The Suicide Squad

This one is very slick and stylish. Also, it's funny and violent and gory. What it isn’t is riveting all the way through. The movie comes across more a series of set pieces and setups and punchlines rather than a fully-realized and well-told narrative. Director James Gunn--he's getting the lion's share of the credit for this flick, whatever it may be--pays a lot of attention to "don’t this look cool?" but not as much to "does any of this make much sense?" Viewed on its own terms, the film is entertaining to a point, funny to a point, and worth a watch, if you're the kind of viewer who likes this sort of thing. That there is the rub: is this your kind of movie, and are you this kind of movie's audience. It's a question that's more fraught than you might think. It's hard to deny, from a rational and (ironically) bloodless point of view, that a movie like this is, in certain respects the sign of a sick society. It’s too casually bloodstained and crude to be anything you’d consider quality entertainment. And if you’re someone who is entertained by this flick--and many will fall into that category, perhaps even me--then you should probably start asking some questions about yourself, if not the society as a whole. That's all a little bit deep for a movie that clearly does not aim to be deep itself, but sometimes the big questions arise from the minor matters. From a pure filmgoer's standpoint, this one is probably a near-miss--and if that dooms any potential sequels, maybe that's not a bad thing.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2

Most of the time, the heavy use of nostalgic music--in this case 1970s and '80s stuff--is just a marketing tool used to rope in a specific, ticket-buying cohort. Not so here; the music actually plays a pivotal role in the story. It's a thread that ties things together in an interesting way, more so than the tunes in the first installment. Expanding out from that, this film wears its Eighties heritage more flamboyantly than any other flick movie of recent vintage (as does its predecessor); it's no wonder then that folks like myself are eating this stuff up. All that wry, ironic, and even a little bit cruel humor goes a long way to creating the likeability, even if a lot of this story is obvious both in terms of plot and visually. There are a lot of ways of earning an audience's good graces, and these folks pull out all those stops, enough to make an enjoyable sequel. Enough for a third go round? We probably don't have a choice, but, sure, I'll go along.