what you are going to realise as soon as you spin the film up. It’s honestly one of the most gorgeous looking films you are going to see... both in terms of the constantly contrasted, neon coloured lighting which should contradict but perpetuates the solid, film noir atmosphere from the picture. I knew I was going to be in for a good ride visually from very early on, where the director has a third of a shot on the left lit with a green alleyway and everything else black. Then a door opens on the right so that the frame is lit in the opposite third with a totally different colour with another character different to the one who was previously in the left hand third of the frame. So we have a frame split into three colours... if you count the middle, black section as a colour... and the effect is quite beautiful...

And the whole film is like this. It’s a visually rich feast for the eyes and, frankly, this in itself should be more than enough for me. Couple this with some nicely written dialogue involving some sharp and witty conversations performed by actors who really know what they are doing, well... by 20 minutes in my mind should have been well engaged with the content.

Alas, the convoluted story, while not exactly that surprising or unfathomable, doesn’t really hold the interest in its execution and, I have to wonder if this is because of some kind of pacing issue, perhaps with the way the film was edited, as to why I just wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. I mean, it’s an hour and a half movie but, honestly, it feels like three hours.

One of the problems I can put my finger on is the lack of surprise on certain of the many ‘twist reveals’ in the film. For instance, the identity of a Mr. Big villain character is so obvious that, when the person took some prosthetics and make-up off near the end, rather than be surprised I was thinking that, actually, with all the make up effects removed the actor looked less like what the actor usually looks like than when he was in disguise. So no real reveal there, then. Especially when, by the time that character reveal is seen on screen, pretty much all the other candidates viable as the identity of this key role are pretty much dead.

Similarly, when another main character is revealed to be playing... how can I put this... a dual role, it really is no surprise. There have been at least two very telling moments where this is kind of hinted at earlier in the film and the choices are... either the editing of the chronology of the movie is really bad and some stupid mistakes were made or... there’s more than one of that character, so to speak. So, yeah, no surprises there, either, I’m afraid.

What was surprising, actually, was the motivation behind the actions of this dual role, as revealed in the last twenty minutes or so of the film in a... it has to be said... thoroughly nasty revenge movie kind of denouement. The real reason for the main protagonist(s) actions throughout the film are not that easy to predict, I would have to say although, by this point in the film, it does seem to be a case of too little, too late. At least in terms of finally wringing out any kind of entertainment value from the script. It’s also, possibly, a little hard to watch for the more squeamish audience members, even though the final... shall we say ‘blow’... is actually off camera and implied.

And that’s me done with Terminal, I guess. A beautiful piece of eye candy with some cracking dialogue, smart performances and, in all honesty, not much going for it despite all of these factors. I know this is a short review but I really have nothing much more to say about this one. If you are a viewer who loves the visual aesthetics of cinema then... you probably need to check this out for just the shot design alone. I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone else though because, somehow, it’s just plain dull and fails to hold the interest. Not one I’d happily sit through again.

The Suicide Squad

Starro Starro Night

The Suicide Squad
USA/Canada/UK 2021
Directed by James Gunn
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one has lots of spoilers so,
yeah, if you don’t want to know... don’t read.

Wow... it has to be said, in the long lineage of movies and theatrical serials based on DC comics characters going back to the 1940s, James Gunn’s sequel (ahem... sorry... I meant ‘soft reboot’... nah, it’s a sequel) to Suicide Squad (reviewed here), entitled The Suicide Squad, has to be somewhere within the top ten. Or if you’re counting just the modern DC Expanded Universe films... easily within the top three. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this film all that much, it has to be said but, when I saw it I was completely bowled over by just how brilliantly put together it is.

Okay, so the film stars a few actors reprising their roles from previous DCU movies... Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flag and Viola Davis as Amanda Waller. It also stars a huge amount of heavy weight actors in various roles, far too numerous for me to mention here but a quick taster would be Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2 (who really is the emotional heart of the movie), Idris Elba as Bloodsport, John Cena as Peacemaker, Peter Capaldi as Thinker and Sylvester Stallone as the voice of the wonderfully animated shark character, King Shark. They and all their co-stars are absolutely brilliant in a movie, which is as unpredictable (for the most part) as it is wildly entertaining and it’s one of those near perfect comic book movies where it gets almost everything right.

The film starts off before the opening logos have even started, with a Johnny Cash song which immediately ties into the opening prison scene. Most of the characters who make up the Suicide Squad this time around are newcomers (apart from Flag and Harley Quinn) and we have a very short introduction to the new characters in a kind of ‘fast forward’ through the recruitment process, including the Escape From New York style bombs implanted in the necks of the majority of the squad (and we also get to see what happens when one of those goes off). We then get the squad sent to the island of Corto Maltese, which of course is named after a character in a famous European comic book. If you remember, Kim Basinger’s Vicky Vale character in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie (reviewed here) was also known for her war torn photographs taken on the fictional island of Corto Maltese.

Anyway, I said this review contained spoilers and I’ll reveal now that, in a serious rug pulling exercise, of all the characters you meet in the early scenes, only two of the squad make it off the beach of Corto Maltese alive. It’s an explosive and incredibly violent scene which finishes most of them off before they’ve even started and... then we get the opening credits and find that Viola Davis’ character has been hedging her bets, with the first team being just a distraction to keep the military busy while another team landed on another part of the island. And then, as we get to know them, more hilarity, action and gory violence ensues as they go about their special mission to destroy the main bad guy of the movie, while of course, stopping to rescue the two surviving members of the other team who kept the military so busy. Well I say two surviving members but, the first of the two post credits scenes does one of the few things I was expecting to happen much earlier on in the film so, yeah, stick around when the end credits start up people.

And, actually, there are a few bad guys in the film but when I say the main bad guy I actually mean the main bad starfish. Yeah, that’s right. Anybody remember the truly ridiculous giant starfish character Starro The Conqueror? Starro first appeared in comics (and on the cover) in the very first Justice League Of America story from an issue of The Brave And The Bold in 1960. And as silly as the thing looks.. well... he looks even sillier in the movie but James Gunn somehow manages to pull off his character really well and, grounded by some of the truly visceral violence (there’s way more spilled blood in this one than most modern horror movies... think of the fourth Rambo movie and that should give you some idea), the big pink starfish smashing buildings kaiju style (which is also used as an ‘in film’ dialogue reference) works really well and you do fear that this could be the end of humanity as we know it... if the squad doesn’t think of something.

The film is extraordinarily fast moving, even in it’s exposition scenes... hey, if you want someone to move that kind of dialogue along fast without it getting boring, what can I say? Peter Capaldi was an excellent choice after his experience playing in Doctor Who... and it’s a real visual, eye candy assault on the senses. Some of the scenes, such as Harley Quinn breaking out of a prison, are handled in a very surprising, expressive, totally comic book manner while still being absolute adrenalin rushes of cinematic action. The whole thing works really well and even the practice of using songs to illustrate certain scenes (okay, I’d prefer it was just score utilised but hey, you can’t have everything)  is not overly distracting and gives the film a certain lift in some sequences.

My one complaint... and it’s a really minor one which most people might not notice, is that a couple of long shots don’t match up to what is happening in the close ups. For example, Harley Quinn looking to the upper right of screen in one scene and then cutting to a long shot showing her looking down at a corpse. Or the scene where she is being tortured with electricity and in one shot her feet are clenching through the pain but, when you see this repeated for a long shot, she’s forgotten to clench her toes up. It’s all pretty small stuff though and it really doesn’t hurt the film, which is frankly one of the best movies of the year.

Although the film certainly is a sequel and certainly fits in with the overall arc of the current crop of DCU movies, The Suicide Squad can also be used as a jumping on point because it barely refers to the other properties and it certainly would work as a stand alone movie when required. Truly one of the best movies DC and Warner Brothers have put out and fans of big budget comic book movies should definitely give this one some time. I can’t wait for the Blu Ray myself.

Birds Of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

The Riled Bunch

Birds Of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
2020 USA Directed by Cathy Yan
UK cinema release print.

Well, this film may not be the greatest action movie that’s been out there in recent times but it’s certainly distracting enough in that it never stops moving and really doesn’t give you any time to disengage from it before the next thing happens. Part of this is due to the flash backwards and forwards structure of the first half of the movie (the better half) and if this seems deliberately entangled to the point of a lack of clarity on the timeline at one point (yeah, I got just a little confused until I realised it wasn’t actually the police that picked up Harley Quinn in the earlier part of the film), I suspect the film would have been somewhat less potent if cut together in a more linear fashion. This structure also allows Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn (reprising her role from the earlier Suicide Squad movie, reviewed here) a chance to strengthen her character’s relationship with the audience by seeming to control how the movie plays out and also giving her some ‘Deadpool-like’ ‘breaking the fourth wall’ moments.

Now, we have a fine dramatis personae of strong female characters played by some exceptionally good actresses here... in addition to Robbie we have Rosie Perez playing Renee Montoya, Jurnee Smollett-Bell playing a totally different version of Black Canary to the blonde, fishnet tight wearing version of the heroine I used to read in the 1970s (who was romantically linked to Green Arrow), the always watchable Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Ella Jay Basco as Cassandra Cain (who I think is running around as a new version of Batgirl in the comics these days?) and the always reliable Ewan McGregor letting his hair down as the main villain, Black Mask.

Now, my only real problem with the movie is that... well, I’ve never read any of the Birds Of Prey comics but the main attraction for me reading one would be the main character Barbara Gordon as team leader Oracle. Now I remember purchasing the excellent one shot/graphic novella The Killing Joke back in the 1980s where former Batgirl and daughter of Commissioner Gordon was shot in the spine by The Joker before he presumably raped her and took naked photos of her writhing on the ground. Unlike many of the more adult and experimental one shots of the day though, this one was firmly placed in Batman continuity so, instead of getting up and walking away, in the comics that came after, Barbara Gordon was confined to a wheelchair but became the eyes and ears of the team which eventually was known as the Birds Of Prey, Oracle. A pretty important character if you ask me but she’s nowhere in the movie and, since Black Canary is also absolutely nothing like the character I used to read back in the day, I think I can safely say that this new movie is about as close to the source material as... insert an engaging metaphor for something being completely far away from the source material as you can get right here folks. Which kinda sucks for fans of the comics but, since comic book continuity for me doesn’t really count for much after the 1980s (it’s just the way I am), then I’m not all that bothered about it either and what that does for me is allows me to look at a film like Birds Of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (a character who isn’t really in the Birds Of Prey comics as a team character at all) with no pre-judgement on how poor an adaptation it is.

That being said, while the film is certainly clever... I’m not sure I’d agree with everyone who is saying it’s a really fun movie. It might be that some of the jokes weren’t to my taste (I think I only laughed once about two thirds of the way through and I can’t remember what it was I laughed at now) but it certainly wasn’t a dull movie and, if I really wanted to resort to the critical cliché lurking like an elephant in the room then I may even call it a rollercoaster of a movie... I won’t though so I’ll trust the reader to insert their own rollercoaster analogy in here too please.

Okay, let me dispel another bizarre rumour that I’ve read on Twitter over the last few days... this movie is, despite popular opinion on the matter, absolutely nothing like the 1966 Batman movie in tone, editing style or... well, really anything. I don’t know why people are saying that but, seriously, if you are going to go to the cinema expecting something that tonally similar to the good old days of Adam West then, well, I think you’re going to be disappointed. And, yes, I’ll admit I was a little disappointed in the movie but I really didn’t have time to dwell on that because the whole thing moves so fast, to be honest.

So... in a way I feel like this movie is a bit like the new, female Ghostbusters attempt of a few years ago... nicely put together with some nice chemistry between the actors but the humour falls really short of target. Also, I was surprised about the rating the movie has. Over here in the UK it’s a 15 certificate but I think it could maybe have been a 12A. I’m guessing it’s not scenes like cutting people’s faces off and throwing them on the floor in front of their loved ones before doing the same to them which got this film a higher rating because, frankly, as nasty as that sounds (and it’s certainly supposed to be to give Ewan McGregor’s villain a certain threat level), it’s handled in a fairly bloodless manner. I think it’s probably the amount of profanity in the movie that’s got the rating up there somewhere where very few superhero movies have been before.... or masked vigilante movies anyway (since this version of Black Canary has that silly canary scream which they added to the character fairly recently in 1969, I guess it’s almost a superhero movie, to some small extent).

Daniel Pemberton’s score is... I dunno, I couldn’t hear it through the sheer noise of the sound effects foley for the most part. He’s a great composer though and luckily for me they are releasing his score on a proper CD in a few weeks so I’ll be able to hear what is probably another in a long line of works of great musical art from this guy away from the punches, gunshots, revving motors and explosions of the film. Yeah, that’s one thing I will say, this movie is a really noisy experience... I kinda wish I hadn’t seen it in IMAX now but the time that performance was on was the more convenient for me.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about Birds Of Prey And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn. This is a good movie to distract you from the troubles of the outside world and that’s a good deal of what certain kinds of cinematic art are supposed to do, for sure. That being said, it’s nice if certain stand out moments from a movie stay with you and lurk in the mind for a while afterwards and, frankly, I got out from this just a few hours ago and have forgotten an awful lot. The best thing in this movie for me was Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing Huntress for laughs... so I’m glad the original character was nobody I knew about or was invested in. If you liked Suicide Squad and even DC movies like the recent Joker (reviewed here), then you’ll probably be okay with this one. I don’t know if these will continue to tie up with the DC universe the way it’s going at the moment but... well... time will tell I guess.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood

Bruise Lee

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood
UK/USA/China 2019 Directed Quentin Tarantino
UK cinema release print

Warning: Even the presence of a spoiler warning for this movie would constitute a spoiler so you can see the kind of Catch 22 situation I am in with this... so let’s just say that, yes, there is a spoiler here.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is the... well, since I don’t seem to be as mathematically challenged as the Hollywood marketing machine, let’s just call it the ‘latest’ movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote it. It’s a film I had been looking forward to for a while since, although I find the director a bit hit and miss, when he’s on form he does create absolute masterpieces of cinema (such as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds) and a film doing the ‘Manson murders’ and set in Hollywood in 1969 seems like a match made in heaven.

And, as a film it’s kinda entertaining but it’s also somewhat less than I was expecting from it, although I do reserve the right to change my mind on this one because, like some of the best Marvel movies of recent years, it might be that my brain needs to have longer to process it and it’s quite possible that if I ever do see this one a second time, I might like it a lot better than I did before.

Saying that, I still had a fairly good time with this movie... after all, one of the chief pleasures of watching a movie by Tarantino is spotting all the visual and audio references to other peoples movies and, as you can imagine, this film is filled to the brim with them in a much more overt manner (if such a thing is possible when it comes to Mr. T) than any of his other works.

The film follows fictional movie star Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his stuntman/driver/best friend Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. It also follows real life Sharon Tate played here by Margot Robbie, who was of course the most noted of the victims of the slaughter by the hippy followers of Charlie Manson on that grim August night in 1969.

Now, while I loved both all the references to various movies which the film is littered with and, frankly, loved the film and TV shows created to slot into this era by Tarantino for the Rick Dalton character (I especially loved the authenticity of his Italian secret agent movie although, on reflection, it maybe looked a little more like a ‘polizei’ movie than the specific strand of Italian spy movies it was emulating). However, it has to be said that there was practically no story on this one and its all over the place in terms of the way elements of the characters are revealed...

Now I’ve got no trouble with this usually, especially coming from Tarantino. As he’s demonstrated in a few of his movies, he can do this kind of slowly developing story image put together out of myriad scenes which tell something intrinsic about the characters very well and he usually does it in an effective manner which is a joy to watch. However, this particular hodge podge of scenes involving the various main characters and people such as Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen are... well, they’re all still a joy to watch individually but for some reason they never really forward the story that much. At least that’s how it seemed to me. The reason being, I think, is as I said in the paragraph above, there is no story, as such. And everyone knows the outcome of the Manson murders, right?

Okay... spoiler coming up.

I had a couple of conversations with different friends on the lead up to the release of this film about what I thought was going to happen because people keep telling people not to ‘spoil’ the movie and, frankly, it’s hard to spoil a movie when you know how historic events play out. So, this led me to believe that, just as he completely rewrote the end of World War Two in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino would change the outcome of events as they happened in real life and create a ‘new ending’ for Sharon Tate and Manson’s followers. Indeed, asides from the obvious tribute to Sergio Leone in the title, it would also suggest a certain fairy-tale quality to the narrative being presented here and suggests that there will be a certain amount of, shall we say, ‘deviation’ in terms of how things are left. And... yeah. I totally called it, this film left things exactly as I thought they would leave them when I heard about this project so... the film’s two main male protagonists are injected into history and, of course, change it in the way that very few people other than Tarantino would do without some kind of logical alternate to the ending, or lack of, of certain characters... such as in the movies From Hell or The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (which I reviewed here).

And yes, it’s kind of a double edged sword in terms of the education of young movie goers everywhere when you present fiction as implied facts like this. I work at a college and know a lot of the kids think the war ended when Hitler was machine gunned down in a cinema and... I'm pretty sure that a lot of those same teenagers will be checking the IMDB after this to see what films Sharon Tate has been in recently too. It’s not fair that ignorance of history should block cinematic art like these Tarantino flicks and it’s no reason to censor the art in any way but... a disclaimer at the end might help clarify things to a certain section of the audience maybe. You know... like a statement saying that in real life Sharon Tate, her friends and unborn child were brutally slaughtered by the followers of Charlie Manson... something like that.

Anyway, other than this and despite the kind of directionless, almost spectator sport of 'picking out little details on the screen' kind of nature of the film, there are still some sequences which demonstrate Tarantino’s absolute mastery of the art. Two scenes spring to mind, both featuring Brad Pitt where, frankly, even though I’d worked out exactly how they were going to play out before they finished, were nevertheless almost excruciatingly suspenseful to watch and this is where the director really shows why we go and see his films time and time again. One is where Brad Pitt goes to check out an old friend on a ranch (I won’t say more) and the other is when a bunch of hippies invade a house towards the end of the picture. I’d liken them to the scenes with Alfred Molina in them from Boogie Nights in terms of just how insanely intense they are here and, as always, Tarantino has a way of taking things which we take for granted as fetishised instruments of death and reminding us that they are, truly, very dangerous.

And that’s me about done on this one. The common Tarantino needle-drop approach to the music was less appealing to me this time around (and it really shouldn’t have been since I love that period in music) and, although there is the obvious Manson reference to The Beatles White Album in the dialogue, you don’t actually get to hear any of it in the movie. Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is probably not a film I would recommend to anyone but the most cine-literate of my friends, truth be told but I expect it will grow on me in time and might even be worth a Blu Ray purchase at some point in the next few years. Nothing more to say except... stay on for the end credits.

The Legend of Tarzan

Jungle Gym

The Legend of Tarzan
UK/Canada/USA 2016
Directed by David Yates
Warner Bros Blu Ray Zone B

Due to a coincidental turn of events, both the leading ladies in my life received a copy of The Legend of Tarzan as part of their Christmas haul this year. Firstly, I remembered my sexy lady friend had expressed an interest in seeing the movie at the time of its release but didn’t get an opportunity to see it... so I picked a copy up for her. Then, by a strange twist of fate, a few weeks later my mother also expressed an interest in seeing it... so she got one too (what is it with Tarzan and the ladies?).

Now, I wasn’t too keen on seeing this one myself. I had managed to, almost by accident, avoid it when it was released into cinemas earlier in the year and I didn’t think that I would have to bother to catch up to it. Alas, it was the first movie my mother wanted to watch on Boxing Day this year so, alas, I had to sit through it after all. Which ultimately, it turns out, was not actually a bad thing.

I’m not the biggest fan of Tarzan, it has to be said. Sure I used to watch the Ron Ely, Lex Barker, Jock Mahony and Gordon Scott versions of the character when I was a young ‘un. My favourite of all of them in my early years was, of course, the Johnny Weissmuller series of movies... there’s no topping those ones. I never got to see Buster Crabbe play the role but, you know, that one’s in the ‘to watch’ pile for sometime in the future. Edgar Rice Burroughs was never about Tarzan for me, though... he was all about John Carter of Mars, as far as I was concerned. The Tarzan stories were just a curiosity... although, like a lot of kids my age, I had the Mego action figure with the curious skin coloured costume made to look like skin slipped over the already skin coloured action figure plastic... never could figure that out.

So, yeah, I wasn’t exactly fussed about seeing this but I quite like Alexander Skarsgård as an actor... maybe not as much as his father but, heck, he’s a pretty good performer in my book and the agenda for this movie, it has to be said, seems to be one of getting a load of great performers together to get it all to work. So, supporting Skarsgård we have Margot Robbie, the always brilliant Samuel L. Jackson (who seems a bit of an anachronism in terms of his status in the time in which this movie is set... but I’m no expert so I might be wrong on that) and the often outstanding Christoph Waltz as the villain of the piece.

Now one of the things I was most afraid of when sitting down to watch the movie is that it would be yet another interminable ‘origins of the Lord of the Jungle’ movie but, as it happens, the writers wisely jettison the lengthy build up to the creation of Tarzan and go for a more interesting plot line while still, as it happens, trying to have their cake and eat it in terms of the origins department. That is to say, the film is set many years after Tarzan was ‘himself’ and he is now firmly enshrined in his Lord Greystoke personality... until a combination of the villain orchestrating his return to the jungle combined with Samuel L. Jackson’s ‘good guy on a mission to free the slaves’ character pushing from the other side of the equation forces Tarzan to return to his roots. Needless to say, things go pear shaped quickly and we have a jungle romp where the villain is trying to manipulate Tarzan towards his death for personal gain while taking Jane as a hostage.

Now, the origin of Tarzan is still included in the film but the writers have it as a slowly developing series of flashbacks inserted into the main narrative at regularly paced intervals. It’s not needlessly long and it also serves to inform the relationship between the main lead and his romantic interest via effective cinematic shorthand so... it not only backs up the main character but it’s also used to enrich the character arc and, above all, doesn’t outstay its welcome. I found this a much better solution to the usual ‘origins’ problems modern film-makers seem to want to needlessly lumber themselves with so... the movie gets a big tick with me for that.

The Legend Of Tarzan is nicely shot with some wonderful use of three (at least three) different colour palettes... with the scenes in London all being lit with a steely blue bent to show the coldly neutral prison that the main characters' lives have, almost without them realising it, become. These are offset with some yellowish, not quite sepia but heading to that kind of overt colour coding, flashback scenes and, as I was expecting... the full monty in terms of all the colours of the rainbow when we get to the contemporary (to the characters) jungle scenes. So the people behind the camera really thought about this one in an intelligent fashion and it really shows. The film is, in some ways, a joy to watch and I was much taken with both the visuals and, as I intimated earlier, the performances.

Where the film goes wrong is in some of the dialogue. A lot of it is good but, alas, I still think Christoph Waltz is not having good enough dialogue written for him. I’ve not seen him do anything to equal the lines he’s given in the Quentin Tarantino movies he’s starred in and, while Tarantino is a pretty good writer, I don’t think this is because he’s the only one able to write for Waltz. I just think the approach to his personality is not hitting the mark with a lot of his Hollywood productions, it has to be said. I mean, the dialogue they gave him in those terrible Clash Of The Clans adverts about a year ago was pretty good and a darn site better than a lot of the US made movies he’s been in... so I don’t think it should be this hard to get a screenwriter who understands the kind of material that Waltz absolutely excels at. And that’s really not knocking Waltz... he still does a phenomenal job here but... I just felt his scenes could have done with a lot more dialogue to play around with than what he gets here.

Still, that’s a minor complaint in an otherwise cool movie and, although I was less taken with Rupert Gregson-Williams' completely appropriate but perhaps overly clichéd score to the movie, I overall had a good time with this and some of the dialogue was, indeed, excellent. The chemistry between Alexander Skarsgård and Samuel L. Jackson, for example, really works well and they should maybe put the two in more films together, methinks.

And that’s all I got to say about that one. Not the best Tarzan movie I’ve seen but a lot better than most of the attempts made in, maybe, the last 30 years or so by a long chalk. If you like the Tarzan character then this is an enjoyable, if empty, take on the character and you should find yourself suitably entertained by a fine action film. It’s never going to get anywhere near my 2016 top ten list but it’s certainly not the film I was expecting it to be. So The Legend Of Tarzan is well worth a look if you have some free time on your hands, I reckon.

Suicide Squad

Deuce Ex Position

Suicide Squad
2016 USA Directed by David Ayer
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there’ll be some minor, suicidal spoilers in this one. Read at your own peril.

Okay, so this film is getting a lot of hype right now and, in terms of box office success, it’s making a big killing. I have to say that, while I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing this movie, I didn’t have a bad time with it. It’s not a terrible movie but it is a movie which does have a lot of problems. I can totally understand the critical dubbing it’s getting but that doesn’t mean to say you’re not going to like it. Let me explain what I’m talking about here but first, a little background as to where this review is coming from.

This is not the version of DC’s Suicide Squad which started appearing in 1959, in issues of The Brave And The Bold and Action Comics, although some of the members were in place even back then. This version, adapted for the movie, seems to be based on the fifth incarnation of the comic book which started maybe five years ago (which I think may be when Harley Quinn was first in it... I think). Now I don’t know much about any of the characters in this movie, apart from The Joker, it has to be said. Some of them I know purely from playing the Batman Lego games on my old Playstation 2 and iPhone. The others I know nothing about and certainly Harley Quinn was a character invented much later than the comics I was reading, for the Batman animated adventures... so I’m not even sure if she’s properly become canon in the non-kiddie versions of the comic books or not. I’m guessing she must have transitioned into the more adult DC titles after a while or we wouldn’t be seeing her here. So, yeah, the only character I know something about, in terms of the protagonist/antagonist supervillain elements of this piece, at any rate, is The Joker so... that’s my only credentials for the credibility, or not, of this review. Sorry about that. But I can still review it in terms of being a movie... I just can’t comment too much on the adaptation elements. So, yeah, take it or leave it, I guess.

Suicide Squad is definitely a movie which can’t help but show you its very obvious influences. Now, I’ve never even got around to seeing The Dirty Dozen but I know for sure that what we have here is a DC version of that movie but, that’s okay because I believe one of the incarnations of the comic book was too, so... yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem. Its other main influence seems to be John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York in terms of the way the action is contained within a few, abandoned city blocks with various antagonist forces trying to stop Suicide Squad from reaching their destination. Now this really is quite blatant and its interesting that the writers have chosen to push the analogy further by actually using Carpenter’s carrot/stick approach to getting an anti-hero to do your dirty work. That is to say that each member of the Squad who starts the film off in captivity is injected with an exploding neck bomb which can be triggered to take their head off at the whim of their boss. I’m surprised the writers went this far, to be honest, and I can only hope it was done in the spirit of homage, rather than anything else.

Okay, so positive points about the movie are that it looks quite good, in the odd moments the camerawork settles down and you can gather your eyes together for longer than a second. It’s also got a terrific cast including the main lead, as far as I’m concerned in terms of amount of screen time and presence, Will Smith as Deadshot. The lead female is definitely Harley Quinn, portrayed really interestingly by Margot Robbie. And we have Jai Courtney, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Cara Delevingne, Joel Kinnaman, Jay Hernandez and Karen Fukuhara. And they’re all pretty  good. Fukuhara plays a character called Katana and she has an groovy sword which is like a distant cousin to the sword Michael Moorcock created for his Elric Of Melnibone character, which was called Stormbringer. Stormbringer was made out of black, other-worldy material and had runic symbols carved into it, if memory serves. It often had a mind of its own and when it bit into its enemies, sometimes without the intention of the person wielding it, it sucked the living soul from its victim and the albino Elric was fed the energy from that soul through the hilt of the weapon, allowing him to stay strong when his normally pallid state would not allow him to conquer his enemies so easily. Katana’s sword also steals the souls of her victims but then it traps them within the weapon itself... which allows her to talk to her dead husband whose life was taken with her sword. So there’s some interesting stuff going on in the background of this movie. 

There’s also a fair bit of action throughout the film and, for the most part, it doesn’t really drag too much and it at least keeps moving forward to a specific goal. There’s not much plot but that’s okay too... not all movies need that much of one to do what they do. This is sadly deficient compared to, say, any of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe movies at the moment but... yeah, that’s okay too. Not every movie has to have the kind of gravitas and interesting plot twists of that kind of writing and, while this certainly doesn’t, it doesn’t really harm the movie, I think.

There are, however, a few things that do harm the movie, or at least give it some problems to try and overcome or, in this case, run through while the writers think nobody is looking,

Okay, so we have Jared Leto as The Joker, Now I don’t know anything about this guy except that he was exceptional in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream. Here he’s dong his own thing with The Joker, just as he should do and, though it’s fine that he’s doing it his own way here... I just didn’t warm to this interpretation as I did to the great performance turned in by Heath Ledger in the role or, even, the pretty good versions portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero. This version seems to have less weight about him but, I don’t know, maybe that’s the point. I can’t fault him for his performance on any level and, if reports from the set are to be believed, he certainly gave it his all. I just didn’t like it too much although, saying that, I think the character as performed by Leto could have some potential if the writing was a little warmer and he was given a little more three dimensionality. I don’t think his performance particularly hurts the movie though. Especially since he’s hardly in it. Just a few short scenes scattered throughout the picture where he never really interacts with any of the main protagonists, except for Harley Quinn, at all... other than to shoot at them form afar in one scene.

What does hurt the movie is the amount of exposition needed to flesh out each and every character in the story. It’s surely pretty obvious to most people that DC are trying to cash in on the box office success of multiple hero fests that Marvel have so well established over the last decade in films like Avengers - Age of Ultron (reviewed here) and Captain America - Civil War (reviewed here). The problem is that Marvel took a long time to establish those characters in their own films first, for the most part, and it was a well thought through concept. In ‘DCland’ it’s a ‘quick, cut to the chase’ approach and it really shows. It was quite evident in their previous movie, Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here), with its bizarre ‘meta-humans on a computer screen’ sequence and it’s even more of a disaster here where, because they have a whole bunch of new characters put together, there’s probably more exposition and back story in the movie than actual plot and, although they’ve tried hard to shoe horn in the vast amount of explanations they need to get through here, it’s a bit of a mess of ‘flashback hell’ to be honest.

Another thing is that there’s a very strong, almost surrealistic, supernatural element to the whole antagonist angle in this film and... I’m just not so sure it sat well with the majority of the other elements here. When Marvel adapted Thor and his world of Gods as characters, they were careful to present it as an ‘alternative science’ approach to make it fit in better with the rest of the dramatis personae and they’ve taken this long to go ‘full supernatural’ with the introduction of a Doctor Strange movie later this year. Here it’s all very much something that all the other characters take in their stride and... I guess you have to ask yourself why? Sure, they’ve all seen Superman in action and this film is very much a third part of the Man Of Steel series, linking into the ending of the last movie in particular... but it’s still very much a stretch to credibility when you see some of the things happening here.

About that... this film also features cameos by two of the super heroes seen in Batman Vs Superman. I won’t spoil one cameo because it takes you completely by surprise, comes fairly early and it’s over almost before it’s started... but anybody who’s seen the trailers for this film will also know that Ben Affleck reprises his Batman/Bruce Wayne role from the last movie (forewarned is forearmed though... there’s a lot of material in the trailers which didn’t make it into the final cut of the cinema release). He does this four times, in fact... three times in his Batman costume, scattered through the movie, and a fourth as... well, just make sure you stay around for the mid end-credits sequence to see another reference to the forthcoming Justice League movie.

Another big problem is the use of music in some scenes. Steven Price’s score is not at fault. It’s a good selection of appropriate music which serves to boost the tone of the movie... although he does use a melody very reminiscent of something John Barry used in scenes of the Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) quite often and it kept popping me out of the movie with visions of the Swiss Alps, to be honest. However, its the song placement which becomes a problem in this one. It starts off pretty well with some well mixed in tracks that serve as a kind of audio shorthand for some of those horrendously prolific exposition scenes I was talking about. I was kinda applauding the choices and the way they were being used until... at one point during the briefing scene, it’s mixed in way too loud over important dialogue and you can barely hear what the actors are saying to each other. This is pretty terrible and I had to rely on my knowledge of the trailer, where the same dialogue is unencumbered by too prominently mixed music, to remember just what was being said in this scene. So... yeah, that’s just awful and unforgivable. Maybe they can remix it for the home video version. The song placement just doesn't work from this point on and, when even more songs come in later, you just know this was a movie that was all about the ‘songtrack’ deal at the cost of serving the art effectively. So really not very happy about that.

Also, the writing is very sloppy. At one point the Squad’s incentive for doing what they are doing is destroyed, a dramatic moment so obviously played as a card in the hand of their employers and, furthermore, Harley Quinn’s own neck device is also disarmed by The Joker. What then would propel them, her especially, to return to prison at the end because a duplicate controller is pulled from a convenient pocket. Did everybody just forget what’s happened? This is just plain crazy.

The films biggest sin, though, is the entire predictability of everything you are about to see. The destruction of the neck bomb controller, characters X and Y not being dead after all, character Z having no back story so you know he’s gong to die real quick as an example to the Suicide Squad of what will happen if they disobey orders etc. It’s all written extremely badly and you will always see it coming. There are absolutely no surprises in this movie at all, except... the brief appearance by one of the superhero characters I mentioned earlier. So that’s a real problem.

You know what though? For all its challenges, Suicide Squad is quite a fun film. I’m almost regretting seeing it on a big screen because, for me, it felt like one of those early to mid 1980s straight to VHS releases which you would hire from the local ‘off licence’ and watch with your mates. It works in its own way and maybe doesn’t feel like its something they could have got away with as a cinema release but certainly could glean a small following of people who could watch it in the same way they might enjoy a Chuck Norris movie or a Cannon Films production. Not the best movie in existence but something which might appeal to an element of your own personality and fit right into your way of seeing the world. It’s not something I would go out of my way to recommend, for sure, but it’s certainly not something I would tell people to avoid, either. It’s probably good for a Saturday night out... or in... and if you go in not expecting too much, as I did, then you shouldn’t be too disappointed with it.  After all... why be so serious?