Half in the Bag Episode 114: Suicide Squad

half in the bag [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes i did it you hear that jay that's the sound of lightning fast vcr repair going online oh my god i haven't heard this sound in 25 years i'm assuming this isn't a fiber optic connection with at least megabits per second uh no it's actually just plugged into our phone line so if somebody calls us we get kicked offline what the guy that sold it to me at the gas station said it was top of the line and i believed him what are you doing oh i'm just going on to rotten tomatoes i wanted to check the score for that new suicide squad movie oh my god what did you learn from the internets well the score is really bad oh well that's no surprise yeah but i found a website where somebody has started a petition to shut down rotten tomatoes just because they give dc movies bad scores oh wow really i wanted to get rotten tomatoes shut down for giving positive reviews to the ghostbusters remake the system is rigged here's what it says we need this site to be shut down because its critics always give the dc extended universe movies unjust bad reviews like 1. batman v superman dawn of justice and 2. suicide squad oh there's just two there's just two listed yeah that counts as always well that justifies shutting down an entire website especially one that's owned by warner brothers yeah definitely the company they're clearly biased against their own movies yeah uh and that affects people's opinion even if it's really great movies oh my god could you fit more grammatical errors into one paragraph i tell you jay i just don't understand this world anymore i know we've got things like disease poverty andy dick and terrorism but clearly this is a priority i tell you jay this new suicide squad movie makes me want to grab some rope get a chair go up into my attic and commit to learning all the nautical rope knots you know like anchor bend bow line bow line on a bite bunt line hitch butterfly knot carrick bend heaving line knot icicle hitch midshipman's hitch mooring hitch rolling hitch running bow line sailor's coil stevedore stopper knot truckers oh my god dc is back with another thing this time it's called suicide squad a film about all the executives at dc oh wait sorry with man of steel and batman v superman dc has attempted to differentiate themselves from marvel superhero films by adopting a dark gritty more realistic aesthetic they continue to try and be different from marvel with suicide squad by featuring a giant blue laser shooting up into the sky characters exchanging quippy dialogue and a terrible villain with weak motivation who has an army of faceless henchmen for our heroes to kill endlessly with no moral qualms nothing like marvel movies at all the joker the most iconic villain in comic book history shows up to have no relation or impact on the plot whatsoever thanks for nothing jay what did you think of suicide squad um why did you say that so sing-songy i don't know did the movie put you in the mood for music after all the the endless endless pop songs suicide squad aka paying royalties i have the budget head to go to music every five seconds there's a new [ __ ] song we'll talk about that we'll talk about that and why that's there okay i know why because i'm a cynical man with with the heart of cole um i would describe this movie as frustrating [ __ ] frustrating i think i hated it and that's what's frustrating is that there was a lot of elements in it that i actually thought could have been good and there's some stuff in the final edit that i think is actually good but i kind of feel the same way about it that i did about that fantastic four movie where the re-edits and reshoots and moving around scenes is so obvious that it's hard to even judge this as a completed movie yeah it echoes uh fantastic for a whole lot uh it's it's studio meddling the sequel yes because i did a little reading on this and it's very similar to the josh trank debacle although david ayer didn't like publicly say horrible things about the studio that will ensure that he never works again in hollywood i think i think i feel very sorry are they saving money on budget by hiring like like c-level directors like well they're hiring people for these [ __ ] movies that have a voice someone like josh trank who's made a movie with a vision david ayer's done movies with a vision why hire these people why why like why hire someone that that is a director that has things that they want to say yeah and then and then and then just change it all later hire brett ratner who will do whatever the [ __ ] you want it makes no sense to me why they keep hiring these people well also they need to they need to figure out what the [ __ ] they want to do before they start rolling the cameras well that's the problem is they don't know what they want until they see what they don't want well they don't know what they want until they see what others have made that is successful yeah and then take the footage you already have and rearrange it to try and get it to the tone of something else yes that's exactly what happened here because like you said i can also see a movie uh in this mess oh yeah because the first half of this movie is a complete mess complete mess it feels like the first half of this movie feels like a sequel because it keeps cutting these flashbacks and the flashbacks are clearly at one point were full scenes that have been like chopped up and truncated and when it cuts to him it's like oh we're cutting the footage from the first movie but this is the first movie yeah and like the joker's just there the most iconic uh superhero villain ever and it's like oh there he is he's just in a scene i wish i could see that scene because it might be interesting where you have harley quinn before she goes nuts and she's his therapist or whatever and it's like oh i would like to see oh we're out of that scene now now we're back to viola davis explaining that they have to assemble this team and then the minute that ends she goes into a boardroom and explains that they need to assemble a team there's a lot of repetition in this movie yeah um and and her assembling a team to fight this threat she unwittingly creates the threat that was the most frustrating part is like she's like we we need to we need to assemble this team because superman he turned out to be a good guy but the next person like him to come down to our planet might not be a good guy so we need to assemble harley quinn with a baseball bat to combat zod now what the [ __ ] is she gonna do what is jai courtney with a boomerang going to do against a super powered uh uh alien from another planet so that plan is stupid she says hey uh enchantress this witch lady you're gonna be in charge of the suicide squad because i think that they can do something for some reason and then immediately the enchantress turns evil and and uh becomes the main bad guy of the movie and then viola davis is like we need to stop enchantress i told you like this whole thing is your fault the entire movie is viola davis fault it makes her look like a dumbass when they combed through the the enchantress which which layer they never found the little little bottle that held her secret evil brother [Laughter] get some clay and a kiln and make a little bottle to put the enchantress back in it but it worked in uh in ancient times sure it might work again i don't know how i guess they had the cat i say magic words or something and we don't know those anymore so they couldn't put them back in a very fragile breakable bottle also what [ __ ] person who calls themselves an archaeologist finds an ancient thing and like cracks it oh they pick up that [ __ ] very carefully jay and they put it down the guy and touching this she goes i'll just break this and whatever what the [ __ ] maybe she's new to it this is her first uh her first time out she she was like an archaeology student and she she was sick the day they uh they taught the lesson don't break artifacts what's this uh cheerleading trials [Music] hi boys i have a feeling the original edit like the first half of the movie was these weren't flashbacks and this was just like here's a character and here's what they're doing here's the other characters i was thinking of uh the movie sorcerer directed by william friedkin which that's sort of a a group of misfits banned together for a mission that starts about halfway through the movie the first half of the movie is here's one of these characters they really establish him and then here's another character in another part of the world and they really establish who that is and then halfway through the movie they get to the mission i kind of felt like that's what maybe the original cut of this movie was before they [ __ ] everything up and threw the footage into a wood chipper well yeah it's it's a lot of characters to introduce though and and you would need that really slow pacing yeah i have a feeling that's what it was but the weird thing is they they try and introduce them all quickly with these jump cutty flashbacks and then after they're done doing that we're reintroduced to them again where they go like cell to cell it's like we know these are now it's a [ __ ] mess and then in the third act of the movie the start of the third act we get a flashback to something that happened in the first act of the movie we already saw this it's not even giving us new information it's just here's that scene you already saw yeah i mean it's it's a the first half of the movie is a terrible mess and then that ending um you kind of get a an idea of what the director was going for they're the best scene in the movie is when they all just kind of go ah [ __ ] [ __ ] you we're going to go on this bar and drink yeah and then you know well that's where the movie slows down it slows down yeah and they do some characterization and i was like oh god uh joel kinnaman don't come in and say you're in love with the enchantress and that's the reason why and he could say i love him oh god no other than that it was a really nice slow scene and then after that everything got very dramatic yeah and and you and i was like okay this is kind of working for me i like the dark tone i like it and well i like the dark tone in contrast with how weird everybody is it's not going for like jokey quippy it's just these are just weird characters right and i liked that i didn't like the villain and that's what killed the ending for me is all the the cgi witch flying around and the laser got him in the sky i didn't like that stuff but yeah like you said i can see what he was going for i i kind of did like that part because i'll explain to you in a minute but you felt you saw kind of what what he was going for and how and the thing that ruined the movie for me was yeah it's like dc panicked they saw how successful deadpool was deadpool was very very lighthearted yeah very funny and then you have guardians of the galaxy and i think what i read was they did test screenings as they always do and people were like it's not funny but it's not dark yeah and then the studio's like yeah we'll we'll try and do both we'll find the best of both worlds well the story is they they had multiple editors doing different cuts of the movie they had a they hired a trailer house to do a cut of the movie yeah and i think that's the yeah trailer so i think they went with that version where it's like let's cram in as many pop songs as we can the first 10 minutes of this movie feel like a big trailer it's like five pop songs in a row it's just endless and they're all so obvious like as far as uh you know the lyrics of the song i was thinking of the watchmen movie that does that too or it has really obvious songs [Music] and i'm and i'm watching these scenes and i'm picturing them without the music and and so it's almost like yeah tonally it's it throws it off yeah it's like hey we're guardians of the galaxy we're funny and and you know quippy and there's humor and and i have a feeling that it wasn't supposed to be like that with the exception of harley quinn and her little like lines that she throws out lets her character it's fine yeah and she's the best part of the movie margo roby robbie how do you pronounce it i think it's roby whatever it is she is great in this and i actually liked will smith in this quite a bit too which is surprising because i normally don't like him but he's way more low-key and he's of course the heart of the movie because he's got a daughter and there's that connection and when this movie just slowed down and focused on them i liked some of it yeah but the harley quinn other than her like it it doesn't doesn't make sense for them to use her uh obviously she's the joker's girlfriend so don't let her out of that cage because that's just inviting disaster because he's gonna try and come get her by the way when they let her out of the cage and they're heading into the city for their mission she's like texting the joker why does she have a cell phone why the [ __ ] did they give her a cell phone maybe she found one while they were walking around on the street i really don't know but yeah that's a bad idea plus she's clearly mentally unstable yeah and she said and what is she going to do the only person that has any abilities that would help them is maybe the pyro guy yeah jay courtney with a boomerang like what's he going to do against a super powered uh uh witch demon oh i'm not gonna kill you i'm just gonna hurt you really really bad that's awful don't forget we're the bad guys i know this is heresy but i had a little ghostbusters vibe i was thinking of uh the end of ghostbusters or the witch at the end and all the she gets like she gets like this this she's the witch and she was like petrified and then it's like she peels her skin off and reminded me he goes or dogs yeah yeah and then i'm gonna open the portal i'm a i'm an interdimensional unstoppable creature and then so you got this like ragtag group of like people that are have all these different weird abilities and they're like here go stop this i was just wondering why batman didn't show up and try and help but batman does show up in the movie yeah he punches a woman in the face which is sort of weird i found that off-putting to see one of the most famous superheroes of all time just punching harley quinn right in the face multiple women get punched in the face in this movie and now that i'm like like if it's appropriate it makes sense but in this movie it was weird one time it's played for laughs that slipknot character that's another thing too is like after we establish all these characters and then it's like oh and here's another guy and he gets out of a vehicle and just punches a woman in the face unlike ghostbusters which features three white ladies who are academics and a black lady who works in the subway this film was a very diverse collection of characters we have we have a latino man we have a japanese woman we have a black man we have a white lady yes we have an australian and we have uh and they're all led by an african-american female who's who's very powerful in the government sure it's it is that's all great but they're all played as like really simplistic stereotypes no there's no there's no racial stereotypes they're they're just uh they're just mostly bad people and and no one is championing this film as the model of cultural diversity as it should be i mean yes they're all villains but that aside they're all bad guys and stereotypes they all do the right thing at the end which is stop an intergalactic monster that's awful oh there's an escape from new york thing where they all have capsules in their neck so they have to do the mission and then the what's that guy's name the robocop remake guy joel kinnaman who's on a great program called well he's the one that's in charge he has the lady on it who played uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh so he uh he he smashed this really great show he smashes the device that will set up these capsules so he's like all right i'm sorry you guys can do whatever the [ __ ] you want and then immediately jai courtney's character runs out i was like oh that's funny he's just abandoning them all but then he's just in the next scene anyway so there's lots of moments like that where it's like oh they're gonna do something different nope this is this is stupid but she has an app on her phone that has their little pictures oh yeah and uh and so that's what she uses as leverage because all she has to do is touch their picture touch screen their head blows up which they demonstrated with a slip knot and then she's like this back off [ __ ] you know and her fingers are on her [ __ ] phone and i'm like if i were the guy on the top row i'm like you hold your phone like this you know you get to get your fingers off the top [Laughter] i'm like who's doing this movie who's making these movies apparently nobody really a a group of people in a board room are making these movies and panicking [Music] and who is this movie made for jay i have no [ __ ] clue there it was originally shot as a pg-13 and then there was talk of them doing well they did do reshoots and there was talk of the reshoots being to make it r which it's not it's pg-13 lots of people get murdered in this movie lots of people get shot and killed there's no blood but it's very violent there's lots of shooting and the characters are you know they're anti-heroes they're bad guys so i don't know who the audience is for it people with adhd because it doesn't make any [ __ ] sense well at our screening there i was wondering this you know and at our screening there was a lot of weirdos um there was there was a a smell of pot in the air there was a small pot in the air but there they're also like like weirdos you'd see like i don't know at like a like a dingy bar or a rave or you know you know what i mean like yeah it wasn't like your typical like it wasn't comic book nerds it wasn't comic book nerds not like the overweight guy with with the captain america shirt on and the big beard and you know he was eating popcorn it was like like i don't know like weirdos came out of the woodwork but yeah like like all the tattoo parlors were empty like it was just like i guess i can see it based on the marketing like it looks like it looks like hot topic the movie yes it looks like hop topic threw up all over guardians of the galaxy yes and that's the movie jared leto's uh joker looked like uh marilyn manson in the the music video he was a scarface juggalo yeah i guess we should talk about jared leto have you ever seen the marilyn manson cover of um tainted love yes yeah yeah where he's he's goth gangsta that's what it reminded me of but yeah let's talk about jared leto uh well he's barely in the movie for one thing he's in about 10 minutes of the movie he has no connection to the plot he's not in any scenes with anybody else except for margot robbie uh and he has a talk with the he a drug dealer who who he offers offers margot roby as a sex slave to him and then and then he says no and then he kills him right was that a double cross what was that scene the guy the guy acted completely justified he's like what happened no this is that i don't have sex with uh my girlfriend yeah and he's like i'd like to but but she's a lady so no yeah thank you yeah that was unclear but but my point is that was a scene that happened that made no sense there was another scene where there's the uh guard at the prison that's at like a casino or whatever yes and they drag him to the back room and the joker says some things and there's no connection to anything what was that scene i what i blew up with what i thought was going to happen was joe which which kind of happened there it was brought up later but the joker takes the guard in and and basically says you're gonna let her out of jail but then then it's like then the the the suicide squad team led by viola davis come in and they take margot robbie out yeah and she's like i'm leaving now and then he's the guard's like wait wait wait a minute you know the uh joke is gonna be mad at you and then that was the end of it yeah it served absolutely no purpose maybe in the original cut of the movie things made more sense i have no clue well that's what every uh every film goer needs to say maybe it makes sense before they release the movie they should put disclaimers before these movies that say like this movie did make sense at one point in time enjoy question mark this movie was really good it made a whole lot of sense and then we [ __ ] it up and released it because we got scared yeah and we're constantly looking at other movies instead of like having the balls to release a movie the way it was intended to be released we had committees and market research people and pre-screenings and and all these people going this take this out this little this you're saying you needed to do this you need to do this and those are questions or things that were being said after the movie was shot right and they didn't have the nerve to release it probably this is all uh speculation well it's like fantastic four we'll never know we'll never we'll probably i mean maybe this movie will get like they did the batman v superman extended cut maybe they'll do an extended cut of this and it will make sense i don't know um because it feels like a lot of this is the result of reshoots too so it's like if they do an extended cut will it be that original version before they did that who knows yeah it's all speculation yeah all i know is that jared leto is the worst [ __ ] joker ever why did you say that he didn't even seem like the joker he just seemed like a slightly quirky thug yeah i mean unless you're gonna spend a lot of time on the character like no the nolan movies did right where he actually has something to do with the story that would be nice yeah yeah the joker really should have like he should have shown up at the end and kind of like foiled their plan to stop the bad guy by you know it's doing something like yeah or even the the final scene of this movie well we don't get into spoilers but oh i mumbled spoilers hours ago okay i guess we don't care the movie sucks don't see it so the end of the movie is is everyone's back in prison uh and the joker shows up and he breaks her out like if that was the first time you saw the joker like a lead into a future movie maybe that would work but just having him be there at the beginning of the movie in a sloppily edited flashback that's not how you introduce such an iconic villain can we talk about the part where he asked uh harley quinn if she would die for him and she said yes and then she threw herself into a vat of a horse semen yeah i don't know was that to imply that that weird chemical gave her some kind of superpowers or i have no [ __ ] clue i mean we know the jack nicholson joker fell into a vat of chemicals and that's what made him the joker bust his face up so maybe that has some connection i have no idea what that was supposed to be because they showed her getting like uh electroshock yeah treatment um and that's what [ __ ] her up mentally uh but but uh uh did she train with like a martial arts master what gave a average psychiatrist psychologist the ability to be like the kung fu master did we know that oh it was the power of bad screenwriting oh is that that the superpower that that turns your hair rainbow colored and parted to the side [Laughter] we've got you [Laughter] come on back we're watching we're watching um uh pass through faster soon whenever it's available pass through is my fourth theatrical feature film but yeah like i the second half of the movie i i can't say that i hated it the second half gets better there's still parts that feel truncated and rushed but it at least feels like a linear series of events that happen in the order they're supposed to yes as opposed to the first half which is a giant [ __ ] yeah you don't feel any kind of like forward momentum like of of excitement like we got to stop this interdimensional monster yeah you just you just sort of feel like you want to shower it's exactly what you would expect when a studio meddles with a movie and just does panic mode editing stop meddling with the movies if you're going to hire david ayer and i'm sure he had a pitch i said this is how i'm going to do it then just let him do it and this and don't listen to your test audiences yeah or just hire brett ratner or just hire brett ratner and then like he'll do whatever you want every phase of the production have uh marketing and uh pitch meetings and go we're gonna tweak this you don't even need a director you just need a boardroom of executives like like shouting orders from like like a an ipad behold the voice of god [Music] so mike would you recommend a suicide squad just say no you can do it are the wheels turning of who to recommend it to no not really the wheels are turning because because i didn't hate it uh i i it it didn't have that like like i hate you zack snyder you know you obnoxious prick this could have been good it it made me hate all the the higher ups yeah like and that's why it was so frustrating to me i hated the movie because it was so clearly [ __ ] with to the point of almost being incoherent for the first half right the first half is [ __ ] terrible the second half gets a little bit better but by that point so much damage has been done it's like i can't get into this movie now and then we have one nice scene where they're all hanging out in a bar that's the only scene in the movie that i liked yeah there's moments throughout the movie that i liked but that's the only full scene where it's like okay i can see what they were probably going for yeah it's not worth it for that scene alone and now and it's not like you could say well there were a lot of funny moments because it really weren't it was very dark but i i don't know i i i was somewhat aware of of the studio meddling and the problems and i was very curious to see it to kind of see watch on the screen like okay that's from that that's wrong that doesn't make it almost like an analytical perspective oh sure i i enjoyed it on that level yeah and to watch the uh the the hindenburg the giant dc logo on it [Laughter] oh the meta humanity [Music] well one of the supporting roles in suicide squad a random government agent man is played by actor david harbour oh i see you're a big fan of his i i'm a huge fan of david uh harbor i've been following his work for years but in addition to suicide squad he is also on the netflix series stranger things you guys getting paid by netflix now yes oh i love checks you

Channel: RedLetterMedia

Views: 3,214,927

Rating: 4.8739676 out of 5

Keywords: redlettermedia, red letter media, red, letter, media, half in the bag, plinkett, best of the worst, mike stoklasa, jay bauman, rich evans, suicide squad, david ayer, harley quinn, joker, batman, dc, dc comics, warner brothers, warner bros, will smith

Id: ePoxmPMwJNQ

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/blastcage]

http://i.imgur.com/lbnJ7TY.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3xSzb1C.jpg

if this sub is going to enjoy anything about this video it'll enjoy this

[u/dcnoob122]

I enjoyed the video, but even they question the phone? Griggs gave it to her!!!

[u/Blvd_Nights]

They nailed it on this review.

[u/[deleted]]

i have been lurking and waiting for this its time

[u/Ganthid]

Can someone tell me why Harley was in this film other than name recognition? Where did she learn to fight?

[u/[deleted]]

If you cant watch, they didnt like it.

[u/Shlak2k15]

Welcome to the New Reddit, where some speech is freer than others.

[u/boostergoldfan]

What'd they say? On mobile atm and don't want to watch till later