tara strong

The Not-So-New 52: Suicide Squad – Hell to Pay (2018) 

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

A few years back, [Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer] and I were browsing through the then-current version of the HBO app and stumbled upon the then-latest DC animated movie. We managed to barely get through the opening, which we found kind of distasteful and crass. That movie was Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, and I wasn’t really looking forward to this one on this watch-through, since my previous experience was negative. Upon watching the film in its entirety, however, I can report it’s actually pretty fun. Whereas the humor in Batman and Harley Quinn mostly missed the mark, this one manages to weave together an interesting narrative that plays to the strengths of the characters chosen for this outing, while also tapping into an irreverence that previous darker attempts at comedy failed to achieve. 

After a cold open in which an ill-conceived attempt by a couple of hotheads to get out of Suicide Squad duty leaves everyone but Deadshot (Christian Slater) dead, Amanda Waller (a perfectly cast Vanessa Williams) sends him into the field alongside the moralistic martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), gimmicky sharpshooter Captain Boomerang, literal and figurative ice queen Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), cybernetically enhanced Copperhead, and, of course, Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Their mission: to retrieve a magical object, a literal “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which Waller secretly seeks for herself as she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and now that the truth is out that hell is quite real, she knows she’s got a better shot at cheating her way out of it than seeking redemption. Two other parties are after the object, however, as immortal (but as he points out, not invulnerable) mutant caveman Vandal Savage is after is in pursuit of the card, as is the Reverse Flash. This film ties itself back to Flashpoint Paradox by having C. Thomas Howell reprise this role, and his whole deal is that when he was shot in the head at the end of that film, he “froze” himself in the moments before death with his superspeed, but each time he uses it, he gets that much closer to dying from the wound. (You just kind of have to go with it.) 

The end of this one is a bit of a foregone conclusion. You don’t really introduce a member of this team whose imprisonment is the result of revenge killing the men who murdered his family, and who remains tortured by the loss of them despite being a vigilante who is willing to kill, and then also have a get out of hell free card, without the audience putting those two puzzle pieces together long before the finale. There are a lot of fun twists and turns along the way, though, and the comedy pretty much lands. Waller has to make this mission “off the books” (since it’s really her personal play to avoid damnation rather than a government sanctioned action), so the Squad heads out to the card’s last known location in a decrepit RV. This means that, of course we’re going to have a scene where Copperhead flashes his fangs at a child in the next car while they’re on their road trip to scare them, and of course we’re going to have a bus full of nuns show up at some point as a visual gag. A lot of it is pretty rote, but there’s some playfulness that makes this one a little more memorable. Of particular note is that the person that the group is initially sent to find, Steel Maxum, turns out to be both an exotic dancer and the unlikely former host of DC cosmic org chart bigwig Doctor Fate. Greg Grunberg has some fun with the role, playing up the guy’s himbo nature, which is so at odds with extreme stoicism of Doctor Fate that it makes for some good gags. Used to less comedic and more dramatic effect is the way that Vandal Savage’s plans are ultimately undone by his own inhuman morality; his daughter turns on him after Vandal allows her girlfriend to be killed in some crossfire, citing that she is “expendable.” He later says that he has had more children than he could ever count, and yet they always fail him because they think too small, when it seems like the real lesson he keeps failing over and over again is not to underestimate the power of love. 

With one that functions as well as this one does, there’s not much more to say without simply recapping more of the film’s comedic moments, and I think that this one is better enjoyed than it is retold. It’s pretty funny, so I say: go forth and enjoy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Killing Joke (2016)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

When we were recently discussing Brandon’s viewing of Theodore Rex on the podcast, he talked about how it was comforting to know that there are movies that have been universally derided as bad which are, in fact, bad. Batman: The Killing Joke has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score out of any of these movies; although there are nine films that didn’t get enough reviews to provide a score, that list of non-scored films includes some of the best, like All Star Superman and Crisis on Two Earths. Rotten Tomatoes is, as we always say, an imperfect criterion, but because it got a one-day theatrical release in order to generate buzz, it also has the highest number of reviews on that site with forty-one critics weighing in (the next highest, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One, has nineteen reviews), so in this case, it bears out in the critical response. It’s true: this one is bad bad. I always assumed that it generated a negative response because it’s an adaptation of a truly top-tier Batman (and Joker) story, and that people simply didn’t like some of the changes that were made to it or were otherwise disappointed. I had also heard rumblings about the “character assassination” of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, which at the time seemed like typical Comic Book Guy grumblings, but no, that part is true as well. If anything, all the backlash against it that I remember seeing at the time was insufficient to express just what a fucking disaster this is. 

The film starts with voiceover from Batgirl (Tara Strong), as she opens with a fourth-wall wink about how we the viewers probably didn’t expect this story to begin this way. The first half, which is all new material, is mostly about her. She watches from afar as her father, the venerable Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise), meets with her Batmentor (Kevin Conroy, our beloved); she becomes the obsessive fixation of the unlikely named Paris Franz (Maury Sterling), an upstart crime family scion who aims to decapitate and replace the organization’s leadership; she even gets a catty gay best friend with whom she works at the library and who provides a sounding board for her thinly disguised musings about her crush on Batman. Yep, that’s right. Barbara has the hots for Bruce in this one, and that relationship culminates. See, he gets on her about taking too many risks in her pursuit of Franz, and the narrative goes out of its way to make him correct, as she consistently gets in over her head and has to be rescued by Batman. Every scene in which she strikes out on her own, he has to bail her out, so yeah, you could say that one of the most beloved and competent characters in the canon does undergo character assassination, for sure. This eventually leads up to the two of them having an argument before she pins the older man down, and they have sex. 

I’ve seen this scene described as being “played for fanservice” in certain parts of the internet, and I don’t think that’s the case at all. What happens on screen takes barely a few seconds; Barbara is on top of Bats, she straddles him fully clothed and takes off the top half of her costume to reveal her bra, and the camera does a (to me) comical pan up to a gargoyle statue on the rooftop with them that appears to be enjoying the show. I’ve also seen a lot of criticism about that tired canard about age gap issues, and I also personally do not see a problem with that here. Bruce could have done more to discourage her, but as she is the initiator and the most enthusiastic participant, even with absolutely no previous encouragement from Bruce, my judgment is that she’s completely in control and has full agency in the situation. She’s got a thing for an emotionally unavailable older man, she gets her rocks off, and afterward, she talks to her one-dimensional gay BFF about how good it was. The problem here is that, shortly after this, she shakes off the cowl and hood for good when she nearly beats Franz to death and retires, then disappears from the narrative until it’s time for her to play her role in the part of the movie that’s actually an adaptation of The Killing Joke from 1988.

In the second half of the film, Batman comes to the realization that one day, he and the Joker will reach a point where the only choice will be to kill the villain or be killed by him. In an effort to try and prevent this, he goes to see Joker in Arkham, only to realize that the man himself has escaped yet again and left a decoy in his place. Elsewhere, Joker obtains an amusement park and a new band of sideshow folks—conjoined ladies, wolf boy, bearded lady, etc.—to act as his goons du jour. Interspersed in his new plans are flashbacks to before he became the Clown Prince of Crime. He was a comedian who couldn’t support his family, so he took a job with a local crime syndicate that was supposed to be for only one night; on the day of the heist, he learns his wife and unborn child were killed, but he’s strong-armed into moving forward with the crime anyway; when the robbery he’s involved in goes south, Batman arrives and he is frightened into falling over the edge into a vat of chemicals, which turns him into the Joker we know. Once everything is all arranged, he kidnaps Jim Gordon from his home and, in the process, shoots Barbara in her torso, the bullet ripping through her body and rendering her paraplegic. He also does something … untoward with her. Trigger warning for assault; skip to the next paragraph if that’s not something you can handle. You see, in the comic, I never got the impression that Joker raped Barbara. He definitely sexually assaulted her, as he stripped her and took pictures of her nude, gunshot body so that he could further torture Gordon with these images (the image of him holding his camera is the most iconic frame from the comic), but this film takes it further. When Batman is informed of the state that Barbara was in when she was found, much is left unsaid, and it’s implied that the Joker took advantage of her, beyond photography. The manhunt for Joker leads to a group of sex workers who tell the investigator with whom they are talking that the villain normally comes straight to them first as soon as he escapes, but that they haven’t heard from him and assume that this means he was able to get his kicks elsewhere. And that’s part of what makes this movie not just bad, but gross. We get two additions to the narrative here about Barbara’s sexuality: one a desired, consensual encounter with Batman, and the other a non-consensual assault by the Joker, with the former being added to the narrative to raise the stakes of the latter, not for Barbara’s sake, but for Bruce’s. See, now it’s even worse because Joker took that from him, too. 

The rest of the story plays out along the canonical narrative beats of the comic on which the film is based. Batman goes to the amusement park lair, he and Joker have a little cat and mouse game where they talk about their relationship and how it appears that it can only end one way, and Batman tries to get through to his insane archnemesis that things could be different and offers him another path. Jim Gordon survives Joker’s attempts to turn him into another Joker by breaking him psychologically. At the end, Joker is subdued, and he tells Batman a joke about two escaping asylum inmates that demonstrates the futility of one insane person trying to help the other, which forces even the dour Bats to laugh. Barbara awakens in the hospital and is on the road to recovery (if you’re curious, no, her friend never comes to see her and we never hear about him again after his last scene, because he’s just that superfluous), and we see her prepare to get to work fighting crime in a new way. Fin. 

I hated this. The animation is lazy in ways that I didn’t think I’d see in one of these productions (there seem to be about a dozen different book spines that were drawn for the movie, and they are repeated endlessly in both Barbara’s home and in the library scenes, sometimes in huge groups). The narrative choices are abysmal and so grossly misogynistic that the decades-old source material, which was criticized as sexist in its day, feels more modern. In this line of work and especially as the torch-bearers of low-art-as-real-art that we of Swampflix have been slotted into by the appetite for trash that drew us together in the first place, we end up revisiting a lot of things that mainstream (and armchair) critics have designated as “bad movies.” It’s simply in our nature to find the fun and joy in these, to see what glisters in the crap, and our evaluation is positive. However, as with Brandon and Theodore Rex, sometimes a film comes along that reminds you that, yeah, movies can be bad, actually, and that not everything to which that appellation is applied is a secret gem waiting to be unearthed. Sometimes, garbage is just garbage. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Wonder Woman (2009)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

It’s a testament to just how starved we were for Wonder Woman content in the aughts that this animated movie, which came out in 2009, was so well received. It’s not bad per se—in fact, in many places, it’s quite good—but this movie’s version of Steve Trevor is gross in a way that was probably apparent even at the time, but which has become even more apparent in contrast to the way that the character was portrayed by least problematic Christopher in Hollywood, Chris Pine, in the live-action 2017 film that was released just a scant eight years later. 

The 2009 Wonder Woman film starts in the distant past: Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Virginia Madsen) is locked in battle with god of war Ares (Alfred Molina), her former lover. As her warriors die on the battlefield, locked in combat with an army of mythical monsters led by her and Ares’s son Thrax, she turns the tides by beheading her own offspring. Preparing to do the same to Ares, she is stopped by Zeus and Hera (Marg Helgenberger), who tell her that they cannot permit her to kill a god, but they will bind his powers and allow her to hold him as her prisoner in perpetuity, granting her and her people a new home on the paradise-like island of Themyscira, safe from the dangers of “man’s world.” After she and her people build their new home, Hippolyta is granted another boon as she crafts a child for herself from the island’s clay, which the Olympians bring to life: a daughter, Diana (Keri Russell). Decades later, Ares remains under lock and key under the guardianship of Persephone (Vicki Lewis), a warrior who lost an eye when she jumped into the line of fire and took a blow that was meant for bookworm Alexa (Tara Strong) in the war against Ares in the prologue; this lack of interest in battle on the part of Alexa makes her the target of mockery for supposed cowardice by her older sister Artemis (Rosario Dawson), Hippolyta’s right hand general. When modern USAF pilot Steve Trevor (Nathan Fillion) lands on Themyscira after an aerial dogfight, a contest is held to determine which of the Amazons should travel beyond their peaceful oasis to return him to his nation. Diana wins this competition, but her excitement is short lived, as Ares’s escape while the island’s inhabitants were distracted by the contest means that she will not need to seek him out and return him to his cell. 

There’s a tonal issue at play here that drags this one down a bit. It’s got a PG-13 rating, and at the time of release, there was some outcry about the level of violence in this one. I think that’s reflective of a systemic issue, as this film is no more violent than Superman: Doomsday, which didn’t receive the same kind of criticism, and I think it’s owed solely to the fact that the combatants here are women. There is a decapitation (in shadow), but in the earlier film, Doomsday murdered an actual child (although the “camera” cut away), but because Amazonians (read: women) are doing the violence, this one received more criticism. It makes sense that this would get the MPAA rating that it did because of this, but the dialogue remains very PG. There’s a recurring bit that starts because Trevor says “crap” in front of the Amazons, then has to explain that it means excrement; each time after this that he uses the word, the Amazons take this as further evidence of the crassness and baseness of mankind, until Diana finally uses it herself at the end as a demonstration of her becoming more acclimatized to man’s world. That’s all well and good (if a bit pat and trite), but its failure to push the boundaries of the film’s rating demonstrates that the franchise is still trying to bridge a gap between appealing to (and being acceptable for) children while aiming to attract an older audience through a novel, more mature approach to storytelling. 

Once upon a time, I owned this movie on DVD, having obtained it for a mere $5 from the CVS on Leon C. Simon, when I was a student at UNO. I have a very clear memory of watching the special features, which included several talking heads from the film’s voice cast, and Rosario Dawson using the word “warriess” several times, which I always found endearing. Dawson is giving a great performance here in general, with a couple of quite badass lines—my favorite of which is when someone teases her about her giant sword, and she replies that it “is but [her] dagger.” Very little in the film stuck out in my mind, however, other than the speedrun through the stations of the Diana of Themyscira canon: born of clay, paradise island, crashed air pilot, championship to determine the ambassador to man’s world, crusader for truth and justice. Once Diana comes to the modern world, there’s a distinct lack of charm in her fish out of water story that acts as a demonstration of why this narrative works better as a period piece; the Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie sets its events during WWI while the Lynda Carter TV classic was set in WWII (at least initially), as the earliest comics had been. This allows for there to be some natural chemistry between this isolated demigod princess and a man who can be a little regressive but still likable in that he was more aware than average for this time. Here, Steve Trevor is a total hound dog, in a way that would have been obnoxious even for a contemporary guy at the time of the film’s release. 

All of the stuff with Wonder Woman herself is great (minus a comment that she makes about Etta Candy that is supposed to shame her for being a stereotype), but I’d really rather not have heard Steve Trevor tell Queen Hippolyta that “[her] daughter’s got a nice rack,” even if it’s supposed to be a moment played for comedy (he’s bound with the Lasso of Truth). Later still, he tries to get Diana drunk with the implication that he expects to have the opportunity to take advantage of her! It’s vile, frankly. The rest of the film, as wonderful as so much of it is—the fight between the Amazons and the reanimated dead is a particular standout, especially as it exists both as set piece and as vehicle for closure on the Alexa/Artemis relationship—doesn’t make up for the fact that its male lead is an attempted sexual assailant by any other name. Edit all of that out and you have a 4-star animated flick, but it is in this film, and that leaves us where we are.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond