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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Suicide Squad.
Ok since no movie critic of comic book movies actually reads comics or ever bothered to read the Wikipedia articles summarizing I present to you their issues and why they are wrong. Also including is generic movie information..
The prison has people with no powers! Yes, exactly like the comic books. It was the most dangerous not the most powerful. Harley is dangerous because of nothing else her connection to the Joker. Deadshot is dangerous because people want to hire him. Angry powerful people.
The movie had modern music in it! Movies tend to do this. Be not alarmed.
The pacing was off in the middle! Agreed but the same can be said about everything Kubrick made and I don't hear you complaining.
Harley and Joker have a toxic relationship! Yes, they are villains.
There wasn't enough time spent on character backstory! Use your glowing rectangle.
They caused the problem they were supposed to be solving! Yes, like the comics. It was a metaphor for the CIA. Fidel Castro, Iraq, that dictator in Panama, the Taliban....Got it?
Harley should have better weapons! Have someone scream at you and run at you waving a baseball bat and tell me that you are okay with the situation.
I'll go one step further and say the depiction of the Joker was my favourite. Everyone complained about Leto Joker but he was slimy, untrustworthy and totally insane and obviously deep in pain. I don't understand the hate except for bros who identify with the character and want him to be more in line with their self image
I'm not sure if you picked the most minor nitpicks on purpose but none of those are really why I'd say it's a bad movie. In my opinion it's because the execution is just poor overall. If you watch the newer suicide squad it does pretty much all the same things as the first one but better.
They're there to fix a problem caused by the government that sent them. Harley deals with attraction to a toxic and evil man. Some have super powers and some don't.
The difference is the characters are interesting, likeable, funny, and you get to learn about their back stories and see some character development for all of them. Everything in the original just comes across as forced and only a few of the characters get any real focus.
I sum it up as the difference between killer croc and king shark. Killer croc just looks bad and is basically a 1 dimensional black stereotype that's just there and maybe does something twice the whole movie. King shark is a dumb lovable monster that bonds with the team and actually has a presence beyond monster guy go do the thing we brought you for. They're both supposed to be major parts of the team as the heavy hitters but you could take killer croc out of the first one and the movie would be unaffected.
I went thru the reviews on rotten tomatoes. These are not my arguments. They are the ones produced by people who don't know what Wikipedia is evidently.
I am not claiming it is Shakespeare. It is an enjoyable movie and the arguments I heard about why it was bad are not great. Critics are inconsistent and subjective. What's more they seem peer obsessed over customer obsessed. When I read a film review I want to know if the movie is worth spending money on, not if the critic was in a bad mode that day or if they want to suck up to someone else.
They forgave Kubrick for sins they made this movie pay for. Here check this out: go name 2 humans from 2001 without searching online. About 9 are identified by name and everyone can only remember 1. Seems a bit one dimensional with not enough backstory doesn't it? How about the pacing in 2001. Are you going to tell me you didn't fall asleep in the middle? And yet he is given a pass. One is considered one of the best movies of all time and the other is shat on by critics. Yet both had the same "sins".
Finally. Someone gets it. Kinda.
You would think that wouldn't you, Margot Robbie?
Of course I would, I'm in the movie.
Lmao at the last one. It's one of my favorite movies, I knew the ratings were bad but didn't realise it's under 60% on RT.
Either ways, I'd watch the sequel if it follows the same flavor
I'd say that the spiritual sequel was Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey.
The Birds of Prey (usually founded by Oracle, including the Question, Huntress, Cassie Cain (one of the Batgirls), etc. etc. is... well... they're not done quite right. They changed a lot for the movie and made Harley Quinn the center-stage.
Harley Quinn gets her breakup story with the Joker. She meets up with a whole bunch of street-level superheroes, they all go off and do a grand adventure (less grimdark than Amanda Waller's stuff, but the Birds of Prey were always more "hopeful" than the Suicide Squad).
The important bit is that these characters: the Birds of Prey, they're all superheroines. I don't necessarily agree with the new interpretations of these characters, but everyone "deserves" to be treated as a superheroine, albeit street-level (aka: few / no powers, focus on just thugs and gangs and smaller-scale stuff). I think everyone had their chance to shine and show that they deserved to be part of a superheroine team.
Should Oracle have been there? Obviously, she's one of the most important Birds of Prey IMO. Was Huntress rewritten to become a joke of a character? Yes, but I did genuinely laugh out loud at some of her lines, so maybe it wasn't all bad. Etc. etc. Its a very flawed movie but I did ultimately enjoy it as a whole.
I agree that backstory is non-essential, but are critics criticizing the lack of backstory or the lack of fully fleshed out characters? Because imo one of the reasons the first Suicide Squad was bad was because it didn't have adequately fleshed out characters. Any movie that relies on outside material to fill in essential blanks is not doing one of the major things a movie is supposed to do: tell a full story with its characters. Or at least it's not doing it well
I went into this with a friend of mine when it came out. If you watched a Pacific theater WW2 movie and wrote an article about why it is not explained why we are supposed to hate the Japanese how should people react?
I wasnt really into the Marvel comics growing up and yet thanks to my glowing rectangle it was pretty easy to figure out who that Thanos guy was.
Don't assume your audience is dumb. Even if you have to assume that you can at least assume that they have glowing rectangles.
So yeah they didn't spend a lot of time on each and everyone's backstory. Did you really need it? Was it so very difficult to figure out that lady clearly working for the US government did in fact work for the US government? How about all the backstory shown for Deadshot and Harley? Did you need more? Because if so you got wikipedia.
Sorry to be rude I don't mean to be. Still bothers me that all these professional movie critics couldn't bother to spend the slightest amount of time reading up on this stuff. I liked the movie, I loved the comics when I was a kid.