The Suicide Squad (2021)

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. The drips and drabs of COVID-era new movies keeps coming. Didn’t make it out into the theater for this one. Don’t know when I’ll make it out to the theater for a new movie again the rate things are going. Oddly enough, the last new movie I caught at the theater was likely Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020).

Did I Like It: About a day after screening the film, I was struck by the perfect encapsulation of my positive feelings for the film:

I enjoyed it so much, and wanted the good feelings to continue, that I was halfway tempted to watch the original Suicide Squad (2016). 

And I never thought it would even kind of occur to me that I might want to watch that movie again. But this one moves at such a lean and economical pace—despite its army of charaters all begging for a moment in the sun—that everything Jared Leto-related is forgiven.

Seriously, if you had told me as I was walking out of that movie that Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Quinn will be the most consistently enjoyable part of DC’s attempts to make a connected cinematic universe, I would have told you you were crazy.

Bringing all of the sensibilities from his work on Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and its sequel, along with its sequel, but also blending in the raucous influences of his work with Troma impresario Lloyd Kaufman, this film cuts to the quick and never quite lets the viewer get comfortable, much to this particular viewer’s delight. I laughed throughout, and yet, somehow the film isn’t a spoof of the genre. There’s a fine line between taking potshots at a genre and engaging it both fully and irreverently, and I can’t immediately think of a filmmaker working in blockbuster entertainments who is straddling that line better than Gunn.

It’s not just the best DC movie in recent memory; it is the most purely enjoyable superhero movie since Thor: Ragnarok (2017), easily the most relentlessly fun DC film ever made (and I am far from someone who is down on the DC films as a whole), and easily in the upper echelons of the superhero genre.

Bumblebee (2018)

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz

Have I Seen it Before: No. What would possibly possess me to be in any kind of a hurry to watch a Transformers film?

Did I Like It: Okay. Well, here’s the confession. I kind of—sort of—like the first Transformers (2007). It has just enough of the influence of Spielberg where the film is more about a boy and his connection with his car (who happens to be sentient) than it is about the struggle between the Autobots and the Decepticons. 

Every subsequent film in the series that I had the misfortune to have been exposed to is so laden with exposition and an endless series of meaningless MacGuffins that each film became the equivalent of spending several hours reading the cardboard backing of an action figure. I gave up on Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) long before its interminable nearly three-hour runtime. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) was a non-starter for me long before the near-war crime of its 149 minutes was unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.

So it is with great relief that I report Bumblebee—a film no one asked for and no sane studio should have green-lit—is a delight from start to finish. The glip-glorps and whoozi-whatzis that propelled… plots?... in the previous films are stripped away, and all we know about the various Transformers in the context of this film are:

1)     The Transformers come from Cybertron.

2)     Cybertron is at war.

3)     Bumblebee is a good guy. To a far less important extent, so is Optimus Prime.

And that is all you need. Everything else is only of interest to people who have mint-condition Generation One Starscreams* hermetically sealed in their basement.

With the artifice of the franchise now stripped away, the human element that the first film hints at comes back in full force. Shia LaBeouf was sort of a wry, detached figure in the first film, and his affection for the alien car he lucked into never felt like a real performance. Much to Hailee Steinfeld’s credit, I believe the friendship between her and Bumblbee throughout the picture. Her character never becomes a cliché. She never once detaches herself from the proceedings, and one can easily imagine a less polished actor doing just that. After all, there are five films of evidence.

Who knew this series could find its resurgence by making a film actually about people? If the Transformers can turn things around like this, maybe there is hope for other big-budget franchises.

I reserve the right to revoke that optimism upon the release of any further Transformer movies, and probably will.

*That’s a thing, right?