If all of the terms you learn in business school’s are to be believed, I am Warner Bros. Animation’s prime audience: 18-35 straight white male who never got over his dad leaving his family back in 2008 during a screening of The Dark Knight. Warner Bros, and DC Entertainment in general, have been almost exclusively catering to my demographic with very serious, very gritty heroes and enough cheesecake to make Buddy Valastro lactose intolerant. The result was an atmosphere of bloody and sexual comics that were meant to drive in a new and younger audience while still appealing to older audiences who apparently wanted nothing more than Lobo and nipples.
In spite of how utterly insane the comics coming from DC were, many of them were played completely straight, as if the often laughable attempts at being “grown-up” were a sincere attempt at seeming significant to a rapidly changing market and not an attempt to drag in more of the peanut gallery.
Though DC’s improved considerably in the shockingly short time since 2011, it’s clear Assault on Arkham is another call-out to the lowest-common denominator. Assault follows the Suicide Squad as they break into Arkham Asylum and steal something for their boss/captor, Amanda Waller. It’s a cynically violent and often uncomfortably sexual mess of a film that glorifies villains and cruelty over the love and compassion that so many heroes are defined by.
…And I kind of loved it.
Normally, I’m put off by shows or films that try and make its protagonists dark and dreary in order to seem more mature, but that’s not really a problem with Assault on Arkham. It’s a spin-off of the Arkham video game franchise taking place between Origins and Asylum so it naturally adopts a rather gloomy aesthetic, leather costumes that compliment practical weaponry and revealing costumes for the women. It’s a universe that still gives itself room for non-realistic stories (as shown by Poison Ivy and literally anything that happened in City) but overall it’s a world that feels much closer in tone to the Nolan films or The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a tone unfortunately played during in the rather unremarkable first few minutes of the film where Batman (Kevin Conroy) arrests The Riddler (Matthew Gray Gubler) while beating up the SWAT team from the Arkham City announcement trailer.
And then Batman goes away for a solid half hour or so and we get a dubstep montage of KGBeast parachuting into an enemy base with a parachute made to look like the USSR flag while on a motorcycle.
Also the rest of the Suicide Squad gets introduced. They do cool stuff but none of it is as Soviet.
By hardly caring about Batman’s intro – he just shows up to punch the Riddler and walk away which is already the conclusion to every other Riddler story- Assault on Arkham immediately shifts the focus to the Suicide Squad (or Task Force X if you’re a nerd/Amanda Waller) who are right away more interesting and dynamic characters than the Bat. KGBeast (as mentioned before) is perfect with too little screen time, Captain Boomerang has a funny voice, Black Spider’s comically serious, Killer Frost is still DC’s surprise character find post-Injustice and Deadshot is… Okay, Deadshot’s essentially the Batman of the group — but his occasional moments of sass give him more personality than Bruce Wayne’s cardboard cut-out who was presumably rendered uninteresting for the purpose of accentuating how likable this group is.
All that said, the undisputed breakout character of this film is Harley Quinn with a performance by Hyden Walch that finally makes me understand the “Female Deadpool” approach DC’s been taking her in lately. She’s funny, has the best one-liners and the depiction of her history with abusive relationships and mental illness isn’t completely ignored. Unfortunately, neither are her breasts. I feel comfortable not labeling this as a spoiler because it has nothing to do with the plot, but Harley Quinn and Deadshot sleep together with all of the passion and energy contained within this sentence. Harley Quinn and her side-boob show up in Deadshot’s room and proposition him because he’s a bad boy or something. Deadshot, equally unimpressed with this turn of events, looks up to an offscreen director who tells him to go for it, which results in Deadshot saying “What the hell?” and emotionlessly going down on the clown.
Continued belowNow, I’m not an opponent of hook-up culture. If anything, I believe in it more than I believe in most gods. But the hook-up scene with Deadshot and Harley is just one, and admittedly the largest, example of when Assault on Arkham tries too hard to cater to its lowest common denominator. Again, I’m not counting these as spoilers, but Assault on Arkham includes another scene where Harley strips to distract a guard and one where Killer Frost is transported nude via body bag into the Arkham morgue so an implied-necrophiliac coroner can stare at her sideboob before Frost kills him by making out with him.
I can’t believe the last one actually happens either.
These sexploitation showcases are clearly thrown in to attract that lowest common denominator I mentioned earlier but for whose benefit I sincerely can’t tell. Having revealing costumes is one thing, but having a character get unzipped by a mortician who’s such a necrophiliac that he’s slobbering over himself while armed guards are standing right there? Combined with the aforementioned sex scene and Harley’s strip tease for the guard (which is not the only way to take out a guard considering they have a shark man on their team), Assault on Arkham feels almost insecure, like it needs to fall back on the sexploitation to keep itself interesting, when it really doesn’t. Harley’s the most compelling character in the movie; we don’t need a scene of her talking about getting Deadshot into a “tight space” while Captain Boomerang reminds everyone he has a boner. It’s just unnecessary space that kills the momentum of the film by taking you out of it in an effort to distance yourself from the necrophilia jokes or cheesecake.
Maybe the occasional dip into the cheesecake is a move on the writer’s part to distract from the main plot which, to be honest, is pretty much all over the place. The relatively simple heist the movie revolves around does actually take some cool twists and highlight how amazingly coldhearted Amanda Waller is (and thank whomever retained her original 80’s look) but it sits in the background to the obligatory appearances of the fan-favorite Arkham characters (real talk: Joker did not need to be in this movie for more than three minutes) and the push DC’s obviously giving to Suicide Squad by making them the undercover stars of a “Batman” movie.
In the latter, they succeed admirably. The Suicide Squad comes off as a band of lovable yet dangerous misfits that don’t shy away from going beyond one-dimensional killers. There’s even a shockingly sad moment in a scene reminiscent of the old “Suicide Squad” comic’s consequence-filled tone. With the box-office events of the past two weeks, I’m sure DC has been scrambling for a team of rascals to compete with Guardians of the Galaxy and, though it’s not perfect, they may be on to something with Suicide Squad. It honestly works less as a movie and more as a reminder that the Suicide Squad are great characters.
By creating a film that has the sexploitation and hardcore antiheroes DC is legally obligated to have while at the same time throwing the serious out the window and just enjoying itself, Assault on Arkham is definitely one of the more fun releases DC Animation has released lately. However, it still holds on to some of the problematic tropes that have defined DC in recent years, though more with a sense of reluctant obligation than eagerness. If you cut out the cheesecake scenes, Assault on Arkham actually develops its female characters very well. And though the voice acting can be off at times (Deadshot sounds like what can best be described as White Protagonist Gruff™ and Gubler sounds like he’s disgusted with every other line he’s reading), many of the one-liners and witty banners are delivered excellently.
Assault on Arkham is hardly a perfect movie. If anything it’s mostly DC shouting “HEY! We can have a fun team too!” Yet in that shouting they manage to find a dynamic that comes so close to working. Perhaps if they felt more confident in their product and replaced some of the sideboob with a more solid plot, DC would have a very valid argument.
Final Verdict: 7.4 – A hilariously violent, thrilling, and oddly touching film, though also one trying too hard at times to cater to a demographic it doesn’t need to limit itself to.
