Wonder Woman

In the new superhero movie Wonder Woman, we are presented with perhaps the most interesting and thrilling character of the year. A woman who is tough, kind, compassionate. She's a warrior and yet also a passifist. It's just too bad that the movie she is in is subpar.

In Wonder Woman, the story is bland and the performances are a mixed bag. The title character is also known as Diana, an Amazonian princess on an island of only females. World War I reaches their shores, as an American spy named Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crashes there and seeks their help. While the queen wants nothing to do with mankind's wars, Diana is convinced that this battle can truly end all wars. She disobeys, and runs away with Steve to end the war. The terrible convenience of a just war is that it's only in retrospect, it seems, when it becomes evident whether or not it truly was just. World War I was meant to be the "war to end all wars," and yet it of course led to another world war, as well as (indirectly) the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Diana arguably goes through a similar realization.

The performances might be a mixed bag, but they work best when humor is involved. Pine is as charming here as he is when he's Captain Kirk or when he's singing in Into the Woods. Said Taghmaoui as Sameer and Lucy Davis as Steve's humorous secretary provide satisfactory comic relief. Even Danny Huston as the villain and Elena Anaya (whom audiences might recognize in a somewhat similar performance in The Skin I Live In) as his poison doctor engage in a bit of morbid humor. Ludendorff poisons a group of exhausted German generals ready to give up the fight, and then he throws them a mask. "That mask won't help them!" Dr. Poison yells. He responds: "But they don't know that!" Then they let out a mischievous laugh. Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright, as Diana's mother and aunt, respectively, deliver dismal, humorless performances, with Wright's being possibly the worst of her career. (Both struggle to deliver those egregious lines in whatever accent they're aiming for.)

But the title role is played by Gal Gadot, and her performance is the only truly wonderful thing about this movie. She portrays Diana as perfectly complex. Feminists who have been praising the film might be a bit concerned about how Diana appears frequently wearing next to nothing in the same fetishistic outfit and whip (not to mention all the bondage imagery) that she had in the comics. (A biographical film about Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and his mistress, Olive Byrne, both of whom lived with him simultaneously, is due out later this year.) Still, it is refreshing to have a female character tougher than all the boys, and it's long overdue. In addition to the fact that young girls are being provided with a tremendous character to look up, young bisexual people can also look up to her as a hero; for too long, young bi people have had only cruel stereotypes of them in media. While Diana's bisexuality is not portrayed here, the character has been officially confirmed as being bisexual. (Catwoman has also been confirmed as being bisexual.) It's essential that the sequel confirms this.

Wonder Woman is not as boring as Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice or as stupid as Suicide Squad, but it is disappointing in its own right. I'd say it's time for DC Comics to throw the towel in, especially when one views any trailer for the upcoming Justice League movie. Some, like Matthew Jacobs at the Huffington Post (typically), are speculating that it might win Best Picture. I sincerely hope it does not.

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Suicide Squad

Let's cut to the chase: The good news is that Suicide Squad, the third entry in the D.C. Extended Universe, is not nearly as bad as this spring's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. The bad news is that it is still bad. What could have been a fun movie about antiheroes being truly heroic, an antithesis to the overly moody previous D.C. films, is instead a fairly formulaic, rather dull flick that tries to play it safe and yet results in another miss.

Viola Davis plays Amanda Weller, a government official who concocts a bizarre plan to form a task force containing the worst of the worst super villains ever known. These malefactors, she believes, might just be able to do some good for once. In return, the villains get some time deducted from their sentences. If they disobey or try to escape, they die. Fortunately for Weller, if something goes wrong, they are, as Deadshot says, the patsies.

Deadshot could be described as the Suicide Squad's leader, if they needed one. He's a hired assassin who's never missed, and who first appeared in D.C.'s comics in 1950. Here, he's played by Will Smith, who is just as charismatic as ever but who has not been the lead in a blockbuster since Men in Black 3 from 2012. The other two big stars in the film are Margot Robbie, Smith's co-star from Focus, and Oscar-winning "method actor" Jared Leto as cinema's most notorious clown, the Joker. Leto has some big shoes to fill, as fans have argued for years whether the best on-screen portrayal of the Joker has been from Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, or Heath Ledger (or, I suppose, Cesar Romero). Leto does not come close to them. It's not a bad performance, per se, but during the best moments it feels like it's simply a repeat of all the stuff we've previously seen. Leto's method acting doesn't save the performance; I'm not sure what sending rats and used condoms to his co-stars during filming did to enhance his acting. And yet it's not nearly as disappointing as how Robbie as Harley Quinn, the Joker's lover, is squandered; despite a pretty good performance by the always good Robbie, this is a role that, as Alison Wilmore of BuzzFeed describes, is "made into damaged dolly jerk-off material."

It would be hard to argue that this movie isn't anti-women. At one point, one of the villains (good guy villains, I mean) punches a woman and then says, "She had a mouth." And it's a comic relief moment. It is 2016, right?

On a better note, considering how devoid of diversity Hollywood is these days (#OscarsSoWhite), this might be one of the most diverse movies around: Smith, Davis, and Adewale Skinnuoye-Agbaje, covered in makeup as Killer Croc, are black; Jay Hernandez as El Diablo, who throws fire from his fists, is Latino; Karen Fukuhara plays a swordswoman bodyguard and is Asian-American; and Adam Beach as Slipknot is Canadian First Nations.    

But most of this movie is a mess, and most of the blame for this could fall on David Ayer, its writer and director. I'm not too surprised. Training Day, which he wrote, is very overrated, and Fury, which he wrote and directed, borders on trash. End of Watch is barely tolerable. There are some positive aspects of his direction, though. With an eclectic soundtrack that includes "Without Me," "You Don't Know Me," "Bohemian Rhapsody," and "Fortunate Son," he at least shows us that he has good taste in music. And the visual effects and color palate are mostly spectacular.

Suicide Squad is not as bad as I was expecting, but it's still bad, and considering that Suicide Squad is essentially strike three for Warner Bros. in their efforts to try and match the powerhouse that has been Marvel Studios, I'd say it's time to call it quits. No Justice League, no Wonder Woman, perhaps not even a stand-alone Batman film directed by and staring Ben Affleck. It's time to retire the costumes.

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