Task Force X!

Suicide Squad (2016): written and directed by David Ayer; based on DC Comics characters and situations created by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, Gerry Conway, Paul Dini, Bob Haney, Howard Purcell, and many others; starring Will Smith (Deadshot), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Viola Davis (Amanda Waller), Jared Leto (The Joker), Joel Kinnaman (Colonel Rick Flag), Cara Delevingne (June Moone/ Enchantress), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Killer Croc), Jay Hernandez (Diablo), Jai Courtney (Captain Boomerang), Adam Beach (Slipknot), Alaine Chanoine (Businessman/ Incubus), Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne/ Batman), and Ezra Miller (The Flash):

I'd love to see the David Ayer director's cut of Suicide Squad. Did it include as many music-video sequences? More importantly, did its first 45 minutes seem like the film adaptation of Who's Who in the DC Universe I've been waiting 32 years to see? 

Ayer is a solid, gritty director of manly men doing violent, manly things in movies that include Fury and End of Watch. And Ayer has definitely seen The Dirty Dozen, which did this sort of Rogue's Team-up with flair -- an early death in Suicide Squad bounces right off the first death in The Dirty Dozen in visual terms. Lee Marvin would really help this movie, or even someone Lee-Marvin-esque rather than Joel Kinnaman's somewhat bland portrayal of team leader Colonel Rick Flag. Was Stephen Lang available? Stephen Lang would be a killer Rick Flag.

Dismantled and reassembled by a team of panicked Warner Brothers executives after the widespread vitriol that attended Batman V. Superman back in March, Suicide Squad is a strangely enjoyable mess that seems to be missing vital connective tissue at several points in its narrative. The changes in mood -- from zippy to grim to sentimental to music video to Ghostbusters -- are striking and sometimes off-putting.

But like a lot of DC Comics movie offerings (and very few Marvel movie offerings, regardless of their box-office success), Suicide Squad is stylistically interesting and, at times, visually bold. The plot may sag or jump, but visually David Ayer manages a number of striking moments, along with some awfully good live-action visual adaptations of comic-book costumes. Say what you will about these DC movies, but they've yet to foist upon the viewing public as crappy a superhero costume as Marvel's lame-ass visualization of the Vision.

But people like plot. Plot, plot, plot. And I wish this one was more coherent. Hell, I wish they'd included a scene that actually named one of the two supernatural Big Bads (Incubus) rather than leaving that job to the closing credits. Hmm. Incubus. And another super-villain is named Slipknot. That's some weird musical stuff.

Everyone's already talked about Margot Robbie (pretty good as Harley Quinn, not so good as psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel) and Jared Leto (underwhelming and underused as the Joker, who really should be stuck trying to save the world at the climax because that really would be funny). I liked Jay Hernandez and his character Diablo, which visually is a crazy gang-banging stereotype but as written and performed is instead the movie's most noble and nuanced character. Viola Davis is pretty much on-point as Amanda Waller, who will do anything to save the world. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje  gets buried under a ton of make-up and a mumble-mouthed Cajun accent as Killer Croc, but he's still pretty good.

And Will Smith does that twinkly Will Smith thing as principled assassin Deadshot while wearing a mostly faithful recreation of Marshall Rogers' striking re-design for the character from the 1970's Batman comics. Why Warner wasted Smith here and didn't get him on-board the Justice League movie as Green Lantern John Stewart baffles me. It seems like a major missed opportunity. Oh, well. 

The last hour is pretty much that Ghostbusters reboot you didn't expect to see in a comic-book movie. And I liked a lot of the visual work on all the monstrous tentacles and crawly, misshapen, monstrous hell-soldiers running around a supernaturally invaded Midway City, (Midway City being the name for Toronto on Earth-DC, at least judging by all the recognizable Toronto locations that make cameos in Suicide Squad). The Enchantress looks creepy in her earlier appearances, though her later belly-dancer get-up underwhelms. Techno-organic hell-god Incubus also has some visual moments, along with an underwhelming death. 

That the movie should end with Harley Quinn killing the Joker seems like a real lost opportunity to freak out the Internet. But it would totally be a great idea. And clear the way to someone better than Leto playing the Joker because that guy never stays dead anyway! Suicide Squad straddles a line between lightly recommended and recommended. Your experience may vary. 

Supes in the 90's and Bat's in the 40's.

Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite!: written by Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway, and Dan Jurgens; illustrated by Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway, Curt Swan, John Byrne, Bob McLeod, Brett Breeding, Art Thibert, Dennis Janke, Dave Hoover, Kerry Gammill, and Scott Hanna (1990/ Collected 1996): An entertaining, short story arc from the various Superman titles in 1990. Why they decided to go with a title that spells out 'KKK' in acrostic is a really good question, though. 

Coming four years after John Byrne and company had rebooted Superman into a less god-like version of himself, Krisis offers us a Superman who already seems as comfortable as an old shoe. And there's nothing wrong with that. The art is also solid, workmanlike, no-fuss stuff. The three writers give us a Superman who's as noble as ever, faced with a situation in which his powers have mysteriously vanished because of Red Kryptonite.

As there is no Red Kryptonite in the rebooted world of Superman post-1986, this offers an intellectual challenge for the Man of Steel. Not only does he need to find out why he's a normal human now, he also finds himself obligated to continue fighting super-villains by whatever means necessary. My only regret is that the writers didn't figure out how to bring back the Super-mobile, a toy from the late 1970's that was forced upon the Superman creators of the time as something that just had to appear in the comic books. See also the Spider-mobile. 

The supporting cast is likeably constructed here, from the tough Lois Lane to the mostly competent Jimmy Olsen and onwards to relatively new cast addition Professor Hamilton. The main villains of the piece are Lex Luthor and Mr. Mxyzptlk. Luthor is dying of Kryptonite exposure because he's been wearing a green K ring on his hand for several years to ward off Superman. Mr. Mxyzptlk has undergone an unfortunate redesign in the post-1986 Superman universe: the skinny, almost snake-like look wouldn't survive much longer, thank Rao. 

Along the way, we do get a terrific joke that brings Superman reboot co-architect John Byrne back to the Man of Steel after a two-year absence with a funny riff on alternate universes and Byrne's work on the Fantastic Four prior to his work on the Superman comics. Recommended.

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 2: written by Bill Finger; illustrated by Bob Kane, George Roussos, Fred Ray, Jerry Robinson, and others (1941/collected 1993): Bob Kane worked out a sweet legal deal in 1939 with what would become DC Comics. It got him sole credit in perpetuity as the creator of Batman. This also screwed over writer Bill Finger, who by all accounts came up with about 90% of Batman's recognizable features. 

Kane generally got full credit on art and story for Batman stories until the 1960's. It's not entirely clear whether he actually did anything other than supervise the stories included here from 1941 issues of Batman magazine. So it goes. 

The stories collected here are interesting in a historical sense -- this is not the hyper-competent Batman who has really only existed in comic books since Frank MIller's 1985-86 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns. Instead, he's more of a costumed adventurer with an incredible propensity for getting knocked unconscious by everyone he fights. 

Seriously, post-concussion syndrome should really be the Golden Age Batman's Kryptonite. That and Robin the Boy Wonder's ability to get taken hostage at inopportune moments. They're stories for kids (as, indeed, most stories about super-heroes should be), capably illustrated by Kane (?), Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, and others. 

Bill Finger's pulpy inventiveness was already in full swing by 1941. My favourite example here involves Batman fighting a professor who's been exposed to too much radium radiation. He may be a mad, highly radioactive scientist, but his heart was in the right place: he wanted to cure disease. The Joker makes three appearances in the course of the collection (which spans one year of comic books in 1941). Yes, he was already being over-used. But while he's kooky, he's also a homicidal criminal And, as always, something of a dick. Recommended.

Red Helmet

Batman: Under the Red Hood, written by Judd Winick, directed by Brandon Vietti, starring the voices of Bruce Greenwood (Batman/Bruce Wayne), Jensen Ackles (Red Hood), Neil Patrick Harris (Nightwing), and John DiMaggio (the Joker) (2010): There have been four 'in-continuity' Robins in Batman history, with Jason Todd being the second, following Dick Grayson after Grayson graduated to college and became the costumed hero Nightwing.

Todd's history was bizarrely twisted. DC's post-Crisis revamp of continuity in the mid-1980's turned Todd from a circus kid like Grayson before him to a surly street punk. Looking back, it seems obvious that Todd's ultimate fate was years in the making post-Crisis, thanks in part to a bit in Frank Miller's ostensibly out-of-continuity The Dark Knight Returns in which Todd's death is one of the defining moments of an aging Batman's retirement from crime-fighting.

And so, in the late 1980's, DC held a phone poll to decide whether or not Jason Todd would be killed by the Joker. By a vaguely suspicious margin of 72 votes, death won, and Todd got bludgeoned and exploded to death in A Death in the Family, a horrifyingly bad story arc in which Iran names the Joker as their ambassador to the U.N. because...well, because it's a really stupid storyline.

Either that or we were about to find out that the Joker had been a Muslim terrorist all those years.

So the Joker, in his new role as U.N. ambassador, brings a nuclear missile to the United Nations and threatens to blow it up. Yes, the Ayatollah Khomeni was even loopier in the DC universe than in ours. A couple of years later a new, more loveable Robin -- Tim Drake -- debuted, and Jason Todd seemed to be consigned to the dustbin of Bat-history.

Cue the mid-oughts. Todd returns. And from that return comes this animated movie, well-made but depressingly similar to the depressing, doom-haunted Batman comics of the late 1980's and early 1990's. The animation, voice-work and writing are all solid, and writer Judd Winick wisely drops the whole Iranian connection for a slightly more workable plot involving super-terrorist Ra's Al Ghul's bone-headed decision to hire the Joker to distract Batman. The overall effect of this dark, violent movie, though, is pure Debbie Downer.

The Red Hood also offers one of the more curious naming choices in comic-book history -- in this new incarnation, as in his original 1950's first appearance, he doesn't actually wear a hood. It's a red helmet. I guess Red Helmet sounded too goofy even in the 1950's, though no goofier, ultimately, than Green Lantern. Or Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. And would someone just kill the Joker already? Lightly recommended, and not for kids.