Suicide Squad is good

I heard it again yesterday from a critic reviewing Justice League. Blah blah blah "and the derisable Suicide Squad" blah blah blah.

Lazy, lazy, lazy. Some people still think it is cool to slam SS. It won an Oscar? Oh woe; the world is ending; this is as bad as Trump winning president.

Get over yourself, or fuck off back to Twitter where no-one is listening.

DC has many problems with its films. Primarily because there are many good Marvel films and they are trying to catch up... without looking like they are copying someone else's homework.

DC fans are different from Marvel fans. I think Suicide Squad is the most Marvel-like film that DC have done... which is a problem? I don't get it.

Marvel's "secret" is simple. It's a balance between light and dark, humour and action. All the DC films barring Suicide Squad have got that terribly wrong (with the exception of The Dark Knight, which can carry the excessive darkness by playing two differently dark characters, Batman and Joker, against each other).

I think there is another factor which whipped up the anti-SS feelings in the echo chambers of social media. Sex. The character Harley Quinn is overtly sexual and that is a problem for critics. Female critics have to decide if the film is exploiting women and using the character primarily as a sex object. Male critics have to do the same... but if they "get it wrong" then they are going to be lambasted as sexist pigs.

If the critics want to play safe then they can just pan the film for anything else they can think of and dodge the sex issue entirely. That's what a lot of them did. They did the same with Sucker Punch, which was so sexy (a major point of the film) that I could almost see the cold sweats on the male critics as they thought "I can't possibly give this a good review without being crucified by every woman I know".

And social media is inherently negative. You only have to look on Twitter for a few seconds to see that. People love to get their teeth into slagging something off. Take a few genuine fans who have legitimate gripes about how the source material has been translated, some critics desperate to not mention sex, press a few buttons and you have a meme that Suicide Squad is the worst film ever made.

Suicide Squad is not a terrible film. It's not even a bad film. I have seen a lot of terrible films and even more bad films. On balance, based on the film itself and not what other people say about it, I think it is actually quite good.