Some Hail Marys just meteor straight to the ground, don’t they?
*mild spoilers ahead*
God, I wanted Suicide Squad to be great. Following on from the disappointing Man of Steel and the 2.5 downer hours of Batman V Superman, this villainous shakeup looked like the chance Warner Bros. needed to take for their DC cinematic universe. But this is the case of the ugly duckling growing up to be one fugly duck.
I could spend three articles arranging the tornado of terrible things about the film – the gross male gaze-y camera choices, the weak use of The Joker, the “machine of doom” that we never hear much more about other than it’s a machine and it does doom things, every time Killer Croc spoke, the way Cara Delevingne does magic moves like she’s spinning 13 invisible hula hoops – but you’ve probably heard it all before.
I’m only truly devastated about one thing in this film: Jai Courtney. He was great and I will fight anyone with a rusty saw blade who thinks otherwise.
Courtney made Captain Boomerang – a piece-of-shit comic book character – an entertaining piece-of-shit character to watch. He enters the kamikaze mission not giving a bollock about anyone and is only looking for an opportunity to gap it. No matter who you are, you’ve reached that “fuck it” point in your life that makes this scumbag semi-relatable.
His ignorance gets a squad mate killed, his cowardice has him swigging booze behind a car during a gunfight, and he takes the first opportunity he’s given to leave and walks straight out of the building like a bloody champ.
(But then they bring him back for no given reason, which was pretty bullshit.)
Courtney has never impressed in a blockbuster before. He’s either been a bland asshole in a forgettable film (Divergent, Jack Reacher) or a bland sub-hero in a forgettable sequel (A Good Day to Die Hard, Terminator: Genisys). However, as a sub-hero asshole in Suicide Squad, Courtney finally shined like a bruised eye on a battered body.
The final film doesn’t do Jai Courtney justice – a sentence I never thought my fingers would type. It’s a movie that feels smooshed into a constantly twisting mold of audience expectations. “Do they like jokes? Add more jokes! Do they like the trailer? Make it more like the trailer!” And the end result is a Play-Doh Frankenstein that can barely walk.
Captain Boomerang is an ode to not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks. Suicide Squad needed way more of that.
