When critics weighed in against Suicide Squad — as evidenced by its 26%rating on Rotten Tomatoes — hardcore fans rose up in protest, thinking that (akin to Donald Trump) things were rigged against DC’s roster of heroes.
After all, DC’s characters are the old school gang classic figures such as Superman, Batman, and The Justice League of America team. Though it subsequently had a $135 million opening weekend (the largest ever in August), reviewers ravaged Suicide Squad with Salon’s writer calling it “profoundly second-rate at every level of conception and execution.”
But what was so second-rate: the film or its critics?
Suicide Squad smashes box office record, defies critic https://t.co/9O3Hh63oJb pic.twitter.com/S0nD3mZImQ
— GraphiqEntertainment (@Graphiq_Ent) August 8, 2016
Between the two huge companies that own the characters that are the basis for these films, Disney-owned Marvel’s heroes have been favored by fans and critics alike. Its heroes, particularly Daredevil, Fantastic Four, The Hulk and even Spider-Man, were conceived as outliers and misfits to American society.
They are foreigners to humanity, created by atomic energy, a threat to the body politic. The X-Men are the ultimate outsiders since as meta-humans, they’re the next step in evolution, and at different times have been stand-ins for racial, religious, and sexual minorities.
But in Hollywood it’s Marvel that now seems to be winning the commercial and critical lottery. While DC is the older company and has historically enjoyed more success on television, Marvel entered the cinematic race with more robust effort. That may partially explain why Marvel seems to do it better. Their earlier mistakes have been lost to the past.
For the most part, recent superhero pictures have been based on ensembles since the first X-Men movie onward. Ensembles are great for building franchises but not for building characters. Some of these films have squandered opportunities to craft credible profiles by having too many characters necessary to set up future features.
Both Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy featured less well-known characters which liberated the filmmakers from the weight of the original stories and familiar heroes. Though the hardcore fan may howl when these films diverge from the print/panel characterizations, it also gives the creators a chance to play around and craft distinct variations — something much harder when that figure is Batman or Spider-Man.
Indeed Suicide Squad backfired when it shoehorned in a well-known character, in the form of The Joker, thrown into the movie for his association with Harley Quinn and his nemesis Batman. In an effort to hype up the film, it seems like Jared Leto tried to play him as the Clown Prince of Crime but he came off like a desperate teenager trying to shock his parents; an excessive add-on to an already huge cast.
These movies come closer to brutish action films — where stars shoot their way to victory — than they do to Hamlet. But they can’t just exist as a series of set pieces built around the presence of a super villain who offers an excuse for elaborate fight scenes and destructive acts, rather than effective plot development, before time’s up and the credits roll.
Recent superhero films demand countless action scenes laden with ultra-violence because of a combination of forces: the studio’s bottom line; overseas sales to audiences uninterested in complicated characters or dialogue (with de-sexualizing alterations to appease Chinese censors); and the need to appeal to kids (especially post-millennials with the attention span of a gnat) who have enough other media distractions.
Superhero films are a source for new strategies to sell toys and t-shirts so they don’t have to offer complex personalities and narratives. Who needs originator John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad when all it takes is flashy colors and sexy marketing to sell an action figure? No need for conventional character development if core audiences don’t require it. The whole genre has become more visually grandiose while becoming shabbier plot-wise.
From this vantage point, neither Suicide Squad nor Batman v Superman were as mediocre as critics decreed. Captain America and The Avengers really weren’t that much better but Marvel gets more props because it better integrates its heroes’ universe.
But the raft of films on both sides of the aisle are full-on bombast with chaotic storylines and too many scantly outlined characters and subplots.
In both Deadpool and Ant-Man, humor counterbalances endless battles and acts of destruction. But that doesn’t necessarily make for thorough characterization. When Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool breaks the 4th wall between audience and scenario, critics and fans cheered but were the filmmakers bamboozling audiences to appear smart and clever rather than offer insight into this sociopathic killer? At least the raunchy sex scenes were a nod to Deadpool’s humanity — however perverse that might be.
Maybe it’s time we see superhero films where characters fight evil but also worry about bills and affordable healthcare. The assumption is that there’s no need to explain what superheroes do in a normal day or what challenges they face when not fending off super villains.
The studios and filmmakers have lost sight of this need for humanity and made their heroes nerd-geek-wish-fulfillment fantasy figures.
So I suggest a few solutions to make comic book movies more real:
Why can’t a superhero film have a plot that offers a human story like Josh Trank’s Chronicle — a much better superhero film he made before 2015’s Fantastic Four disaster?
Will the upcoming Marvel Doctor Strange movie breathe real life into the character and give him an emotionally rich backstory — not just the expected superhero tropes?
Will DC’s Suicide Squad sequel reveal a whole raft of new rich personalities and present a classier kind of crazy?
Here’s hoping…