Suicide Squad "Buries the Lead" (spoilers!)
I'll get right to it:
Suicide Squad could have been a wild, funny, sharp-edged satire, but (somewhere along the way) somebody had a failure of nerve and re-edited it into a standard superhero movie. The re-edit completely sawed off the blunt edge of the screenplay and scrambled the plot. Three great performances--from Will Smith (Deadshot), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn) and Viola Davis (Amanda Waller)--were trapped in a movie that never seemed to gather momentum for the entire running time.
I'm gonna tell you exactly what went wrong, and how I would have fixed it.
A lot of critics seemed to have fixed on the Enchantress as a big problem of the movie: one-dimensional big bad, vague motivations, subpar minions. (All true.) They also complained that, since Enchantress was the first metahuman recruited by Waller, the Squad wasn't facing an outside enemy--they were basically cleaning up the mess left by its boss lady. But you see....
THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE MOVIE.
Enchantress and her boring brother are not the villains of this movie (or at least I don't think they were supposed to be). WALLER is. Every underhanded, illegal and immoral tactic Waller uses in the name of national security just buries the characters in deeper and deeper shit, until the whole world is about to go down the tubes. That's why Waller uses criminals and psychos as her task force, instead of recruiting her own version of the Justice League; unlike superheroes, the psychos won't ask questions that will embarrass the government.
That Enchantress was the original test subject for Task Force X should been kept Waller and Flag's little secret until the end, setting up a more focused confrontation between the Squad and Waller. It should have gone like this:
Movie opens on Enchantress and her bro causing havok in Midway City. Intercut with Waller proposing her TFX idea to the Pentagon. (I liked the visual "dossiers" on each member--keep those.) Enchantress sets up her apocalypse machine and Midway City clears out. Pentagon approves TFX, and Flag and the squad are sent in to bring Enchantress back--alive, if possible.
As the team slogs through a magically altered Midway City (bubble-faced zombie minions? Out!), Deadshot starts asking questions: why are we--an assassin, a flamethrower, a genetic throwback, a guy who tosses boomerangs, and a crazy chick with a baseball bat--doing this job and not a team of superheroes? Why does Waller want Enchantress alive?
(And maybe we get a convincing explanation of how Deadshot can be a coldblooded assassin and a superdad, or why Dr. Harleen Quinzel went over the edge....)
But Flag isn't talking.
The squad confronts Enchantress and her brother, defeats bro (pretty much how they did it in the movie), leaving Enchantress vulnerable to Waller's control. Waller swoops in, says to the Squad: thanks, I'll take it from here--and oooh, doesn't this apocalypse machine look INTERESTING. And THEN we get the flashback of Waller, Flag and Enchantress putting on that show for the brass--and Deadshot and the rest of the squad finally realize how badly they've been played.
Waller is about to pack up Enchantress and the Machine to go who knows where and do God knows what, but Flag says that wasn't the deal. He threatens to crush the Enchantress' heart and WALLER says, "You don't have the balls." He does it anyway. The machine disintegrates, and the Enchantress dies--but Rick gets his girlfriend back.
Fade to sequel.
Looking over my scenario, I can see a few rough spots--but at least the plot makes sense, and my version would be at least 20 minutes shorter and move a lot faster. Refocusing on Waller--as I think director David Ayer intended--would have made a much better movie.
Suicide Squad could have been a wild, funny, sharp-edged satire, but (somewhere along the way) somebody had a failure of nerve and re-edited it into a standard superhero movie. The re-edit completely sawed off the blunt edge of the screenplay and scrambled the plot. Three great performances--from Will Smith (Deadshot), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn) and Viola Davis (Amanda Waller)--were trapped in a movie that never seemed to gather momentum for the entire running time.
I'm gonna tell you exactly what went wrong, and how I would have fixed it.
A lot of critics seemed to have fixed on the Enchantress as a big problem of the movie: one-dimensional big bad, vague motivations, subpar minions. (All true.) They also complained that, since Enchantress was the first metahuman recruited by Waller, the Squad wasn't facing an outside enemy--they were basically cleaning up the mess left by its boss lady. But you see....
THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE MOVIE.
Enchantress and her boring brother are not the villains of this movie (or at least I don't think they were supposed to be). WALLER is. Every underhanded, illegal and immoral tactic Waller uses in the name of national security just buries the characters in deeper and deeper shit, until the whole world is about to go down the tubes. That's why Waller uses criminals and psychos as her task force, instead of recruiting her own version of the Justice League; unlike superheroes, the psychos won't ask questions that will embarrass the government.
That Enchantress was the original test subject for Task Force X should been kept Waller and Flag's little secret until the end, setting up a more focused confrontation between the Squad and Waller. It should have gone like this:
Movie opens on Enchantress and her bro causing havok in Midway City. Intercut with Waller proposing her TFX idea to the Pentagon. (I liked the visual "dossiers" on each member--keep those.) Enchantress sets up her apocalypse machine and Midway City clears out. Pentagon approves TFX, and Flag and the squad are sent in to bring Enchantress back--alive, if possible.
As the team slogs through a magically altered Midway City (bubble-faced zombie minions? Out!), Deadshot starts asking questions: why are we--an assassin, a flamethrower, a genetic throwback, a guy who tosses boomerangs, and a crazy chick with a baseball bat--doing this job and not a team of superheroes? Why does Waller want Enchantress alive?
(And maybe we get a convincing explanation of how Deadshot can be a coldblooded assassin and a superdad, or why Dr. Harleen Quinzel went over the edge....)
But Flag isn't talking.
The squad confronts Enchantress and her brother, defeats bro (pretty much how they did it in the movie), leaving Enchantress vulnerable to Waller's control. Waller swoops in, says to the Squad: thanks, I'll take it from here--and oooh, doesn't this apocalypse machine look INTERESTING. And THEN we get the flashback of Waller, Flag and Enchantress putting on that show for the brass--and Deadshot and the rest of the squad finally realize how badly they've been played.
Waller is about to pack up Enchantress and the Machine to go who knows where and do God knows what, but Flag says that wasn't the deal. He threatens to crush the Enchantress' heart and WALLER says, "You don't have the balls." He does it anyway. The machine disintegrates, and the Enchantress dies--but Rick gets his girlfriend back.
Fade to sequel.
Looking over my scenario, I can see a few rough spots--but at least the plot makes sense, and my version would be at least 20 minutes shorter and move a lot faster. Refocusing on Waller--as I think director David Ayer intended--would have made a much better movie.