Tag: Margo Robbie

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The Suicide Squad

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in The Suicide Squad

Frequently Asked Questions about The Suicide Squad

Q: What is The Suicide Squad? 

A: The Suicide Squad is a team of supervillains from the DC comic universe. They are led by covert operative Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) and Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). They recruit incarcerated meta-humans for impossible missions in the service of “national security.” Over the years, comics writers have used the Suicide Squad as a way to recycle crappy, one-off bad guys. This film’s incarnation includes Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Peacemaker (John Cena), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and the legitimately popular Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). 

Q: Polka-Dot Man? What does he do, shoot polka dots?

A: Yes.

Q: Didn’t this movie come out a long time ago? 

A: You’re thinking of Suicide Squad, which was released in 2016. 

Q: So this is a rerelease? 

A: No, this is The Suicide Squad.

Q: Exactly. It’s the same movie.

A: No, the 2016 film directed by David Ayer was called Suicide Squad. This 2021 film directed by James Gunn is The Suicide Squad. See the difference? 

Q: Not really. 

A: This one begins with “The.” 

Q: Ahhh. That’s … stupid. Couldn’t they have called it The Rise of Suicide Squad or Suicide Squad: Something Rises? 

A: Yes, those do sound like better titles. Especially these days when everything rises, like Dark Knight Rises or The Rise of Skywalker. But that’s not what Warner Bros. and DC opted for. 

Q: Why not? 

A: Look, I think you’re getting too hung up on this. I don’t know why they chose a bad title, but I do have a lot more information to impart about The Suicide Squad. 

Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), Peacemaker (John Cena), Bloodsport (Idris Elba), and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) get ready to kill a whole bunch of people.

Q: Does something rise? 

A: Yes, Starro rises. It’s a giant starfish from space that craps out starfish facehuggers, which make people into starfish zombies. 

Q: A giant starfish? That doesn’t sound like a scary supervillain.  

A: In Starro’s defense, it is very large. But like I said, The Suicide Squad is a dumping ground for bad ideas. Starro is so notoriously lame, Alan Moore made fun of it in Watchmen with the giant space squid Ozymandias teleports into New York City.  

Q: I never realized that was satire. 

A: Everything in Watchmen is satire. But we’re talking about The Suicide Squad. 

King Shark (Sylvester Stallone) takes a break.

Q: Right. So, if they’re all bad guys, why are the Suicide Squad fighting Starro?

A: The government sends the squad on a mission to Corto Maltese, an island nation where a military coup led by Luna (Juan Diego Botto) is threatening world peace with a secret super weapon, which turns out to be Starro. 

Q: So who are the good guys? 

A: There are no good guys. 

Starro tearing up the club.

Q: I thought James Gunn worked for Marvel. Didn’t he direct Guardians of the Galaxy? 

A: Yes, but back in the Dark Times of 2018, some alt-right jerk-offs got Gunn fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after he criticized Trump. Warner Bros. scooped him up, and here we are. 

Q: That’s terrible! Will we ever see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3? 

A: Yes, Gunn got rehired after everyone cooled off and figured out the whole thing was dumb. 

Q: So, is The Suicide Squad any good? 

A: Well, it’s better than Suicide Squad, a movie so terrible it was actually edited by a company called Trailer Park, Inc., who specializes in cutting film trailers. 

Q: That’s a pretty low bar to clear. What is it like? 

A: Remember that scene in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, when Yondu the Ravager uses his remote-controlled arrow weapon to slaughter an entire spaceship crew, while grooving to the smooth bossa nova sounds of “Come a Little Bit Closer,” and you were like, “Wow, this is a little too brutal for a kid’s movie”? All of The Suicide Squad is like that.

Q: Sounds like Gunn really phoned it in. 

A: Pretty much. It has its moments, and it’s not as tedious as the Zack Snyder DC films, but it feels completely unnecessary. It says something that, with this and Birds of Prey, DC does villains better than heroes. Or maybe it’s just the Margot Robbie factor. 

Q: Haven’t you done this FAQ schtick before? 

A: Yes, but since DC and Warner Bros. can’t be bothered to come up with new ideas, why should I try? 

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Film Features Film/TV

Birds of Prey

Ah yes, the first superhero movie of the year. It’s like the sighting of the first robin of spring, only with more tedious fighting.

For 2020, it’s Birds of Prey. For a mercenary enterprise that shows every sign of being constructed out of spare parts and leftovers by a corporation determined to wring every last penny out of the increasingly threadbare Batman brand, it’s not bad.

Everything about this film’s concept is schizophrenic. The primary title suggests it’s a superteam story, but make no mistake, this is Harley Quinn’s movie. More to the point, it’s Margot Robbie’s movie. She not only stars as the Joker’s former special lady friend, she’s also the top-billed producer.

Crazy for loving you — Margot Robbie (above) as Harley Quinn breaks up with the Joker and takes charge of her life in Birds of Prey.

Birds of Prey began life as a spinoff of 2016’s Suicide Squad, an abominably bad movie that teamed up a bunch of Batman-adjacent bad guys for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. Suicide Squad is one of those movies that you think might turn the corner and be so bad it’s good, but then you try to watch it, and it’s just painfully Highlander II bad. So Robbie, director Cathy Yan, and writer Christina Hodson had a pretty low bar to clear.

One theory goes that Batman is so beloved because he fights the best villains. Harley Quinn is the last great addition to his rogue’s gallery, introduced in 1992 as part of the first season of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series. The original Harley (Dr. Harleen Quinzel) was unambiguously a victim in an abusive relationship — a psychologist at Arkham Asylum assigned to help the Joker. But she fought the crazy, and the cray-cray won.

The Joker had always had nameless henchmen to carry out his evil clown games, but never a sidekick or a love interest. Even though Harley Quinn was conceived as a throwaway character, she caught on and actually proved to have some depth. She would periodically try to break away from the Joker’s domination, only to go crawling back. Consequently, she became one of the most sympathetic characters in the Batman mythos. When Robbie gave the character a live action debut in Suicide Squad, she was reimagined as a polychromatic roller derby girl, reduced to a damsel for Joker to rescue.

When Birds of Prey opens, Harley and the Joker’s volatile relationship has finally exploded for real. As she explains in her voiceover, she’s bound and determined not to go back to him this time. Her post-breakup ritual is relatable. She moves into her own apartment. She changes her hair. She spends nights on the couch watching Looney Tunes while eating a carton of ice cream. She gets a pet hyena and names him Bruce, after that Wayne guy. She rekindles her love of ultraviolence at the roller derby. She gets blotto drunk and blows up the chemical plant where her ex transformed her into a metahuman.

In the early going, when it’s focused on Harley’s character beats, Birds of Prey is actually fun to watch. I’ve been a Robbie skeptic, but I have to admit she has grown into a good actress. As Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, and Mark Hamill have proved by playing the Joker, it’s fun to watch someone with chops chew the scenery.

Harley gets a McGuffin to chase — a diamond inscribed with the information needed to claim a great fortune — in a nested set of voiceover-enabled flashbacks. When the birds of prey start assembling, things get more conventionally punchy. There’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead — who should be in everything — as Huntress. Jurnee Smolett-Bell as Black Canary, introduced singing a torch song version of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” The great Rosie Perez is Renee Montoya, a Gotham City detective who talks like she’s from a 1980s cop movie. She’s balanced out by Ewan McGregor who serves up the ham as Roman Sionis, a villain who looks like a refugee from a Miami Vice episode.

The closest Marvel analogs for the R-rated Birds of Prey are the Deadpool movies. Director Yan wears her influences on her sleeve: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Kill Bill are most prominent. As with all these endless superhero movies, the little character moments are the best parts, while the action sequences all kind of blur together. But the stakes are pleasingly low (the world is never in any danger), and Robbie’s charisma saves the picture from getting overwhelmed by corporate IP service diktat.

The journey of Harley from henchwoman to antagonist, and her determination to get out from under the shadow of her more famous boyfriend, is where the energies of the all-woman creative team have been directed. Their candy-colored enthusiasm is infectious.

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I, Tonya

The 24 hour news cycle began in earnest in 1991, when CNN drew big ratings with its coverage of the Gulf War. That war didn’t last very long, but the need for TV ratings persisted, so something had to be done. If there wasn’t news worthy of 24 hour coverage, it had to be created.

Margo Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya

Three years later, Tonya Harding provided prime fodder for the news machine. Harding was a figure skater from Portland, Oregon. While the Gulf War was going on, she was winning the U.S. Figure Skating championships and setting records as the first American to ever land a triple axel, and the first person to ever land two triple axels in a competition. She finished fourth at the 1992 Winter Olympics, but just when everyone thought her career was probably over, the Olympic Committee changed the schedule so that the winter and summer olympics didn’t happen in the same year, so she strapped on her skates and started training to represent America on the ice in 1994.

Then, deep weirdness struck. Harding’s rival was Nancy Kerrigan, and as the qualifying competition approached, someone attacked the figure skater with a baton, severely injuring her and putting her Olympic potential in doubt. Suspicion immediately fell on Harding, who became the center of a then-unprecedented media scrum. She made the Olympic team, but with the FBI and the every media outlet in the world breathing down her neck, she melted down in competition in front of the largest worldwide audience in Winter Olympic history. Kerrigan recovered enough to get a silver medal. When the FBI discovered that her on again, off again husband Jeff Gillooly had connections to the assailant, he testified against her. In all, four people served jail time for the Kerrigan attack, and Harding was banned for life from figure skating. Soon afterwards, O.J. Simpson killed his wife, and the media spotlight swung elsewhere, leaving Harding, not yet 25 years old, with a life in ruins.

Sebastian Stan, Margo Robbie, and Julianne Nicholson in I, Tonya

It’s hard not the think that I, Tonya was greenlit in the aftermath of the highly successful TV event The People vs. O.J. Simpson. It’s the kind of gooey 90s media event that a screenwriter can really chew on. Director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers take a meta approach to the material that, in light of its media-generated heat, seems entirely appropriate. The narrative is told in dueling interviews with Harding, (Margo Robbie), Gilloly (Sebastian Stan), and Harding’s mother, LaVona Fay Golden (Allison Janney). Between the three of them, there are zero reliable narrators on screen. Gillespie and Rogers bounce their characters off each other like a narrative demolition derby. Robbie, of whom I have never been a fan, throws everything she has into this role, and makes her case as a great actress. In her hands, Harding becomes a searingly sympathetic anithero, a woman abused by everyone around her both physically and emotionally, whose only way to relate to the world was lashing out. Despite her obviously superior athleticism and fierce determination, she was never liked or taken seriously by a figure skating sports establishment who wanted their heroines delicate, beautiful, and most importantly, upper class. Harding was poor white trash from the beginning, with an absent father and an abusive mother who nevertheless worked her ass off as a waitress to fund her daughter’s sports ambitions. Janney is especially good as the crustiest mom ever, who both put the grit in her daughter to succeed while sewing the seeds of the eventual flameout.

Allison Janney as Tonya Harding’s mother LaVona in I, Tonya

I, Tonya is described as a “black comedy biopic”, and that’s true enough. But it also serves as a searing indictment of the exploitive media landscape and the rapacious audience itself, without whom the tabloids wouldn’t exist. Like Lady Bird, this is a story about the intersection of women and class. Harding’s story was so compelling to the TV audiences of 1994 because she was someone who was supposed to be the pinnacle of female perfection, the figure skater, who was exposed as petty and vindictive—in other words, just as flawed and awful as the audiences who would go on to jeer her when she resorted to women’s boxing to make ends meet in the late 1990s. Gillespie and Robbie pull no punches—at one point, Tonya looks directly into the camera and says “All of you are my abusers, too”. I, Tonya is a film whose smiling face conceals some very sharp teeth.

I, Tonya

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Film Features Film/TV

Focus

Focus begins with Will Smith surveying Manhattan from the balcony of a luxury hotel suite. Rendered in LED blues and firetruck reds, it is a city of glistening jewels. Throughout much of its two-hour running time, Focus seems like a highlight reel for cinematographer Xavier Grobet, a 25-year veteran journeyman cinematographer whose filmography includes the HBO series Looking and the Jack Black comedy Nacho Libre. I kept getting distracted from the story by the beauty of the establishing shots, like the long pan across the Superdome from I-10 in New Orleans, and by the sneaky zoom revealing our hero across a Formula 1 racetrack in Buenos Ares. Warner Brothers dropped $50 million on this Smith vehicle, and in a world of butt-ugly $100 million tentpoles like Dracula Untold, it looks like money well spent. And it’s not just the photography: the editing by Jan Kovac, the costume design by Dayna Pink — all of the trades are at the top of their game. Sure, it veers into Matthew McConaughey car commercial affluence porn, but doggonit, it’s some good-looking affluence porn!

About the story: Smith is a master con artist named Nicky who meets a young, up-and-coming con artist named Jess (Margot Robbie) when she latches onto him in the bar downstairs from the aforementioned luxury hotel suite. After a meet-cute that involves some heavy petting and a gun shoved in Nicky’s face, Jess is impressed enough with what she sees to beg her to take him under his wing. Jess is convincing enough that Nicky agrees, and she joins his elite team of pickpockets and scammers haunting the Super Bowl in New Orleans, where they pull a series of increasingly lucrative cons, from simple pickpocketing to elaborate gaslighting.

Co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who co-wrote the 2003 sleeper hit Bad Santa, revel in the intricacies of the cons and the psychology of fooling a mark. Smith’s Nicky is like Batman: always better prepared and more clever than everyone around him. Smith has even adopted a Christian Bale-like growl for the role. But this is not supposed to be a superhero movie, and after a while the string of coincidences and doublecrosses that passes for a plot become too much to overlook, even when your focus is distracted by all the well-shot shiny objects on the screen.

Smith cut his teeth in TV, and he’s a fine comic, and occasionally dramatic, actor. Focus sees Smith with his movie star mojo jacked up to 11. His personal trainers have had him working overtime, and he’s given long speeches, which he mostly nails. And yet, it’s not enough to overcome his dramatic lack of chemistry, sexual or otherwise, with co-star Robbie. Chemistry is a weird intangible that can make or break you, especially in a two-hander like Focus. They kiss and roll around in bed enough, but there’s never any sense of real passion between the two actors. It doesn’t help that Jess is so poorly written that it gives Robbie nothing to work with. She’s just supposed to be “the girl” in this story populated by powerful, hypercompetent older men with whom she is always impressed. The movie would be better if she resembled an actual woman instead of a prize in a male power fantasy.

Ficarra and Requa are trying to make The Sting or The Usual Suspects, but their story lacks the former’s sense of fun and the latter’s disciplined structure. But at least there’s plenty of great cinematography to get lost in during the long flat stretches.