BATMAN: ASSAULT ON ARKHAM

With batman turning 75 years old this past may, it is about time DC draws upon its well established Gotham mythos and tells a story not centered on Batman or Bruce Wayne, but a motley crew of villains newly dubbed 'The Suicide Squad'.

And for what purpose did Amanda Waller assemble the squad and how did she knit together this loose thread of impossible loners and gets them to play as a team?

With the promise of freedom for success or the punishment of a nano-explosive devise planted in their necks for anything less than perfection, the Squad, under the reluctant leadership of protagonists and anti-hero Deadshot and the Joker's former love interest Harley Quinn, is given the insane task of breaking into Arkham. "The Wall" cleverly convinces these convicts to put aside past differences and focus one simple task, assassinate the Riddler.

Through an introduction to our main players, obviously paying homage to a heist movie in the vein of Oceans Eleven or Resevoir Dogs, we are brought into the workings of a plot masterfully designed by morally ambiguous, government big wig, Amanda "The Wall" Waller. We follow the Bat's enemies as they crawl from deep with in the recesses of Gotham's penultimate penitentiary, away from the Batman's perspective, and into the villainous gaze of Arkham Asylum's closed-circuit cells, perpetually haunted by DC Comic's most dangerous, and psychotic, criminals.

As the plot develops we see the Batman early on confronting the Riddler, in an apparent quest for the location of a dirty, nuclear bomb hidden by the Joker. But this part of the tale quickly fades into an unfocused background and the clarity of the other characters come into full view as motivations blur the line of antagonism and protagonism.

Though It cant help being noticed that there is an overwhelming lack of Batman in this Batman movie. But don't let the lack of the bat, nor the fact it is based on a video game, keep you from a well knit premise covering the sharp banter and and blood soaked trail left by the newly formed Suicide Squad.

And with the ethical cowl of Bruce Wayne stripped almost entirely from the audience's concern, the body count escalates upon the execution of Ms. Waller's self serving plan, leaving the crew of criminals to reluctantly work together or fall into their old habits of solitary and ego mania.

Even as we are treated to the famous rendering of Kevin Conroy's Batman and a remarkably well done adaptation of Mark Hamil's joker voice, done by Troy Baker, it is at this point we become aware that this is not another meatless rendering of the 1990's Batman we have become so familiar and compliant.

Thanks mostly to the flow of fill in profanity, excessive violence and a rather explicit sexual liaison between Harley and Deadshot, which at first glance seems a gratuitous flirtation with mature content, only later to provide a fuel to fire the rage needed to propel the Joker from his innocuous Insanity as the incarcerated clown prince of crime to an understandably enraged victim of a lovelorn heart in the final climax of our ever unfolding delineation of animated double crossing and cartoon carnality.
But what lamentation we may feel for the Bats missing screen time, we are rewarded by a climactic jail brake, orchestrated by the joker and populated with the cornucopia of criminally insane Arkham residents. From Poison Ivy and her botanically induced zombie minions, to the chemically enhance biology of Bane, Hopefully this menagerie of cameos may well grow into further DC movies with the same edge and mature tone to continue to keep the Bat busy and Gotham's growing fans sadistically satisfied for the years to come.

John SMITH
For MOVEMENTMagazine.com