Movie Review: “Suicide Squad”

Starring
Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Jay Hernandez, Jai Courtney, Cara Delevingne, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Director
David Ayer

With the exception of “Star Wars: Rogue One,” David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” has been my most anticipated movie of 2016 since the first footage was released at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Though there was certainly reason to be concerned following the disaster of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and rumors of production troubles, the consistently excellent trailers – which promised a fun, irreverent comic book film in the same vein as “Deadpool” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” – helped quell those fears. Unfortunately, you can’t judge a movie based solely on its trailer, and that could not be any truer as far as “Suicide Squad” is concerned. Although it’s not as problematic as Zack Snyder’s superhero face-off, it’s just as disappointing, if only because it had the potential to be better.

Following the death of Superman, A.R.G.U.S. director Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has created a contingency plan to deal with future metahuman threats in his absence: a covert team comprised of the world’s most dangerous criminals to carry out black ops missions for the government in exchange for reduced prison sentences. Led by no-nonsense soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and implanted with explosive devices in their necks to keep them in line, the codenamed Task Force X – which includes sharpshooter assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), Joker’s deranged sidekick Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), pyrokinetic gangster El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Australian jewel thief Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and reptilian-skinned cannibal Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) – is sent to rescue a high-value target who’s stranded in Midway City after it’s turned into a warzone by a powerful witch called Enchantress (Cara Delevingne). Throwing a wrench in Waller’s plans is the Clown Prince of Crime himself, the Joker (Jared Leto), who sets out to save his beloved Harley amid the ensuing chaos.

Read the rest of this entry »

  

You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for content updates. Also, sign up for our email list for weekly updates and check us out on Google+ as well.

Movie Review: “Concussion”

Starring
Will Smith, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks, Alec Baldwin, Luke Wilson, Stephen Moyer, David Morse
Director
Peter Landesman

“Concussion” is a film without an audience. Football fans won’t see this movie, because they don’t want to embrace the fact that the NFL lied to them for years about the dangers associated with playing football, and threw thousands of its former players under the bus in order to protect the brand, because money. Who does that leave, then? Medical procedural fans? Well, maybe, because “Concussion” plays more like a TV movie than a theatrical release. The worst thing about it is that the subject of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) deserves a larger audience than it currently has, and yet the movie’s villain, unlike the like-minded “The Insider,” which targeted the tobacco industry, is the NFL. People like the NFL, which means they’re far less likely to see a movie that tells them that their favorite thing is wicked.

It is 2005, and Nigeria-born Dr. Bennet Olamu (Will Smith) works for the coroner’s office at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Hospital. He has an odd relationship with his patients, in that he speaks to them while he’s determining their cause of death. One day, he examines the body of local Steelers legend Mike Webster (David Morse), who’s recently committed suicide, and sees an unusual amount of protein in his brain. Unluckily for him, as it were, Bennet examines a few more football players who exhibited erratic behavior shortly before their premature deaths, and concludes that they are suffering from brain trauma that arose as a result of repeated blows to the head. Bennet thinks that he is doing the NFL a favor by giving them this information. He is mistaken.

Read the rest of this entry »

  

Movie Review: “Focus”

Starring
Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney
Directors
Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

Movies about con artists are almost as difficult to pull off as an actual con. They need to be clever enough to outsmart and entertain the audience without being overly complex or resorting to narrative cheats. “Focus” is definitely entertaining at times, a flashy crime drama highlighted by a pair of movie star performances from Will Smith and Margot Robbie, but it also commits the aforementioned offenses in order to get to its twist ending… by way of several other twists, naturally. That’s not its biggest problem, however, because most con films break those rules at some point. Instead, it’s the fact that “Focus” is basically two movies stitched together by the same connective tissue, and only one of the halves is any good.

The film begins with a gorgeous woman named Jess (Robbie) picking up the charismatic Nicky (Smith) at a hotel bar, eventually taking their soiree upstairs to her room where her angry boyfriend kicks down the door and threatens to shoot Nicky unless he hands over his wallet. It’s a classic con, and one that Nicky knows all too well as a seasoned grifter himself. But Jess shows promise, so Nicky invites her to join his large-scale operation, hitting big events like the Super Bowl that are packed with crowds of easy marks (read: drunks and cheating husbands) for them to rob, swindle and shake down on the streets. After Jess gets burned by Nicky at the end of the job, the two go their separate ways until they cross paths again three years later when Nicky is hired by the wealthy owner (Rodrigo Santoro) of a Formula One racing team to help ruin a fellow competitor using his powers of persuasion. Everything is going according to plan when Nicky discovers that Jess is dating his new employer, and though he wants to make amends after the way he left things, Jess is unable to trust him, convinced that Nicky must to be working some kind of angle. The real question is whether Jess is too.

Read the rest of this entry »