I’m a little late to this party mostly because Wife and I have been hard at work trying to keep a gremlin alive in our house for the past three weeks. We’ve started watching a lot of Friday Night Lights with Mom while she’s here visiting to make sure that we don’t accidentally forget this emotional terrorist at the park during a tantrum or feed it too much sugar. Big takeaways from Friday Night Lights is that football coaches can go anywhere, anytime with complete impunity. Midnight practices in a lightning storm? OK. Mid-evening beer drop off by your wife at the office? No problem. You’ve got the time to spring kids loose from the county jail and also oversee the rehab of your star QB, but juggling that with your daughter’s dance recitals is a bridge too far. I don’t know how the first season ends though, so please no spoilers.
What are we doing again? The Suicide Squad? We started this earlier tonight and it took a few extra hours, but ultimately, I can say confidently that it’s probably a good thing that Wife went to bed before the second half. The Ratcatcher 2 is as triggering as Wife thought she would be. I have read some brief articles about the way that TSS signals the end of a dying genre, the way that the cowboy Western outlived its welcome and then continued to lurch on ineffectively, zombie-like, without much purpose through the sixties before its final demise–and the way that Gunn is emulating Clint Eastwood in his reactionary films questioning the tenets of the very genre that got him famous.. I’ve also read that this movie somehow solves a problem with the ending to super hero movies–plot armor. I don’t quite pick up on either of those threads, but I know I’ve also been under a rock for a few weeks and things may have changed since my last night of proper sleep.
Time has lot all meaning in the intervening weeks. Last night, Wife woke me up to console our illiterate sea monkey and I spent a good two hours singing to her in a dark closet only to return with a half delirious child to someone saying “it’s still your turn it’s only been five minutes,” which is all to say that if anyone thought that this two hour romp through some of the most delightful rain forest of Panama was a waste of time, you are really talking to the wrong man. This was the first new movie I’ve seen in weeks and I haven’t spoken to more than a handful of adults this month, so I am just grateful to see unmasked faces and watch humans communicate with one another.
Franchise seems like the wrong word for what’s going on in this movie. It’s unclear to me how this fits in with the chronology of Birds of Prey, let alone that other similarly named movie with eerily similar-looking actors, but in terms of what it’s set out to do on its own merits, I have to respect a movie that is not looking for more than an episode and some very preliminary character development for the few surviving stars. BOP taught me that there is quite a bit of room in my heart for the slapdash, luck-filled coincidence machine that is Harley Quinn’s combat style, and this film blends that aesthetic along with the less quirky and cartoony violence of John Cena kicking the shit out of anything that stands in his way.
Was it “corrective”? Did it “reset” past wrongs? Were there “enough” closeups of hearts bursting or “vermin chewing through things”? I can’t say. Was it fair to do that shark man as dirty as they did? Does the Green Mile want to sue for copyright infringement? Who’s to say? But from where I’m standing, TSS accomplished two things. It gave me an excuse to cheer for a group of truly stupid misfits and it didn’t ask me to think too hard about the morality of the Big Bad. I didn’t have to sit through a monologue or acknowledge the reasons we ought to condone our own destruction. Superhero movies have grown pretty fucking dark but this movie featuring a mass murdering child-killing weasel had no qualms about letting it all hang out.
