Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay Blu-ray Movie Review

Grindhouse DCU

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 12, 2018

The animated feature Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay is everything that 2016's live action Suicide Squad should have been. It's a fast-paced, hard R-rated adventure about bad guys doing bad things for bad reasons, and there's nary a hero in sight. The film has a body count that Quentin Tarantino would envy, and its grindhouse aesthetic is self-consciously borrowed from 2007's experiment in retro cinema by Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, with artfully "distressed" footage and an unmistakable channeling of Rodriguez' score. Listen to the film's driving theme, and tell me you don't hear a variation on Planet Terror. Watch the faded opening and closing titles with their recurrent vertical scratches—scratches in CG animation?—and tell me you don't recognize the techniques employed by Tarantino/Rodriguez to re-create the mood of a rundown theater showing battered old prints. The only thing they left out was the fake trailers.

Hell to Pay's executive producer, James Tucker, seems to have been a key overseer of the film's creation, and he confirms in his commentary that he wanted to add a grindhouse variant to the animated DC universe. His ambition continues the effort exemplified by Batman: Gotham by Gaslight to push the series in unexpected directions. The result is one of the best DC adventures in years, live or animated, for those whose tastes runs toward the bloody, bleak and pessimistic.

Once again, we find ourselves surrounded by the inmates of Belle Reve Correctional Institution, the special prison built to contain so-called "metahumans", along with a few regular humans whose skills make them exceptionally dangerous. In this variation of the story, government operative Amanda Waller (Vanessa Williams) is the warden of Belle Reve, and she treats the inmates as her own personal IMF—except that Waller's operatives don't get a choice about whether to accept their missions. The film's extended opening follows one such mission, as a team assembled by Waller travels by submarine, then hops a moving train to recover a flash drive from crime boss Tobias Whale (Dave Fennoy, who voices multiple roles).

What's on the flash drive? Who cares? Waller wants it, and her team kills everyone on the train to get it for her. (There's also plenty of intra-squad drama, but I'll leave that for the viewer to discover.) As in many a Bond film, the opening caper has nothing to do with the film's main action, but it does allow director Sam Liu (an animated DCU veteran) to establish key elements of Waller's operation, including the team's inherent instability (because no one trusts their teammates) and Waller's ultimate control in the form of an explosive nanite chip implanted into the head of each team member, with Waller's finger on the button. A head exploding on camera may have been a shocker when David Cronenberg first did it in Scanners, but now it's become routine.

Some time later, Waller is diagnosed with an unspecified terminal illness and, no doubt reflecting on her multitude of sins, she becomes preoccupied with the afterlife. She assembles a team to recover a unique mystical card that grants the bearer automatic redemption at the moment of death. It's literally a "Get Out of Hell Free" card, and it has its own unique back story. The ability to sell this far-fetched MacGuffin as a plot device is a tribute to how effectively Hell to Pay creates an alternative reality where such things are credible.

The only returning team member from the opening sequence is crack marksman Deadshot, who is voiced by Christian Slater with a sarcastic edge that puts Will Smith's pallid performance to shame. The remaining members are martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), ice queen Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten, fresh from True Blood), the Australian Captain Boomerang (Liam McIntyre), the serpentine Copperhead (Gideon Emery)—and, of course, no Suicide Squad outing would be complete without the Joker's lunatic former girlfriend, Harley Quinn, who is here voiced by Tara Strong, flipping to the dark side after playing Batgirl in Batman: The Killing Joke. Insisting that their current mission remain under the radar, Waller crams this feuding team into a massive RV, thereby adding an incongruous road trip layer to the film's already goofy plot. (Be sure to read the billboards they pass on the highway.)

But Waller's team aren't the only ones looking for the card, and they find themselves repeatedly pursued, ambushed and sometimes outrun by a veritable who's who of lesser DCU villains. One group consists of Silver Banshee (Julie Nathanson), Blockbuster (Fennoy, again) and Professor Zoom (C. Thomas Howell), whose interest in the elusive card is intensely personal. Attacking from an entirely different direction are the minions of immortal barbarian Vandal Savage (Jim Pirri), who has charged his dutiful daughter, Scandal (Dania Ramirez), and her tough girlfriend, Knockout (Cissy Jones), to bring him both the card and twisted surgeon Professor Pyg (James Urbaniak). The reason why Vandal Savage wants both Pyg and the card remains a mystery for much of the film.

The initial focus of all these seekers is an unlikely character with the even less likely name of "Steel Maxum" (Greg Grunberg), a preening, self-regarding dimwit who is currently strutting his stuff at a male strip club in Branson, Missouri, but who used to be . . . someone else. The character's real purpose, like that of the elusive card, is to give Hell to Pay's villainous roster countless opportunities to bash, stab, shoot, punch, stomp and—you'll forgive the phrase—raise hell. Hell to Pay limits its back stories to those that are essential to the minimalist plot, but otherwise it unleashes its hordes without bothering to explain where they came from or what they can do. DCU afficionados will have a field day identifying the many linkages to other storylines, while neophytes are given just enough information to understand each character's powers so that they can sit back and enjoy the mayhem (not to mention the constant bickering during breaks in the action).

Hell to Pay more than earns its R rating. The bloodletting is copious, and the language is unrestrained. Screenwriter Alan Burnett and director Sam Liu, both long-time DCU veterans, would no doubt have been happy to include more sex than the brief glimpses they're able to provide, but the film careens forward at too fast a pace to allow for more than a few stolen kisses. Given the number of characters they're juggling, it's a miracle that the creative team manages to hold the sketchy plot together, but they do it so effectively that you're pulled right along with the action. Even on repeat viewings, when you know where the film is going (which isn't very far), there's plenty of entertainment in all of the short-term alliances, double crosses and shady dealings, and you can appreciate the care with which the animators and actors have individualized each member of their sizeable cast. They're all bad guys, but they're bad in different ways and in varying degrees, and the film manages to provide a fitting outcome involving the sought-after "Get Out of Hell Free" card—but not before killing just about everyone in sight. On the commentary, executive producer James Tucker warns viewers not to get attached to anyone, and it's good advice.

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The minimalist visual style of the DCU's animated universe is familiar by now, and Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay doesn't depart from it. It does, however, provide an unusually busy frame, thanks to its plethora of characters and the diverse array of environments through which they move. Darkness and dim colors remain the prevalent view, but Hell to Pay is enlivened by frequent intrusions of bright hues and sharp contrast, starting with the mobile strip club maintained by Tobias Whale on his train. The views from the squad's RV provide an opportunity for "normal" vistas that are visually distinguished by brighter, more saturated primaries. Of course, the most intense colors are reserved for manifestations of metahuman powers, like the icy blues of Killer Frost's creations or the intense whites of Silver Banshee's destructive cries. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray capably reproduces these multifarious shadings, and it is remarkably free from distortion and artifacts despite the low average bitrate (here, 14.99 Mbps) with which the producers of the animated DCU continue to insist on mastering their discs.

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Perhaps because its frame is often so busy, the 5.1 soundtrack for Hell to Pay (encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA) is less aggressively active in its surround activity than other recent DCU animated features. The track has all the dynamic range, punch and power that one would expect from a "superhero" adventure—I put the word in quotes, because there are no heroes in Hell to Pay—but the surrounds are used primarily for ambiance and to expand the score by Robert J. Kral (Justice League Dark), who, as noted in the introduction, appears to have taken his cue—literally—from Robert Rodriguez' instrumentals for Planet Terror.

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras for Hell to Pay suffer from two major deficiencies. The first is shared with many Blu-rays of DCU animated film, which recycle material previously released, such as "sneak peaks" and "vault" TV episodes already available. The second is an absence of participation by the voice talent. Instead, we get almost exclusively DC insiders promoting their product line.

• Commentary: Executive producer James Tucker and writer/co-producer Alan Burnett chat amiably about the characters, their history and their connections to other parts of the DCU. They also express their enjoyment in making an unabashedly R-rated film about characters who are, for the most part, utterly lacking in any redeeming moral value. Burnett's wide-ranging involvement in the animated DCU dates back to Batman: The Animated Series, and he retired shortly after writing Hell to Pay, which makes his participation here especially welcome.



• A Sneak Peak at DC Universe's Next Animated Feature, The Death of Superman (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:06): Doomsday strikes again!



• Outback Rogue: Captain Boomerang (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:14): A brief history of the Squad's Aussie member.



• Nice Shot, Floyd! The Greatest Marksman in the DCU (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:36): The story of the marksman who never misses.



• The Power of Plot Devices: MacGuffins and Red Herrings (1080p; 1.78:1; 10:30): An introductory guide to plot construction.



• A Sneak Peak at DCU Batman: Assault on Arkham (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:29).



• A Sneak Peak at Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:48).



• From the DC Comics Vault: Beware the Batman, Instinct (1080p; 1.78:1; 22:04): Episode 11 from Season One.



• From the DC Comics Vault: Young Justice, Terrors (1080p; 1.78:1; 22:39): Coincidentally, this is also Episode 11 from Season One.



• Introductory Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Deep Blue Sea 2 and Batman Ninja.

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The live action version of Suicide Squad went wrong in countless ways, but one of them was trying to make tragic heroes out of characters who are inherently unheroic. Hell to Pay avoids that mistake. Its extended parade of psychopaths and metahumans are meant to be villains. They don't expect redemption, and, with an occasional exception, none of them is seeking it. In the live action film, only Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn fully shed any pretense of caring about truth, justice and the American way, which is why her character was the best part of an otherwise listless undertaking. In Hell to Pay, Harley is just as bad, but now she has plenty of company. The film's uninhibited embrace of villainy gives it a perversely pleasing kick, and it's a refreshing palette cleanser after the pompous bog of self-righteousness into which the live action DCU has been sinking. Highly recommended.