Her Heart's Not In It

Rating: 2/10 (8 August 2016)

Don't watch this film.
Right, that said, here's what I attacked my arm with a sharpie with whilst watching this awful, awful, film. I have pictorial evidence of this which I'm happy to DM or something here, I was going to link to a tinypic, but that seemed a little dodgy. Here's what I 'memento'd' my arm with: intro ... actors ... Expoition ... A-Team intro ... pacing ... Enchantress Good ... not convincing ... violence too old / humour too young ... no drama for Joker despite good performance ... incomprehensible dark fight ... comic beats all miss ... ---censored quote from end of film--- ...
So, three things up front: Firstly, because of how I wrote my arm comments, the reaction here will be mostly (but not obviously) chronologically based on what happened, but there are no spoilers here. Secondly, I've not exposed myself to hype or reaction to the film, so thoughts and feelings are my own, uninfluenced by media, social media, or friends. Then finally (related to number two) I go in to a film straight, meaning that even if I love the trailer I'll not go in thinking it'll be great. This works the other way, too ... I really found Sisters quite hilarious.
OK, I've given my 'intro', so why not look at theirs ... theirs being the first, painful, forty minutes of a film this year, which basically boils down to "The A-Team". So, yeah, I'm not sure that I've seen more exposition so obviously spelled out for me on screen in years ... sometimes literally. But there's more expository nonsense that just keeps flooding, and flooding, your ears and eyes. I have a theory that if you remove 90% of the flashbacks you might have a shorter film buy the performances would actually have some subtlety to them. Harley's craziness would be ... CRAZY ... Joker's motivations (as I believe they should be) would be indecipherable ... Laton's few genuine emotions would be sold so hard. I do feel like this over usage of flashback (without overtly fetishising it for irony-lolz) is just more heavy literal thinking and expository pointlessness. The actors on show here can *perform* and most of that is lost if you spell out all of that to the viewer.
That's probably the only issue with the performances, I think. They all seem to be doing a relatively good job with what was written the horrible pacing and structure just bury emotion, humour, and subtlety which basically kills any effective character development. Although I'll focus minutely on Robbie's performance which I just couldn't get anything from, I do put that down to editorial interference though, it just feels like your fringe friend that is pretending a little too hard. She does, though, like every other player, get given one decent emotional moment to sell (you'll know them when they come because of the massive sign on the screen saying "BIG EMOTIONAL MOMENT"), and these are all handled well enough, but are completely buried by the overwrought stylings of the film.
I guess that can nicely lead in to my one large positive from this complete mess of a film; Cara Delavigne's performance and most of the handling of The Enchantress in general. This said, I didn't feel that she was super threatening, but that's neither here nor there in this part of the analysis. The character really did fit the GRIMDARK aesthetic of the DC films thus far, and I think she'd have worked very well in any of the other properties that they have, so I'd like to see her kept around for when they get to magic in their Universe. I think the lack of threat probably came from it looking much like a weaker version of the planet smasher from MOS. Anyway, I digress, Delavigne is using those peepers perfectly, and really holds the screen and your thoughts well. It feels very much like the only decent, real, emotional, character building that happens, and when it does it's so sparse that I think that it's good that we got what we did out of it.
Let's salute the GRIMDARK again, and take a quick snigger at the poor attempts to bring humour in to the fray. There is only one really good line that actually lands throughout the whole thing and it's Killer Croc that gets it. Otherwise the unfortunate literal nature of the film meant that I actually laughed more at one of Rick Flagg's last lines as an extremely helpful indicator of what was actually occurring for the characters... Tommy Wiseau level stuff. It's a sad time when you're laughing *at* a film rather than with it, it's sad because they could have cut some of the violence and aimed this solely at kids (it's a 15 in the UK) and lose some level of the 'bad guy' device, or ramp that up, and lose the Nickleodeon level "humour." So amongst the usual things that have plagued the Snyder films (he's EP on this, Ayer wrote and directed everything apart from a Boomerang Flashback) like the grimdark, the bad storytelling, the grimdark, the lack of humour, the gri... ... this just doesn't work on nearly every level. Poorly scripted, presented, directed, and ultimately this all ruining performances, it just all points to an unfortunate vision from Ayer.
I'm actually lowering my score having read back what I'd written here, which puts it level with 'The Room' ... maybe I'll have a think about that.