Welcome to the land of trailers. Teases that drive us fucking insane. A tidbit is dropped a year in advance and we spend the next few months breaking down the threads, hints and tiny bits of details that may lead to spoilers. Directors and editors create these 150 second ice cubes of intrigue just to drive us nuts and make us buy the 11 dollar ticket on opening night. Take Suicide Squad, writer/director David Ayer’s latest loaded deck. It comes out in August of 2016, which is over a year away but in the middle of shooting he drops a trailer off for us to dissect and digest over and over again. You see, SS is the third film i the new DC universe of films. It started with Man of Steel and continues with Batman v Superman before Suicide Squad drops next summer. Let’s start with that trailer and roll on from there.

Suicide Squad

What is this about? Well, DC’s band of thieves are rounded up by the government to task missions and take care of the dirty work that they don’t want traced back to their hands. Instead of asking Batman to take out some criminals or a terrorist cell, the suits install baddies like Harley Quinn(Margot Robbie from Wolf of Wall Street), Lloyd aka Deadshot(Will Smith with a shaved head!!!), Captain Boomerang(Jai Courtney) and Rick Flagg(Joel Kinnaman). They do job, eventually turn on each other and the whole trailer is tuned to a Bee Gee’s cover. Sounds swell and the trailer works very well.

Ayer’s magic trick here is reinventing The Joker via Jared Leto’s punk rocker imitation. He had silver teeth, green hair, a deep voice and the tattoos to assure us this is not Heath Ledger’s Joker. Should we cut this new version a free rein of slack? Yes. As much as I adore Ledger’s work, Leto doesn’t do a film because he’s told to. He decides to take it on. It’s a choice thing. From the looks of the trailer I don’t think he is playing around.  (more…)