For the week of December 12th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Suicide Squad to Blu-ray. The latest in DC's struggling cinematic universe, Suicide Squad promised to be a welcome tonic following the dour, self-important Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. That earlier picture downplayed superhero pomp in favor of moody theatrics and pretentious philosophizing, while the trailers for Suicide Squad promised a peppier, less serious entertainment: I mean, where's the melancholy to be found when a stable of DC villains (Will Smith's Deadshot, Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, Jai Courtney's Captain Boomerang, Jay Hernandez's El Diablo, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje's Killer Croc, Karen Fukuhara's Katana, and Adam Beach's Slipknot) have to band together to stop an ancient evil (Cara Delevingne's Enchantress) hell-bent on world domination OR face execution at the hands of the U.S. government (personified by Joel Kinnaman's Rick Flag and Viola Davis' fearsome Amanda Waller)? Certainly the previews indicated something more high-energy, closer in tone to Guardians of the Galaxy. And I'll say this for the end result - if nothing, Suicide Squad is intentionally more frivolous than anything in DC's recent screen offerings. Director David Ayer does very little table-setting to link this picture with past or future DC features (Ben Affleck's Batman gets the most shoutouts), and he gets a very enjoyable performance from Robbie and a phenomenal movie-star turn from Smith. After what feels like a decade of muting his own screen charisma, Smith delivers the kind of brisk, effortlessly charming work that made him famous (this is the same Will Smith who showed up to play in Independence Day and the first Men in Black). However, those positives can't offset all the other clunking missteps. The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Suicide Squad wants so desperately to be "fun" that it makes no attempt to matter at all. And so we get a Big Bad that isn't threatening (Delevingne is terrible, and her evil plan involves the same city-destroying nonsense that showed up in both Ghostbusters and Man of Steel), action-movie theatrics that aren't exciting (hope you enjoy second-unit footage of our protagonists cutting through rote CGI minions), terrible pop-music needle drops (whoever cued up "House of the Rising Sun" and "Without Me" to their current locations deserves a special place in Hell), and wan, inconsistent team dynamics. Outside of Smith and Robbie, we don't care about any of these people, and I'm not sure if it's because the actors whiffed it (Kinnaman, in particular, is a personality vacuum) or because vital footage went missing for the final cut. See, word has it that Ayer's initial vision was far darker, but when the public turned on the grim Dawn of Justice, Warner freaked and hired the trailer company to recut a blither version. I guess it worked - Suicide Squad now lacks any and all emotional or narrative stakes - but nothing makes sense as characters pop in and out of the movie. And that goes double for Jared Leto's revamped Joker interpretation. After all the hullabaloo about his extreme on-set methods, the Joker barely appears in the finished film. Granted, what we get isn't good (the phrase, "GQ Juggalo," popped into my head more than once), but I don't feel comfortable judging his performance given that so much of it was compromised in the editing (for those of you hoping this new extended cut fixes matters - abandon all hope now. We get fifteen-ish minutes of extraneous fodder). I never thought I'd say this, but Suicide Squad actually made me appreciate Dawn of Justice more - better to watch failed ambition than asinine fluff, I suppose (and at least Dawn of Justice's deleted footage contextualized many of the theatrical cut's confusing elisions). How many more chances are we going to give DC?
Michael Reuben wrote that "anticipation for Suicide Squad was extreme, fueled by a clever marketing campaign promising a lighter, more comedic tone and a bevy of characters new to the screen. The film that arrived in theaters last August was . . . something else. Just how to define that 'something else' is a challenge, because Suicide Squad plays less like a movie than a corporate branding project assembled by committee. The only thing they left out was a decent story—and unlike Batman v Superman...[fans] should be forewarned that the ten minutes of added scenes in the extended cut do not significantly alter the plot or fill in any gaps. For those who enjoyed the movie, the additional character beats will probably be entertaining; for those who didn't, they'll just slow it down"
Far better a tale of criminal misfits is another Warner title, the Criterion-distributed Asphalt Jungle. Director John Huston's 1950 classic is the great proto-heist noir; Huston details what goes down when a canny criminal mastermind (Sam Jaffe, who received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work here) puts together a team of lowlifes (including Louis Calhern, Anthony Caruso, James Whitmore, and the great Sterling Hayden, who gives the performance of a lifetime as the team's brutal - and unexpectedly sensitive - muscle) to rob a jewelry store. This film is the Rosetta Stone - without it, I don't know if we'd have Jules Dassin's Gallic-flavored Rififi or even Steven Soderbergh's pop Ocean's Trilogy, although I'm not sure that even those classics can top what Huston has achieved here. Without dampening any of the requisite twists and turns - including double-crosses galore and an eleven-minute heist sequence that hasn't lost any of its white-knuckle suspense - Huston allows a casual tragedy to creep into the proceedings. Jaffe's quirky ringleader first seems like he tap-danced right out of a Damon Runyon fantasy, except he's all too human, and his weaknesses impact the mission in ways he never expected. So it goes with every major character. Calhern's sleazy lawyer is a conniving rake, but we get one look at the object of his affections (a very young Marilyn Monroe), and we understand why he's willing to sell his partners up the river, while Hayden's bruising menace belies this deep, foolhardy nostalgia for a better time he can no longer reach. As such, when the robbery goes south (spoilers, I guess, for a sixty-six-year-old movie), we experience the fallout in a more primal fashion. This wasn't a mousetrap designed to ensnare the protagonists, but rather the culmination of unavoidable human frailties. One of the great features to emerge from the Hollywood studio system.
Just as good, in its own way, is Bob Clark's holiday-themed Black Christmas, which gets a terrific new special edition from - you guessed it - the good folks at Scream Factory. What Clark did with this 1974 chiller can't be overstated; he helped to define the modern slasher movie. Sure, we can track the genre's antecedents to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None or to Robert Siodmak's underrated The Spiral Staircase, but Clark gave slasher pictures their most durable form: a group of young people (including Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, Margot Kidder, Keir Dullea, and Lynne Griffin) are alone in a big house, and a murderer is stalking them. Plus, in the film's most unsettling conceit, the killer proves unusually fond of taunting his victims before they die, calling them up and mumbling high-pitched, nigh-unintelligible obscenities, and these phone calls prove more chilling than any on-screen acts of violence. Not that Clark is a slouch in that department - one murder, where [REDACTED] is stabbed to death with a glass ornament, is the stuff of nightmares, and Clark gets a lot of mileage from contrasting the victim's cries for help with the unintentionally menacing sounds of Christmas carolers right outside the scene of the crime. However, Clark saves his greatest invention for the finale. See, the first 99% establishes Black Christmas as a whodunit, of sorts, and we're trying to I.D. the killer along with Hussey's frightened protagonist...but then Clark pulls the rug out from under us. Without spoiling too much, let's just say that the biggest shock is the unknown, that certain mysteries can never be solved. I always wonder why most slashers copy everything about Black Christmas but the ending. It has an existential dread that only John Carpenter's original Halloween comes close to approximating.
Finally, CBS and Paramount Home Media Entertainment are releasing another Twilight Zone: The Complete Series set. The bad news: if you have Image's complete series, then you already have this edition; CBS/Paramount has simply rebundled the old image discs in a space-saving DVD-sized box. But here's the good news: everything else. This new package is cheaper than the Image version, and given that this five-season collection is stacked with bonus supplements and gorgeously restored transfers, that price reduction means that fans have even less of an excuse to avoid picking this one up. Furthermore, I'd reckon that owning The Twilight Zone is practically a social good. This genre-themed anthology series is one of the medium's high-water marks. Creator Rod Serling gives the proceedings a simple hook: in each episode, we were unmoored in an alternate reality, the specifics of which would change on a weekly basis. The Twilight Zone could be a surreal comedy one week (the season one finale "A World of His Own," with its great meta-commentary on the show itself), a sci-fi parable another week (the Jean-Paul Sartre-inspired "Five Characters in Search of An Exit"), or a horror story the next (the Richard Donner-Richard Matheson classic "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"). The only constant? Serling's finely tuned sense of social justice. Most of these episodes had some kind of moral or social lesson, so Serling could talk about race or class or politics using genre constraints that kept the message from seeming too didactic. Now, considering the nature of the show, it shouldn't come as a surprise that not every episode is a winner. I'd give the program a .500 batting average - more often than not, you'd follow an all-timer (the great, spooky "Long Distance Call") with something far less memorable (the "that was an episode" murk of "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim") - and let's not speak of the infamous fourth season, which distended episodes to a bloated fifty-five minutes each. But it's easy to cut the show some slack. For one, Serling was such a workhorse (he wrote ninety-two of The Twilight Zone's 156 episodes) that you can't expect all his work to be inspired, and for another, the quality variability is a byproduct of the show's willingness to experiment with form and content. You can feel its influence in so many corners of TV's DNA, whether it's the destabilizing paranoia of something like The X-Files, the one-off morality plays of HBO's underrated Tales from the Crypt (when do we get an HD version of that one?), or even a mystery-box program like Lost, which contrasted its central narrative against flashbacks that functioned like The Twilight Zone's standalone stories. One of the five or six greatest shows ever produced.