Fun in Batman’s Funny Farm
I’m not a big Batman fan but I when this came out a few weeks ago, I thought it looked interesting enough to pick up. It was a pleasant surprise that while Batman is part of the movie, a majority of it is actually about the Suicide Squad. Amanda use her traditional implants to convince a bunch of villains to do her dirty work and infiltrate Arkham Asylum. The action and character interaction make it an interesting cartoon, bringing an range of characters to life in a way they haven’t been truly handled in before. Yes, some characters like Harley Quinn and Deadshot have appeared in animation before but usually in a much less serious interpretation. This is definitely a movie worth picking up. But, now it’s time to get onto the real details. Yes, it’s time for the…
We start off with the Riddler asking riddles to none other than Amanda Waller. (Now there’s a bizarre phone call.) Waller tracks Nigma down but Batman arrives too And the Riddler ends up in Arkham. Then we see the capture of a bunch of villains like Killer Frost, Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark, Black Spider, and KGBeast. The group wakes up in Waller’s care, some of them previous members of Task Force X and some were rookies. One of the rookies, KGBeast, doesn’t believe the implants are real, tried to leave… and then his head blew up. That made all the difference to everyone. The night before the big mission, Deadshot and Harley have sex. (That really surprised me in a Batman cartoon.) Despite constant in-fighting between Deadshot and Boomerang, they make it into Arkham to look for information on a bomb Joker had.
Just because they’re in the complex doesn’t make things easy. There are complications with security getting into the areas they need to while undercover. Eventually they all get through, but Harley runs across the Joker and starts firing bullets through the air holes in his cell. They ricochet all over and somehow the Joker avoids them all. Get all pull together and get down to tracking down the Joker’s stuff in the basement. Harley finds her mallet, Killer Frost takes Mr. Freeze’s freeze gun, and the others filter through the stuff from a bunch of lower level bad guys (like Killer Moth, Firefly, and Maxie Zeus). Things start falling apart when Batman shows up. With the team all trying to fight Batman but not as a team, the battle doesn’t go well for them. In the end, it appears that Black Spider defeats Batman. Killer Frost takes off on a side mission that Waller sent her on which is to Kill the Riddler. It turns out the reason for this is because the Riddler figured out how to stop the bombs in their heads. (Ergo, why Amanda didn’t kill him herself.) Killer Frost takes Nigma with her and meets up with the others and they head off to gets the bombs taken care of. It turns out that a high level of electricity can disable Waller’s controllers and they gather enough seats for everyone except the Black Spider. Waller finds out what’s going on and triggers the bombs. The cure worked for all of them except King Shark (presumably because of his thick skin) and his head inflates and warps in odd ways before exploding. The Black Spider is fine which at first made me wonder if he never had a bomb but you see Joker, who had managed to escape in all this mess, finding the dead of the actual Black Spider in Batman’s cowl. (I had wondered if that was going to be Batman in his costume after the battle earlier but forgot about that by this point.)
Eventually, this leads to a battle between Deadshot and Joker because of Harley Quinn. You also have Batman trying to get Harley’s mallet from her since it had been revealed that that was where the bomb was. The battle between Deadshot and Joker really astounded me. Joker was kicking Deadshot’s butt. Between the two of them, I would bet on Deadshot all the time. Yes, Joker has some fighting skills and Deadshot is best with his guns, but Deadshot should still be the better fighter by far. In the end though, Deadshot sends the Joker down into a helicopter explosion (tho the body is never found). In the end, Batman accuses Waller of sending the team in to actually kill the Joker and she says he can’t prove anything. It comes down to Lawton (Deadshot) and his daughter sitting on a rooftop with a gun pointing at Waller and her seeing the red dot on her forehead. He says “Boom” but you never know if he actually ever fired or if he was just proving a point to her.
Overall, it was a really good movie. I didn’t like that Deadshot was in some black costume instead of his regular red and silver one while everyone else was dressed normally. (Killer Frost had some blue outfit instead of her regular white one but I bet that was just a lot easier to animate.) The flirting between Killer Frost and King Shark was cute if a bit awkward. I loved the way the bad guys worked together but yet didn’t at the same time. I liked that the focus was more on the Suicide Squad. Everyone knows Batman. He was in it enough to be a Batman movie but didn’t overwhelm the movie. (As they would say in the Young Justice cartoon, it was just “whelmed”.) I honestly wish there were more movies like this that featured other characters other than just Batman or Superman. Maybe this will be the start. *crosses fingers*
