The Suicide Squad: Totally deranged

The Suicide Squad (2021) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong bloody violence and gore, relentless profanity, sexual references, drug use and fleeting graphic nudity

Available via: Movie theaters and HBO Max

By Derrick Bang

Fans of trash cinema — and their number is larger than you’d expect — fondly remember the 1980s glory days of Troma Studios, which brought us gleefully gruesome low-budget classics such as The Toxic Avenger, Surf Nazis Must Die, Rabid Grannies and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, among many others. 

 

Having battled their way through most of an island nation, our "heroes" — from left,
Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Bloodsport (Idris Elba),
King Shark and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) — simply cannot believe what
they now must deal with.

Writer/director James Gunn’s carnage-laden sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad — this new one adds a crucial “The” — is like a Troma flick with a big-studio budget. That homage clearly is deliberate, since the voluminous end credits include an acknowledgment of The Toxic Avenger.

Which is to say, this is an unapologetically tasteless, offensive, gruesome and profane 132 minutes of hyper-violent gore, made (perhaps) a bit more palatable by equally relentless gallows humor. It’s The Dirty Dozen gone dog-nuts.

 

Gunn and visual effects supervisor Kelvin McIlwain include all possible means of torturing a human body, invariably amid gouts of splattered blood: decapitations, sliced limbs, craniotomies, gouged eyeballs, halfectomies (just what it sounds like), close-range shotgun blasts, and every other imaginable form of slicing and dicing. (Actually, they may have missed defenestration, but I’m not going back to double-check.)

 

Oh, yes: and being devoured by an enraged, land-based shark.

 

Gunn has no shortage of chutzpah. Recognizing that the 2016 film was a grim, joyless affair, he has doubled-down on this one’s unceasing snark. The most ridiculous lines, emerging at the most inappropriate moments, are uttered with straight-faced sincerity … which, of course, makes them even funnier (if your predilections run to such things).

 

And I do love the clever intertitles that bridge events and signal flashbacks (“Eight minutes earlier…”).

 

Gunn also earns geek cred for resurrecting some of the craziest characters ever introduced in DC comic book lore, such as the one updated here as TDK (and played by fan fave Nathan Fillion, although he’s hard to recognize beneath the mask); and the even more unlikely Starro the Conqueror, the first supervillain faced by the original Justice League of America, when that team debuted in early 1960.

 

Unlikely, to be sure … yet also quite creepy.

 

But that comes much later. Events kick off with the clandestine, late-night invasion of the island nation of Corto Maltese, which — thanks to a vicious regime change — suddenly has become a threat to the good ol’ US of A. Our assembled “mercenaries” are misfit, hyper-enhanced villains given this chance to shorten their sentences at Belle Reve, a prison with bragging rights for having the country’s highest mortality rate.

 

These degenerate delinquents are released to the care of Task Force X leader Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), with their every move monitored back in the States by government techies supervised by the merciless Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). One false step, and she’ll activate the micro-bomb implanted in the base of each villain’s skull, thereby blowing his — or her — head off.

 

(Yes, of course we get to watch that happen.)

The Personal History of David Copperfield: A Dickens of a treat

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) • View trailer

4.5 stars. Rated PG, for occasional dramatic intensity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.9.21

I haven’t had this much fun with Charles Dickens, since 1982’s miniseries adaptation of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

 

Mind you, “fun” isn’t easy to pull off, when it comes to Dickens. He does love to make his protagonists suffer.

 

As a clever means of helping his friend Mr. Dick (Hugh Laurie, right) exorcise the
"thoughts of King Charles I" that constantly haunt him, David (Dev Patel) suggests
that these snatches be written onto scraps of paper, to then be attached to a large
kite, so they can be blown away and "erased" by a strong wind.

Even so, director/co-scripter Armando Iannucci’s Personal History of David Copperfield — available via HBO Max — is a high-spirited romp: enlivened by marvelous performances, a cheeky interpretation of Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel — co-scripted with Simon Blackwell — breathless pacing, and occasionally dazzling bursts of Terry Gilliam-style special effects.

The mere fact that this film cleverly covers so much of Dickens’ dense novel — 877 pages (!), in the Oxford edition — is astonishing all by itself. Granted, this cinematic experience is akin to a 119-minute sprint, but it’s hard to complain when the result is so entertaining.

 

David Copperfield boasts two of Dickens’ best-known supporting characters: the melodramatic, nobly flustered and penniless Wilkins Micawber, steadfastly retaining his dignity while forever one short step ahead of legions of debt collectors (and based on Dickens’ father); and the smarmy, sneakily loathsome Uriah Heep, one of the most creepily detestable villains ever concocted. They’re brought to glorious life by, respectively, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw.

 

Acknowledging the joy and phenomenal success that Dickens experienced giving public performances of his works — less staid readings, and more acting tours de force (one of the author’s friends noted that “Dickens was like an entire theater company … under one hat”) — Iannucci opens his film as the adult David Copperfield (Dev Patel) stands on the stage of a theater crowded with fans, holding a stack of pages, and intones one of Dickens’ most famous introductions:

 

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

 

Young David (Ranveer Jaiswal, cute as a button) spends his happy early years without a father, raised more by a doting housekeeper, Clara Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), than his loving but waiflike mother (Morfydd Clark), who mourns the loss of her husband. Alas, when David is 7, she re-marries the cruel and abusive Edward Murdstone (Darren Boyd, suitably imperious), who beats the boy for falling behind in his studies. 

 

Murdstone is accompanied by his equally nasty spinster sister, Jane (the imposing Gwendoline Christie, well remembered as Brienne of Tarth, in HBO’s Game of Thrones).

Christopher Robin: Endearing, but uneven

Christopher Robin (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.3.18

I’ve long regarded title credits as a strong indication of quality; a director who cares enough to insist upon clever, stylish or (in some manner) unusual credits, generally can be counted upon to give his film the same attention to detail.

Desperate to prevent passersby from realizing that Pooh is a stuffed bear who nonetheless
walks and talks, Christopher (Ewan McGregor) begs his childhood friend to "play taking
a nap."

In that respect, then, director Marc Forster’s Christopher Robin begins auspiciously. An extended prolog is lovingly and warmly animated from the E.H. Shepard illustrations in A.A. Milne’s original Winnie the Pooh books; the sequence also incorporates flipped pages laden with the correct type font. In all respects, it’s like we viewers jump into the book itself and become part of what follows, much in the manner of Jasper Fforde’s delightful Thursday Next novels.

This lengthy, period-appropriate introduction also establishes the firm bond between young Christopher Robin (Orton O’Brien) and his half-dozen plush animal friends, all seemingly hand-stitched, as if by some doting parent. They’ve organized a party in the Hundred Acre Wood, but the occasion is somber: Christopher Robin is heading off to boarding school. The mood is pure “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

These sweetly animated characters are voiced sublimely, their note-perfect dialog — here, and throughout the entire film — impeccably crafted to match Milne’s blend of innocence and gentle playfulness (with numerous quotes lifted directly from the page). We can’t help being both charmed and saddened; the sweet sorrow of this impending parting is almost more than can be withstood.

Then the movie proper kicks in, and the mood is ... well, badly compromised, if not completely shattered.

The script — credited, with eyebrow-raising concern, to five different hands — is a patchwork mess stitched together with far less care than that given to its animated stars. The plot is a clumsy mash-up of Steven Spielberg’s Hook and Disney’s Mary Poppins — both centering around an adult who has lost track of his childhood sense of wonder — blended with numerous un-subtle nods to the three Disney Winnie the Pooh cartoon shorts produced between 1966 and ’74.

To make matters even worse, this film’s (mostly) soothing tone often is marred by the destructive slapstick sequences that infected so many of Disney’s insufferably stupid late 1960s and early ’70s live-action comedies. The sudden shift in tone can cause whiplash.

In a nutshell, these characters — human and otherwise — are far better than the derivative, wafer-thin and disappointing story into which they’ve been dumped.