vanessa williams

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

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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

Eraser (1996)

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One of my all-time favorite movie subgenres is the The Internet is Trying to Kill Us thriller, in which mundane online user-interface tech is transformed into a horrific menace that’s aiming to destroy us all. The genre was still in its infancy in the mid-90s at a time when The Internet was just starting to invade our homes, which gave early specimens like The Net a growing-pains conundrum on how to translate online imagery & lingo into traditional studio thriller beats. As a result, that film spends a lot of time following Sandra Bullock around irl as baddies erase her identity online – a compromise between the cyberthriller and the traditional action film (as opposed to more recent, fully-immersed Internet Thrillers like Unfriended). Looking back on the Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick Eraser now, over two decades after its release, it’s a film that feels equally paranoid about the advancement of 90s computer tech and the flimsiness of personal identity in the Information Age as The Net, but it makes even less of an effort to translate that Luddite unease into new cinematic language. Eraser turns the fears surrounding computer tech’s intrusion into American homes into a villainous threat by manifesting it as a big scary future-gun. It’s the most direct, literal approach to the topic possible, and it’s charmingly boneheaded as a result.

The future-gun in Eraser doesn’t shoot bullets, but rather electromagnetic impulses. Its viewfinder display is designed like the sickly green MS DOS grids that decorated far too many cyberthrillers in the 90s, most notably The Matrix. Instead of merely offering the gun operator night vision, this feature allows them to see through walls & bodies like a digital X-ray machine. The gun is designed for military use (and, naturally, falls into the hands of international terrorists), but it’s almost exclusively deployed in domestic settings throughout the film. Characters who threaten to expose the government’s mishandling of the gun’s development and sale are shot at with “electromagnetic impulses” through the walls of their own homes in the Washington D.C. suburbs, so that computerized technology is literally invading their domestic spaces to destroy therm. Vanessa Williams stars as a military-weapons detractor who steals the designs for this future-gun on a miniature CDR, so she is pursued for the disc in the exact way Bullock is pursued for her own forbidden floppy disc in The Net. The only difference here is that Arnold Schwarzenegger is heroic for erasing her identity online as a way of protecting her as a witness. The tagline even boasts, “He will erase your past to protect your future.” Sill, the flimsiness of identity in the digital age is a premise the film banks on to hook the audience, and the film shares a lot of thematic & aesthetic preoccupations with The Net even if it replaces the ethereal qualities of The Internet with a physical “electromagnetic” gun.

Eraser only has one foot in the future of Internet Age techno thrillers. Everything about the film besides the future-gun and the erasure of online identity records is very much rooted in the familiar tropes & imagery of the Schwarzenegger action canon. The film opens with a suiting-up montage (one of many) where Arnold loads down his muscly body with superfluous weaponry. He dresses in almost the exact leather jacket outfits he already self-parodied himself for in The Last Action Hero four years prior. Every time he enters the frame he’s accompanied by guitar-solo theme music announcing his heroism. Most dialogue consists of 90s-era action movie one-liners as Schwarzenegger goes about the business of saving the world from terrorists & cyberguns, including the title-riffing quip “Smile. You’ve just been erased.” Within this familiar framework, Eraser can only stand out on the strength of its individual set pieces, of which ether are two absolute stunners: one where Arnie jumps out of an airplane without a parachute and one where he kills a room full of baddies by releasing CG alligators at the zoo. The gators sequence stuck with me in particular as a kid, being the only detail I vividly remembered about the film besides the cybergun. I was glad to confirm on revisit that the gator stunt is extensive, featuring far more CG chomping action than necessary to get its point across. If only they could’ve found a way to arm the gators with their own cyberguns to tie the sequence into the film’s larger themes of technophobia . . .

I wouldn’t vouch for Eraser’s excellence as an especially exceptional example of Arnold Schwarzenegger action cinema, nor as a clear early entry in the Evil Internet canon. The evil-clone movie The Sixth Day might even be a more calcified example of an Arnie film that directly engages with the technophobia of the early Internet Era. Still, there’s a kind of distinctly 90s anxiety about computerized technology invading suburban homes in Eraser that makes it just as fun of a dated watch as more explicitly Internet-dreading thrillers like The Net. Besides, it really does have some of the best gator-flavored mayhem you’re likely to see in a big budget action movie of its ilk, a novelty that cannot be undervalued.

-Brandon Ledet