The Suicide Squad (2021, James Gunn)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A team of prisoners are offered sentence reductions if they undertake a dangerous mission…

The first Suicide Squad film had been more or less a disaster. A muddled, muddy, moronic mess of a movie, which featured appalling acting, crude comedy and stupefying storytelling. There were also post-release complaints from writer/director David Ayer that his vision had been butchered by studio executives insisting on reshoots and a different edit. (Predictably, a #ReleaseTheAyerCut campaign began online.) But the film had been profitable, so a follow-up was soon planned.

For the sequel-cum-soft-reboot, which insouciantly adds a The to the title, the bigwigs at DC hired writer/director James Gunn. He had made the first two Guardians of the Galaxy films for rival studio Marvel – both huge successes – but then been temporarily fired from the threequel for some distasteful tweets. While Gunn’s take on Suicide Squad is undoubtedly an improvement over Ayer’s, we are talking fine margins here…

The film’s opening sets up a new Task Force X, run by a returning Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, still using a frown as a substitute for acting). This team has some members from the first Suicide Squad – tough-guy leader Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), pop-art-come-to-life criminal Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Australian thief Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) – but we meet newbies too. Michael Rooker’s combat expert Savant appears at first to be a new lead character; comedian Pete Davidson plays manic merc Blackguard; while Nathan Fillion shows up as TDK (The Detachable Kid), a mutant who can detach and reattach his limbs.

This crew is sent on a covert mission to storm the beach of South American country Corto Maltese, which has a new anti-American government. (Meanwhile, the boffins back at Suicide Squad HQ run a betting pool on which task-force members will survive.) However, in a switcheroo gag that establishes the groan-inducing tone of the film’s comedy, most of the team are massacred by Corto Maltese forces as soon as they land. We then learn that they were only ever a decoy. Waller has also sent *another*, more capable team, to attack a different beach…

Harley Quinn and Rick Flag actually survive the assault (because their characters were popular in the original film) and they now hook up the other team, which means *another* round of laborious introductions for misfits with comic-book aliases and abilities. There’s Bloodsport (Idris Elba), a mercenary in a gadget-heavy robo-suit; Peacemaker (John Cena), a conscience-free, reactionary killer with a lack of irony; Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchain), who… [sigh]… can create and fire deadly polkadots at people; Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchoir), a young thief who has the ability to… [are you still reading this?]… that’s right, control rats; and King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), a CGI humanoid shark who… [of course he does]… has a limited vocabulary. Each hero gets a maudlin backstory moment, as if they’re on The X-Factor and the producers have prodded them to build up their sob story, yet you never care about them on any resonant level. (Long-time viewers of superhero movies will also note the lack of new ideas here. Bloodsport is suspiciously similar to the character he’s replacing, Will Smith’s Deadshot from the first film – even down to the troubled relationship with a daughter – while Peacemaker and King Shark often remind you of the much better Drax and Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.)

The team’s mission is to destroy a scientific research facility called Jotunheim, which was once used by Nazis and has now fallen into the hands of the Movie-Cliché Central Americans who have taken over Corto Maltese (even down to casting the same actor to play the same type of sleazy military general as in Bond film Quantum of Solace). Something mysterious called Project Starfish is going on at Jotunheim, and Waller thinks it’s a threat to the good old US of A. So the team track down Project Starfish’s top scientist, the Thinker (Peter Capaldi, wearing sci-fi make-up and trying not to look like he’s taken a desultory role for the money), and coerce him into helping them.

Comedy dominates, but unfortunately this boils down to gags about how flamboyant comic-book superpowers are actually useless, sarcastic dialogue that’s empty observational comedy without any deep understanding of the situation, and OTT violence (faces are blown off, scalps are sliced off, Bloodshot and Peacemaker massacre a camp’s worth of soldiers in a sequence that plays like a videogame Rambo… but only afterwards learn that the soldiers were good guys). James Gunn had *excelled* at likeable, warm, smart comedy with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which remembered to tell the story via character interactions and believable emotions. But The Suicide Squad is childish and snide. The film thinks that saying fuck or pointing out a trope is enough. It really isn’t. It’s soulless and cheap; a corporate, American-network-TV idea of what radical and rebellious looks like.

Thank the superhero gods, then, for Margot Robbie. The manic, bubblegum character of Harley Quinn is actually off-screen for long stretches (perhaps a necessity due to Robbie’s top-end career), but the fantasy sequences, gleeful violence and smart music choices of her solo subplot are a hoot. Here, thanks to Robbie understanding the cartoon tone and always making Harley sympathetic, the film actually sings for a while. After arriving on Corto Maltese, Harley is captured by the rebels running the country. She soon falls in love with Silvio Luna (Juan Diego Botto), the handsome rebel leader, and their twisted romcom courtship is dramatised via a playful montage scored by The Fratellis’ whimsical pop hit Whistle for the Choir. The rest of the movie can’t even dream about this level of panache.

Six freaking kaijus up in this shit out of 10

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Revenge (1955, Alfred Hitchcock)

An occasional series where I review a randomly selected movie – or in this case, a TV episode – directed by Alfred Hitchcock…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

After his wife Elsa is brutally attacked, engineer Carl is frustrated when the police fail to identify the culprit. So he decides to take the law into his own hands…

Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with a certain type of female character – attractive, bright, resourceful, aged about 30, usually blonde, optimistic but emotionally vulnerable – and he relished stories that put them through turbulent experiences. If asked which actress best embodied this woman, most people would say either Ingrid Bergman (Spellbound, Notorious, Under Capricorn) or Grace Kelly (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief). Others may cite Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie) or Kim Novak (Vertigo), while having to acknowledge that those films are clouded by accusations of deplorable behaviour on the director’s part. Students of Hitchcock’s early career could point to the Czech actress Anny Ondra (The Manxman, Blackmail) as his prototype heroine, while Margaret Lockwood (The Lady Vanishes), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), Joan Fontaine (Rebecca, Suspicion), Carole Lombard (Mr & Mrs Smith), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Julie Andrews (Torn Curtain) and others will have their champions.

But while the Oklahoma-born Vera Miles worked with the director several times, and was handpicked to be his next big muse, she’s never quite been considered part of the conversation. This is partly because one of her roles was on television, partly because the others were not lead characters. However, Miles and Hitchcock had a fascinating collaboration and it began when the director was given his own TV show…

Debuting in 1955, Alfred Hitchcock Presents was an anthology series that ran for 10 seasons on CBS and NBC. Each week brought a new, self-contained playlet with a fresh cast; there were thriller plots, mystery stories and oddball character tales. Sometimes the tone was lighthearted, sometimes exceedingly dark, and there were often rug-pull twists and ironic developments – in other words, the same kind of material that Hitchcock had been mining for the cinema. Although rarely involved in the production of the episodes proper, Hitch did appear each week – he delivered short speeches at the top and tail of each instalment, talking directly into the camera in his lugubriously cheeky style. He’d set the story up, tease the twist, mention the series’s sponsor, then return at the end to wrap things up. As well as these cameos and the show’s title, Hitchcock also appeared in the show’s logo – a line-drawing caricature, which he himself designed.

Over the years, many notable names cropped up in the casts. Among the phalanx of established stars and young actors with big futures were Joseph Cotten, Bette Davis, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Peter Falk, Joan Fontaine, Lawrence Harvey, Peter Lorre, Steve McQueen, Walter Matthau, Roger Moore, Vincent Price, Claude Rains, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Robert Vaughn and many others. Lorre and McQueen co-starred in perhaps the show’s most famous episode – 1960’s Man from the South, which was written by Roald Dahl and later loosely remade by Quentin Tarantino in the portmanteau film Four Rooms. (From 1979, coincidentally, Dahl fronted his own anthology TV series, Tales of the Unexpected, and provided on-camera introductions for the often ghoulish episodes in much the same way Hitchcock had done.)

To launch the show in 1955, Hitchcock agreed to direct four episodes of the opening season – including the first to go into production, Breakdown, and the first to be broadcast, Revenge. This was a monumentally unusual step for one of Hollywood’s leading ‘auteurs’ (a term coined in the same year by the French journalist, Hitchcock fan and future director François Truffaut). We’re now used to movie stars, writers and directors crossing back and forth between film and TV, but in the 1950s there was a snobbish divide about such things. Ultimately, Hitchcock directed 17 of the show’s 361 episodes. It’s hard to imagine any of his peers working so often for television while also directing some of cinema’s greatest masterpieces.

Revenge, which kicked off the show on US network CBS on 2 October 1955, is based on a 1947 Samual Blas short story. Newly married couple Elsa and Carl Spann are living in unglamorous but happy domesticity in a static caravan. He’s an aviation engineer; she’s a former dancer who suffered from a minor breakdown when she married Carl. ‘Too much happiness,’ she says to a kindly neighbour as way of an explanation. A doctor has prescribed plenty of rest and sun, so the Spanns have moved to California.

However, one morning, when returning from doing some shopping, Carl finds the caravan’s contents upturned and Elsa unconscious on the floor. ‘He killed me,’ she mumbles when she wakes. She then numbly explains that a stranger who claimed to be salesman had attacked her. (The brutality of the experience is underplayed, of course – this is 1950s American television so Elsa has no visible bruises and the word rape is never mentioned.) When the police are called, they admit they have little to go on – just a vague witness description and a discarded carnation – so Carl resolves to find his own justice.

He coerces the traumatised Elsa into driving around the nearby town, hoping she’ll spot her assailant. When she points out a man walking into a hotel, Carl follows him and batters him to death with a wrench. But later, back in the car, Elsa points out another man – ‘There he is…’ – and Carl realises that she’s so traumatised by her ordeal she doesn’t know what she’s saying. As it dawns on him that he’s killed an innocent man, he hears police sirens approaching… ‘We had intended to call that one Death of a Salesman,’ jokes Hitchcock when we cut back to him for his wrap-up speech. ‘But there were protests from certain quarters.’

Like a lot of the stories to come – not only in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but in similar series such as The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected – Revenge is built around one story beat. The twist that Carl has killed the wrong man is effective and gives the ending a cold shiver of dread; also, the fact the episode is only half-an-hour means that we needn’t worry about any fallout or consequences. There are also a few flashes of Hitchcockian visual panache – the highlight being when Carl beats the suspect with a wrench, a moment that is filmed in a complex shot involving a mirror and shadowplay.

Cast as the bland, uncomplicated Carl was Ralph Meeker, who returned to play three other roles in Alfred Hitchcock Presents before the end of the 1950s. He does an unflashy job of selling the character’s understated anxiety, and the dread moment of realisation in the final scene socks home. But while Carl drives the action of the on-screen plot, the real focus of the episode – and of this blog – is Elsa actress Vera Miles.

In Revenge, Miles must essentially play three different tones. Early on, Elsa is upbeat, happy, content; she flirts with her husband and takes enjoyment from the simple pleasures in life. Immediately after the attack, however, she is dazed and almost catatonic. In the episode’s final third, she must play a woman emotionally, physically and psychologically traumatised; someone who is so damaged, her connection to the real world is slipping. Miles achieves all three throughly convincingly, without ever going over the top or touching melodrama. By swooping from innocent charm to disturbed psychosis, she makes us really believe in all three phases; we really feel *for her* in all three.

Alfred Hitchcock clearly saw something special in the young star too. The following year Hitch cast Miles in his movie The Wrong Man. She plays Rose, the wife of Henry Fonda’s lead character Manny, and is the film’s secret weapon. A subplot of Rose suffering a breakdown when Manny is (incorrectly) accused of a crime sneaks up on you and adds extra emotional weight to the couple’s plight. It’s a terrific piece of acting. And Hitchcock was so happy with her performance that he signed her to a five-year contract. Soon publicity materials were being issued that bigged Miles up as the new Grace Kelly, the megastar who had made three very successful films with Hitchcock but then retired from acting at the age of 26.

However, plans then went awry. Hitchcock was keen to use Miles in his next movie, a psychological thriller set in San Francisco called Vertigo. Miles was to play the dual roles of Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton, women who are the object of lead character Scottie’s obsession. She had done some early pre-production work – posing for a portrait that features significantly in the story – but when the filming dates were moved after Hitchcock fell ill, and Miles then became pregnant, she had to pull out. The roles instead went to Kim Novak; Vertigo became one of cinema’s finest achievements.

After the birth of her son Michael, Miles next worked with Alfred Hitchcock in 1960 when she was cast in horror film Psycho, as Lila Crane, the sister of Janet Leigh’s murdered Marion. But Psycho proved to be the end of their relationship. Although she was on the shortlist for the lead in Marnie (1962), the role went to Tippi Hedron, and Vera Miles was never directed by Hitchcock again. She did appear in two further episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but these were helmed by other people; she also reprised the role of Lila Crane in Psycho II (1983), made after Hitchcocks’s death.

Revenge, meanwhile, was remade in the 1980s when Alfred Hitchcock Presents was rebooted by NBC for a further 76 episodes. The new version was significantly more lurid and demonstrative. Closer to a US daytime soap opera, the storytelling was crying out for the subtly and empathy that Vera Miles brought to all her roles.

Eight shopping lists out of 10