Hardly

There goes my cautious optimism. In December of last year the Suicide Squad main cast was officially announced. Roughly one month later Tom Hardy dropped out due to ‘scheduling conflicts’ with Fox’s The Revenant. The cracks already beginning to show. Man of Steel was basically a lot of aimless wandering around followed by the destruction of Kansas and Metropolis and I’ll be surprised if anything forming a coherent and enjoyable film comes out of the Justice League in all but name, Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. DC and Warner Bros. need Suicide Squad to be the film that captures audiences and they can’t afford any missteps.

I realise this sounds like the conspiracists who claim that a secret organisations rule the world because of minor markings and typos on documents and papers, but I do believe there is cause for concern. Tom Hardy is the kind of actor who can really do anything and do it well. Want him to step up into the main role? He can do that. Or he can take the back seat and support the main cast. He can be charming and likable. He can be your villain and terrorise your protagonist. Tom Hardy just has that versatility.  And that’s really what any actor playing Rick Flag Jr. needed to bring to the table.

Even if Warner Bros. aren’t following the Suicide Squad story from its comic book origins, the character of Rick Flag Jr. was still likely to be the linchpin, holding the team together. The point of the film, or at least an interesting hook, is that these guys are villains. They don’t play nice and don’t work well with others. Someone or something is going to have to unite them, and it would really fall on Rick Flag to do that. The Joker doesn’t care about anyone else unless it furthers his own plans, often even being borderline abusive towards Harley Quinn. Rick Flag, with his military experience, is a natural squad leader and thus, vital to the team.

From brutal biopics to futuristic Sci-fi, Hardy’s versatility is his biggest selling point.

That’s why it is important for the actor who plays Rick Flag to be capable in a range of roles. With a lot of big names such as The Joker and Deadshot, its important for Flag to become a background character when needed. In the same vein, the actor also needs to stand up against the more larger than life characters and command the scene he’s in. If the actor can’t fulfil those roles, audiences will question why the rest of the squad are following him or just getting in the way. DC could have recast any other character but Tom Hardy as Rick Flag was the perfect choice.

It is unfair to blame DC though. After all, they had no choice. They had to recast the role due to Tom Hardy’s scheduling conflicts. And I completely understand, Hardy’s choice. The Revenants sounds like it could be a great film. Directed by recent Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture Academy Award winner, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Hardy will star alongside Leondardo DiCaprio in the film adaptation of the book of the same name about a fur trapper who is betrayed by his fellow hunters and seeks revenge. That sounds like a brilliant combination of talent and creativity. At the moment I have so much more confidence in Iñárritu and 20th Century Fox to produce an intense 19th Century thriller than I do in the ability of DC and Warner Bros. to create a watchable superhero ensemble action film. This is the kind of thing DC Comics should be good at and they’re not. And that’s kind of sad.

Admittedly, I am dubious of the scheduling conflicts reason. The Revenants will be released in December later this year, while Suicide Squad won’t see the light of day until August 2016. That’s eight months difference. While I’m aware that Warner Bros. won’t be filming right up until August, the same is true for The Revenants. There’s post production after shooting that Tom Hardy doesn’t need to be present for and then some promotional appearances. How likely is it that Warner Bros. couldn’t work around a promotional event that Hardy was involved in? This throws up a red flag to me that there were other reasons for Hardy’s departure. Maybe he no longer believed in the project or perhaps he had problems with the director, producers or other cast members. Will Smith might have pulled a Fresh Prince of Bel Air and had Hardy removed like Janet Hubert-Whitten. I can only speculate but I do find the departure suspicious.

Kinnaman is less proven but at least it wasn’t Jake Gyllenhaal.

Replacing Hardy is Joel Kinnaman. Kinnaman is best known for AMC’s The Killing and his role as the titular Robocop in the 2014 reboot. Despite Robocop’s less than favourable reviews and the struggles of The Killing after the initial two seasons, Kinnaman’s performances have generally been applauded. So it’s was a good choice but whether he can handle in the role in the way that I know Hardy could remains to be seen.

In other DC news, Suicide Squad cast members Will Smith and Margot Robbie recently starred in Focus, a dark romantic comedy and con-men and grifters. Again, the film hasn’t been a smash but the actors performances stood out. And I’m also coming around to Jai Courtney, mostly thanks to the recent Terminator: Genisys trailers, which have, amazingly, got me sold on that film. Of course that has everything to do with Emilia Clarke and the interesting time travel twist of the original story, and nothing to do with Jai Courtney. On top of that, Joe Manganiello is rumoured to be playing Deathstroke. At this point the cast size is reasonable so I’d worry about Warner Bros. adding too many extra characters.

More than a year out from Suicide Squad and I’m already feeling like this is falling apart. Like it is barely held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I really want DC to make a good superhero film. Not a good film with asterisks and disclaimers, just a simple, enjoyable movie about superheroes. Marvel are producing them with factory like efficiency these days, so the question has to be asked, why can’t DC even make one?

Stationary

It is easy to understand why audiences would be excited by Jupiter Ascending. Outside of Marvel’s recent Guardians of the Galaxy and the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the space opera genre isn’t exactly rife with fresh, new films at the moment. On top of that, it had a solid cast including major names such as Mila Kunis, Eddie Redmayne and Channing Tatum. If that wasn’t enough to get most viewers excited, the fact that it was written and directed by the revolutionary Wachowskis was the final push of hype. With that direction of talent in front of and behind the camera, tackling new genre, Jupiter Ascending was sure to be great. And that’s where it’s biggest problem begins.

On paper, Jupiter Ascending should be able to do no wrong. Once you get into into the details though, it starts to fall apart. The problem really comes down to expectation. I enjoyed the film in some regards and I don’t think it is unviewable. Being watchable isn’t a particularly gleaming report though. But I had the benefit of reading reviews and knowing that it had been panned beforehand. So I went in with lowered expectations, thus I was ok with what I got in return. Expectations are a deadly thing. They can make a good film great and decent film terrible.

If you don’t know, Jupiter Ascending follows house cleaner and Russian immigrant, Jupiter Jones, who is discovered to be the perfect genetic resemblance of a royal space monarch. Said Monarch is now dead, but wrote into her will that the recurrence of her genetic structure would inherit Earth. Her children are none too pleased about this and each try and capture Jupiter to use in their own plans. Said capture involves Caine, a hybrid wolf man who also had wings for some reason, and Stinger, another hybrid although this time with bees.

Don’t worry about the car. Aliens fixed it.

The reason that Earth is so important is because it’s over populated. Our space ancestors are apparently in the business of growing populated planets and harvesting the people to create a serum for regenerating cells. Jupiter balks at the idea of killing billions in exchange for immortality and struggles to maintain her right over Earth to protect herself, her family and everyone else. This involves her being captured three times, each involving a daring rescue by Caine. During their excursion into outer space, Jupiter begins to fall for Caine.

That’s the basic plot of the film but there’s really a lot going on in the film, it’s just not anything that really matters. It’s soft science fiction, so the focus is really on the characters and the story rather than why things are the way they are. Those characters and story aren’t able to bear the load though. The characters sound like they were named by a teenage girl, and they obviously asked some children what they wanted Caine to be and they couldn’t decide so they made him a half-everything. Action scenes, while visually impressive, feel drawn out and difficult to follow.

The Wachowski’s last great film was undoubtedly 1999’s The Matrix. It is clear they they were trying to recapture that glory with this film. It’s another science fiction film where a seemingly normal human turns out to be special and is introduced to how the world really is. Mila Kunis puts on a fine performance as Jupiter and her humble, selflessness is refreshing compared to Neo’s enigmatic self-importance. But she goes through a lot with in the film and doesn’t get an awful lot out of it. She gets Earth, a renewed appreciation for her family, some gravity boots and winged, lupine boyfriend. But she almost died several times. Her family almost died. There are still billions of planets being harvested by the Abrasax family. Her romance with Caine feels shallow because there’s no real connection beyond his saving her life and her liking dogs. And one of those is a joke.

Stephen Hawking’s genetic reincarnation is a complete monster.

By the end, the film just doesn’t come together. The events where she each meet Abrasax sibling one by one have no real consequence on what happen next. Kalique tells Jupiter to do what she was already planning to do, simply because it feeds her plan against Balem. Titus tries to marry her and then kill her. Balem wants her to sign Earth back to him so he can harvest it immediately. The siblings talk about each other but they never try to stop each other. You’d think that Kalique and Balem would have a vested interest in stopping Titus’s wedding but Kalique does nothing and Balem kidnaps her family and forces her to come to him instead. Maybe he doesn’t know where she is, but given how little the siblings care for each other, it stands to reason that Balem would be keeping an eye on his brother. But nope, everything is just left up to circumstance and chance . It winds up feeling like a lot of ideas thrown at a board with very little in common, bar a main character.

The Caine romance seems to exist in some alternate film as well. One where there are scenes between Jupiter and Caine that aren’t him saving her or him adamantly stating that he feels nothing for her. It’s far too obvious that it’s a ‘doth protest too much’ situation but it would make more sense for it to be true. Jupiter even mentions that she tends to fall for the wrong guy, and there’s little to suggest that this isn’t history repeating itself. She fell in love with him because he was there to save her. What’s she going to do now that she doesn’t need saved so often? A preferable ending would have been if Jupiter went back to her life, keeping Caine around because she appreciates him as a guard and in case the Abrasax siblings try anything else. Apparently, the Wachowski’s were going for a Wizard of Oz kind of vibe, but it’s not like Dorothy went back to Kansas and started dating the lion.

There is a lot wrong with this film. That can’t be denied. However, if you limit your expectations and shut your mind off when you go in, you may find Jupiter Ascending to be mildly entertaining. Otherwise, stay clear.