3

Suicide Squad, The Western

I will preface this whole entry by saying I watched Suicide Squad again in order to write this article, and I'm extremely unhappy about it. The problems with that movie are much more apparent on a second viewing, because your brain doesn't let you focus on why you didn't like it the first time. Like Viola Davis' voiceover during the scene with Harley and the Joker in his shiny shit car when she says Harley is crazier and more fearless, then 20 seconds later, we watch Harley scream in panic because the Joker is driving them off a bridge.

Suicide Squad is such a good idea on paper. It's a motley crew of thugs and miscreants forced to work together to achieve a noble end ... which immediately falls apart when you introduce the Enchantress ' vague and confusing plan and powers, her weird bobblehead minions, Diablo's inexplicable plot twist, and the entirety of Killer Croc's being. Now try to imagine that movie with the stuff you like -- some of the characters and interactions, the overall premise -- without any of the magical shit. Now imagine everyone in those assless chaps, and what have you got? That's right, a Western.

You could do a more imaginative Magnificent Seven, with no need to include Joker by Calvin Klein, a guy who eats a goat, or the Enchantress' never-ending insidious belly-dancing routine. Just a government that has inside information on seriously psychotic brother and sister duo who have an iron grip on a frontier town (or a Mad Max post-apocalypse, if you're not feeling the Western theme), killing with impunity, terrorizing the locals, and building their own army. Are they strip-mining, cornering the market on moonshine, breeding a superior longhorn? Who gives a shit -- do you even remember what the smoky magic lady was trying to accomplish, or why?

What matters is that there's a mess that needs cleaned up, and enough people have already been lost that the authorities don't want to send in anyone important. Enter our gang of flamboyant outlaws who can use the chance to prove themselves in exchange for freedom, or die trying because they're the goddamn Suicide Squad! A sharp shooter, a firebug, a deformed cannibal, an Aussie outlaw, a samurai, a hot chick with a bat. All of it playing out in wide-open sunny spaces, as they ride through open countryside instead of the dark, claustrophobic, filmed-inside-Hot-Topic's-butthole movie that we got. (The vistas symbolize the freedom the characters are trying to achieve!) You can even keep the same cast. Minus Jared Leto.

2

Spawn, The Existential Horror

I remember buying the first issue of Spawn when it hit the shelves back in the day, when I had to walk six miles to the comic book store in the snow, while I was on fire and constantly getting polio. I bought every Image #1 when they came out -- even Youngblood -- because obviously no one was around to warn me not to. And I loved Spawn, thought it was a great book. When the movie came out, I won tickets to see it opening night and was pretty stoked. Then I saw it, and this entry will be the last we ever speak of such things.

1

Catwoman, The Corporate Thriller

I had managed to go through my whole life without seeing this movie in its entirety up until I decided to write this, and man did I miss out. This movie is so good. Every scene is so perfectly crafted in a baffling storm of bumblefuckery. It's like art that was somehow made by a drunken elephant shitting into a paint store. But if we're being honest with each other, it did not work as a superhero movie so much as it worked as a majestic fuckfarce.

There's no need to pretend that any of the "Catwoman" part of Catwoman worked. Just watch that goddamn basketball scene -- the weirdly flirty, awkward, and uncoordinated shit dance between Halle Berry and Benjamin Bratt -- and that'll put your mind to rest on that issue. But the central story of the film is about a low-level nobody stumbling upon grand-scale corporate douchery and then being targeted for a wicked-hard murdering to keep it quiet. Now that's a movie.

Granted, the thriller wrapped up in a ball of Catwoman yarn is not entirely different from a lot of what passed for engaging cinema in the '90s -- The Net, The Pelican Brief, The Firm. Lots of "The" movies, it was a whole thing. How is this different? Well, Catwoman is supposed to be a thief, and the movie pays very minimal lip service to this briefly, and poorly. But say she is a thief, and a good one, and it's in her thieving that she discovers the shady business about the company she works at during the day, her cover story job. Now -- without magical goddamned cat powers -- she's stuck trying to cover her own ass and expose the abject shittiness of Sharon Stone.

Essentially, you can make the same movie, but take every part that involved actual cats, douse it in gasoline, and burn it back to the hack writing Hell from whence it came. Fill in all the holes you made with cat burglar plots and Sharon Stone murdering the Merovingian, and you may well create a film that won't sweep the Golden Raspberry Awards.

If you think you could write a better superhero movie, get a move on it with a guide to scriptwriting from Celtx.

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