Doom & Doomer: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice


batman v superman posterDOOM DELUISE: Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of Doom and Doomer, wherein Jim Doom and I take a back-and-forth look at comic book movies.

Today, we discuss Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the sequel to 2013’s abysmal Man of Steel. Was this film able to rise above that one, or is this whole DC Comics Cinematic Universe doomed before it’s barely even started?

We’ll get to that eventually, but overall, in regards to Batman v Superman, what did you think, Jim?

JIM DOOM: I think I told you that I was going in with an open mind, ready to be pleasantly surprised. But I have to be honest, even with good intentions I was ready and eager to hate this movie with all my heart.

And it’s still not the movie I would have made, and I still won’t be all that bothered if Zack Snyder gets booted from the franchise (and it looks like that might happen sooner rather than later), but this movie at least did a lot of the things right that I think Man of Steel did wrong, and while that’s basically the measuring stick that I hold it against, it makes me more hopeful for the movies that are coming up.

So where should we start? All the things that are terrible about it? Because I really hate the terrible things, and there were plenty.

DOOM DELUISE: Sure, we can start with the terrible things, but then I don’t think we’ll have much left to talk about after that’s out of the way.

No, but I just want to say my general reaction up front, though you’ve probably already guessed at parts of it.

But to be clear, I didn’t hate this movie as much as I initially stated in our text messages about it right after seeing it. Since then, I’ve softened my stance quite a bit. I initially thought it was on par with The Spirit and Ghost Rider and all the other comic movies over the years that haven’t had any redeeming qualities to them. That’s not fair, though.

Ben Affleck as Batman is awesome. So it’s not a movie without worth like those I previously-mentioned.

What it is is a movie that I feel tries to do way too much beyond the four walls of the movie itself. That ambition ends up putting this more in line with comic movies like Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3, which are still plenty bad, though there are parts of each that are quite entertaining. And while you might not outright hate them, the lasting impression is that you’d be fine never seeing any of them ever again.

The big difference between those films and Batman v Superman is that those movies killed their franchises, while this one is supposed to be launching a mega one.

JIM DOOM: I totally agree with the idea that it’s trying to do too much. It is a mess of a movie riddled with completely unforced, self-imposed errors.

All of this stems back, in my opinion, to what I perceive as Zack Snyder’s attempt to remake Watchmen with DC characters.

Rather than just making Superman and Batman movies, he’s trying to make some kind of grand statement that the poor guy just isn’t equipped to make.

DOOM DELUISE: Right, and a big problem with that — because I see your point and think it’s a really good one — is that Watchmen is a story that really only works once you have a long history of superhero stories preceding it. The fact that this comes at the start of the DC Cinematic Universe, before any “world building” groundwork is laid, whatsoever, is jarring, and it makes it so that the viewer is expected to know a lot about these characters and their motivations before they’re even introduced.

JIM DOOM: Totally agree. Defenders of “Superman kills!” point to a few stories from the 1980s (or roundabout there) as proof that Superman does indeed kill in the comics, with seemingly no awareness that they’re undermining their point by having to find a few tiny isolated incidents among like 80 years of stories, and those were following 50 years of precedent that were necessary to make their impact meaningful, if you’re even willing to concede that they were well done and meaningful.

The impatience of going straight to this story is indicative of a lack of patience in virtually every aspect of the storytelling in this franchise.

DOOM DELUISE: Very well said. So when Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne meet, for example, it’s treated as this big moment, and Lex Luthor is just thrilled by the whole idea of it.

But why? The groundwork to make that moment impactful wasn’t in place, because they rushed it.

Kent’s been a reporter at the Daily Planet for 2 years. He covers high school football (poorly, if his boss’ constant screaming at him for being late on his assignments is any indication). Why should a billionaire playboy from Gotham give two drops of monkey piss about meeting Clark Kent?

JIM DOOM: Yep, agreed.

Remember how odd it was that Clark Kent even got hired as a reporter in Man of Steel? It was like, “You’ve been hanging around, and you worked on a ship. Here’s your desk!”

Although Senile Perry is one of my favorite characters, to be fair.

I still laugh at his headline writing in the air, which made up about 50% of his lines in BvS.

DOOM DELUISE: Y’know, one of my chief complaints about Man of Steel is exactly what we’re describing right now.

We were shown all of this superfluous nonsense about Perry White and Lois Lane and all the other reporters at The Daily Planet, but there wasn’t a good reason for it other than, “This is a Superman movie. You guys realize Superman works here, right?”

Sure, in past movies and in the comics. But within the confines of this universe, we were never given a reason to care about any of that stuff until the very, very end when Clark was hired, which, as you described, still ends up being rushed and borderline nonsensical.

Rather than establishing that groundwork upfront, we’re supposed to walk into the theatre with a working knowledge of it prior to frame one.

JIM DOOM: Yeah, I don’t remember if we covered it in our review, but that movie was just a bunch of check boxes of Superman mythology presented out of order with no apparent understanding of how they work together.

DOOM DELUISE: Bingo. I felt this was a continuation of that style of storytelling, which I really dislike.

JIM DOOM: There was some of that, but I think the basic story of, “This godlike figure has arrived, and Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne are going to demonstrate the ways in which frightened people would react to this,” I thought that made sense, and so even though there were things about this movie that were out of order, that particular story has to come early.

Early in Superman’s career, that is.

DOOM DELUISE: Fair enough. Can I ask you a question that you might not have an answer to?

JIM DOOM: Sure!

DOOM DELUISE: If the basic story of BvS is, “This godlike figure has arrived, and Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne are going to demonstrate ways in which frightened people would react to this,” which I think is perfectly captured in the scene between Bruce and Alfred when Bruce quotes Dick Cheney’s foreign policy and says, “If there’s even a 1% chance that he is our enemy, then we have to treat it as an absolute certainty…”

I lost track of that sentence. But if that is the story here, then why does Wonder Woman get a free pass? She steals from Bruce Wayne, lurks in the shadows throughout most of the movie, and yet Bruce doesn’t think there’s even a 1% chance she could be a badguy?

JIM DOOM: Well, she doesn’t do anything that makes her appear “super.”

DOOM DELUISE: What about the photo of her from 100 years ago?

When she arrives on the battlefield, Batman should have screamed, “KILL HER! … uh… Unless she has a mother!”

JIM DOOM: The photo was later in the movie, and also consider what Superman did to earn him this designation in Bruce’s mind — he basically levels a city and then stops to make out with a reporter.

She has done NOTHING close to that.

Bruce Wayne is willing to throw away his morals (and I think it’s important they establish this — he’s crossing a line) because Superman is a threat unlike anything he’s seen, on a scale unlike anything he’s dealt with. There’s a disparity there and one of the things I was impressed with in this movie is that there was acknowledgment of this change in Batman, that he was basically going to sacrifice his humanity to save the world.

And I wonder if any part of that was the Ben Affleck rewrites.

Did you hear he had his Argo writer on set with him, doing rewrites of his lines as scenes were shot?

DOOM DELUISE: I didn’t, but didn’t Argo win an Oscar for screenwriting? That would make sense.

JIM DOOM: But anyway, that’s why it didn’t bother me as much that Batman was a harsher version of the Batman I know and love — because there was an acknowledgment of his change. It wasn’t just, “This Batman is way cooler!”

DOOM DELUISE: Right. I can see your point, but, even if she hasn’t necessarily done anything on the same scale as Superman yet, I just think his suspicions of Supes should have logically extended toward Wonder Woman as well.

JIM DOOM: We don’t necessarily know that they don’t; they were probably just proportionate. He was clearly suspicious of her, but if you have to be godlike to make him a wannabe killer, then being mysterious probably just puts you in the category of every single person that makes him be a detective.

DOOM DELUISE: And I suppose she would’ve completely redeemed herself by the time she entered the battlefield at the end, perhaps, because she intervened specifically to save his life.

JIM DOOM: Yeah, because by then Batman had also gone through his change.

DOOM DELUISE: Before that, even though the audience is expected to know who she is and everything about her background, Batman wouldn’t have known anything about her.

But when you say that Batman had gone through a change by the time Wonder Woman enters the battle, what change are you referring to? The one where he’s willing to sacrifice his humanity to save the world? Or the change he makes when he realizes Superman has a human side to him as well?

JIM DOOM: The latter; his change back to being non-murderer Batman.

Where he would also be less suspicious, or less blood-thirsty, toward Wonder Woman.

DOOM DELUISE: Well, I’m not convinced it was a permanent change. In the vision sequence in the desert, he’s straight-up shooting guys with a gun. And I think we’re supposed to think that’s a vision of the future.

JIM DOOM: Well he quite clearly decided he didn’t need to kill Superman anymore, and since that had been his entire reason for being throughout the movie, I’m going to still categorize that as “change.”

DOOM DELUISE: Ok, fair enough. I thought it was a good way to stop the fight, but I think it was executed very poorly.

batman v superman poster 2JIM DOOM: So maybe I don’t need to project it onto you, but I’ve seen plenty of people pan the alleged hokeyness of Batman ending his bloodlust because of the fact that Superman’s mom has the same name.

And I don’t think you can blame this movie for the fact that writers gave Ma Kent and Ma Wayne the same first name nearly a century ago.

But I thought that was an excellent use of that unfortunate laziness to show in an instant how Bruce realized the one thing where he’d been wrong, and that was in his conclusion that there was no humanity to Superman.

Realizing there was a human side to him was so important.

And I thought it was actually really well done; Batman is like, “Crap, I’ve been completely wrong about this guy.” I thought it was totally believable.

It connected to Batman in a way that nothing else could, not so quickly. And it gave justification for revisiting the Wayne murders.

DOOM DELUISE: I agree with almost everything you said. I think it’s a really clever way to make Batman realize what he’s doing and take a step back. All of that is true.

My issue is with the actual dialogue and how they execute that fundamental change in Batman.

He has Superman on the ground, boot on his throat, and Superman says, “You’re letting them kill Martha.” So Batman says, “What’s that mean? Why’d you say that name?” To which Superman replies, “Find him. Save Martha.” At this point, Batman starts screaming, asking him why he said that name, and it takes Lois running in from out of NOWHERE to intervene and say, “That’s his mother’s name! His mother is named Martha!”

That, to me, is super cheesy. I mean, in that scenario, the more likely — and therefore more believable — dialogue would’ve been so much simpler and less goofy. Superman would’ve said, “You’re letting them kill my mom. Find Luthor. Save my mom!” or something along those lines. He didn’t need to say her name at all, other than to fulfill the screenwriters’ need to have Batman connect Superman’s mother’s name with his own dead mom’s name.

Or that could’ve come later, or whatever. The inclusion of Martha’s name is not even my issue with it. I just thought the dialogue itself was really clunky and forced.

JIM DOOM: I think that’s fair for the most part, but I think “Save Martha” gets across that he’s a man with a family more than “Save my mom,” in which case it’s easy to imagine his mom is some sort of giant space spider or something.

Even monsters have mothers; men have Marthas.

DOOM DELUISE: Sure, but the name could’ve come through in the same scene only later on.

JIM DOOM: Well but he needed to realize he was a man with a Martha in order to stop the deathblow.

Zod had a mom.

Kill Zod.

She wasn’t named Martha.

If it was just, “Save my mom,” it’s easy to stay abstract; the personalization is what gave Batman pause.

If they’re getting to “Martha” later, Batman would be like “Shoot, why didn’t you mention his mom was Martha earlier, before I stabbed him?”

DOOM DELUISE: There are ways to get the abstract into something more personal without having your characters speaking in forced riddles.

JIM DOOM: Humor me; in this moment, as Batman is about to deliver the deathblow, how do you write Superman saying something that cuts to the core more immediately?

Because I thought it was admirably efficient and believable. And I don’t agree that there was a way to make the abstract more personal without uttering “Martha.”

DOOM DELUISE: Easy. I’m not asking for much. He leads with Martha. He should’ve led with saying something about his mom, at which point Batman can pause and be like, “Even monsters have mothers,” or whatever you want him to say, but then Superman can immediately say something about how her name is Martha Kent and she needs to be saved before Luthor kills her.

JIM DOOM: The sentence and actual syntax? Adjustable. But he needed to spit out “Martha” or she stays abstract.

DOOM DELUISE: I’m talking about the sentence and the syntax. I agree that saying the name grounds it, but the way it comes across due to the dialogue is… I was going to say comical.

JIM DOOM: Oh I get you now — I don’t think we’re that much apart. When you were saying “Martha” could come later, I thought you meant *much* later. Like Superman is like “Save my mom!” and Batman is like “OK,” and then they’re chatting and it comes up later that her name is Martha.

DOOM DELUISE: Oh no, no, no. It needed to happen while Batman still had his boot on Superman’s throat.

JIM DOOM: Ok I’m with you then.

But this gives us a great pivot to talk about how terrible Lois is.

DOOM DELUISE: Real quick!

JIM DOOM: You’re just like Lois! Getting in the middle of my subject change!

DOOM DELUISE: Superman should’ve led with, “Hi. Please don’t fight me. Luthor is going to kill my human mother (named Martha) unless I kill you. Can you help me?”

JIM DOOM: Actually yes, that would have worked too. In fairness to Superman, he did arrive and say “I need your help!”

He just didn’t have a chance to say “Martha.” Batman was too eager.

DOOM DELUISE: I thought he arrived and said, “The Bat is dead. Bury it. Next time they shine your signal, don’t answer. Bye now!”

JIM DOOM: Weren’t those different scenes? He arrives a lot.

And he always does that exact same stupid “Land and punch the ground, then slowly look up” move.

That got so repetitive that it was making me laugh.

DOOM DELUISE: But if that was Superman’s way of convincing Batman not to fight him and to retire, though, he sucks at convincing people of things.

JIM DOOM: You don’t stop Batman with words!

Unless they are “Martha.”

You don’t stop Batman with fighting words!

You don’t stop Batman with threats!

DOOM DELUISE: He didn’t even *try* to convince Batman they were after similar goals.

JIM DOOM: But that gets to another thing I liked — I feel like Superman changed too!

And the first interaction was when Superman was still the jerk-wad from Man of Steel, and the second was when he was a new, humbler, more-human guy.

I know you were saying it to make a funny-point, but those two interactions with Batman were significantly more than just a few minutes apart; their place in the movie — and their parallels and contrasts — were important.

lois lane batman v superman posterDOOM DELUISE: Ok, do you want to talk about Lois now?

JIM DOOM: Yeah isn’t she awful?

DOOM DELUISE: The part of the movie that made me laugh harder than any other part (I wasn’t trying to laugh, to be fair) was when Lois threw away Batman’s Kryptonite spear, and then she walks out of the room and suddenly magically knows that Doomsday is part Kryptonian, and she’s like, “Aw, man…” and has to go back and get it.

She’s just the worst.

JIM DOOM: Oh I wouldn’t say she’s the WORST. Because I think there was someone even more awful than Lois!

DOOM DELUISE: Doomsday? Perry White? Alfred? Martha Kent? Jimmy Olsen?

No but seriously, what was Jesse Eisenberg thinking?

JIM DOOM: I don’t know, man. That was just terrible.

Surely people sharing the stage with him had to be cringing, like, “Uh is nobody seeing what I’m seeing here?”

DOOM DELUISE: It’s up there as one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. Like, they spent, what, $250 million on this thing — or some astronomical amount of money — and nobody stopped to tell him he was tanking every single scene he was in?

JIM DOOM: I’m hoping that getting his head shaved will be an excuse for him to act different in future movies.

DOOM DELUISE: I remember I texted you the night you saw it, complaining that I thought Luthor had no motivation or reason to hate Superman that was established in this film, and you said that, yes, it was more or less the same mistrust that Batman had that powered Luthor to do the things he did.

And I thought to myself, “Huh. I guess I must’ve missed that, which isn’t surprising, considering I didn’t understand most of what Luthor was saying throughout the film.”

To me, it was just a word jumble of highfalutin nonsense about the relationship between gods and men.

And to prove that point, just now, I looked up some Luthor quotes, and I’d like to share them with you. To me, they make absolutely no sense, and even the best actor couldn’t pull them off, let alone Jesse Eisenberg.

JIM DOOM: Ooh this will be good.

DOOM DELUISE: “See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Joe, ’cause God is tribal; God takes sides! No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from daddy’s fist and abominations. I figured out way back if God is all-powerful, He cannot be all good. And if He is all good, then He cannot be all-powerful. And neither can you be.”

Next: “You don’t need to use a silver bullet. But if you forge one, you don’t need to depend on the kindness of monsters.”

And finally: “Books are knowledge and knowledge is power, and I am… no. Um, no. What am I? What was I saying? The bittersweet pain among men is having knowledge with no power because… because that is *paradoxical* and, um… thank you for coming.”

That last one, he was losing his train of thought, but it was a bad train to begin with.

JIM DOOM: Oh man that fundraiser party scene was the worst.

Lex Luthor IS ALWAYS IN CONTROL.

That’s what makes him dangerous. He doesn’t lose his train of thought when he is the center of attention.

That’s just so far away from what makes him Lex Luthor.

lex luthor batman v superman posterDOOM DELUISE: Agreed. What’s this line mean? I know it’s in the trailers and everything, but I just think it’s false and weird: “Do you know the oldest lie in America, Senator? It’s that power can be innocent.”

JIM DOOM: I think it’s a really clumsy way of saying that power corrupts, and had he actually said “power corrupts,” then his whole point would have to be that nobody in America says that power corrupts.

And since basically everyone acknowledges that power corrupts, he has no point.

DOOM DELUISE: [Laughter]

JIM DOOM: Nobody is saying, “Power doesn’t corrupt,” so nobody is lying.

DOOM DELUISE: Exactly. It’s utter nonsense!

He might be the worst comic book movie villain we’ve seen yet, and that’s including whatever the hell Samuel Jackson was trying to do in The Spirit.

JIM DOOM: The really unfortunate thing is that his character’s motivations were understandable. He was just terribly written and ridiculously acted.

I thought there was some powerful meaning in the juxtaposition of how two men — Lex and Bruce — fight back against the arrival of a god.

One attempted to make himself a martyr, and the other attempted to use it to seize power for himself.

There’s potential for really good stuff there!

DOOM DELUISE: But this is what we get. So prior to trying to get Batman and Superman to kill one another, what was Luthor’s plan to seize power?

Convince Senator Holly Hunter to let him collect the Kryptonite from the first movie, but, failing that, explode a bomb in that one guy’s wheelchair… for… reasons? So that he can… get… power? Even though he was immediately blamed for the terror attack?

Wait. Was he? I think he was.

JIM DOOM: No, I think people hated Superman for it.

Lex wanted the Kryptonite so he could kill Superman, ultimately, and she saw through him and understood his motivation.

But his surface explanation was that he wanted to use his company’s resources to get a contract with the government to protect them from the Kryptonians.

Superman survived that blast; he isn’t one of us.

The blast was set off by a former Wayne employee who lost everything from Superman’s battle in Metropolis.

I don’t recall them connecting anything about that incident to Luthor, did they?

DOOM DELUISE: I couldn’t say. It’s hard to remember all of the details this far out. I didn’t think the blame for it fell on Superman, though. I don’t remember much coming from it at all, actually. Nothing really seemed to change from it.

JIM DOOM: There were already big anti-Superman riots outside and I think the idea was that this was only stoking the flames. But I thought that scene was also kind of important, because prior to that, there was at least a shred of temptation to agree with Luthor.

He wasn’t exactly being irrational — the Federal government *should* have some protection.

But in that incident, he showed that he’d kill innocent people to further his goals.

And Superman’s helplessness in that situation, and his humility in failing to stop it, was a big part of his turning point from the Man of Steel character to the more likable guy who tried to reason with Batman later.

It took a strange conversation with inexplicably rock-piling Ghost Pa, but it got the job done.

Which is another thing — so many visions and hallucinations in this movie. So weird.

DOOM DELUISE: Yeah, they were. I went to the bathroom at one point, and when I came back, it was the dream/vision sequence in the desert, and I was very confused for a good while.

Was that supposed to be Flash at the end of that sequence, by the way? Saying how important Lois is to the whole thing?

JIM DOOM: I think so. That was my interpretation, which made me groan.

Hurts the chances that she will be killed off as a special surprise treat to the fans.

DOOM DELUISE: So now I guess they’re going to do the Darkseid fight from New 52 to establish the Justice League, and then in part 2, we’ll get Flashpoint? Or the other way around?

JIM DOOM: I hope we get the film adaptation of Final Crisis.

DOOM DELUISE: Well, remember this was supposed to be JUST Batman vs Superman, so maybe the “solo Batman movie” will be an adaptation of Kingdom Come.

JIM DOOM: [Laughter]

DOOM DELUISE: Zack Snyder really wants to deconstruct the superhero myth. He’s just very very impatient.

JIM DOOM: Remember how when this got changed to Batman vs Superman, then Snyder was like “We’ll do Man of Steel 2 separately?”

And now the idea of a Man of Steel 2 is just a possibility — it’s not on the schedule, not even with a commitment from Warner Brothers.

DOOM DELUISE: Yeah, I’d forgotten about that!

JIM DOOM: I feel like that’s a major indication of their lack of confidence. I just saw that news the other day of the status of Man of Steel 2 as just an idea somewhere down the road.

DOOM DELUISE: I didn’t even know it was still at that point. I thought it was just done for forever.

JIM DOOM: The greatest lie in America is that things change when your movies are terrible.

Or maybe the greatest lie in America is that things don’t change when your movies are terrible.
Because things apparently do.

Or something.

No wonder Jesse Eisenberg acted nuts.

I can’t even find my motivation when delivering this joke.

DOOM DELUISE: Do you think they’ll drop Snyder?

JIM DOOM: He’s already signed for Justice League, isn’t he?

DOOM DELUISE: I think so, but they can change that.

They can fire him and hope to recoup their losses with a better director.

JIM DOOM: Maybe Darkseid will bring Superman back to life with the anti-life equation (I admittedly don’t know how that works since I think everything New Gods related is stupid) and that’s how Superman comes back and that’s why the S-logo (it means “hope”) people were fighting alongside Parademons.

DOOM DELUISE: That could explain why Superman’s still a dick in the future.

Like, that dream sequence undermines the character development he goes through later in the film, doesn’t it?

JIM DOOM: It does if you read too much into it, or if you assume that predictions of the future can’t change with events that follow the predictions.

My read on it is that it was Batman’s paranoid dream — combining some vague future threat, since he’s now clairvoyant, with his current obsession.

Now that he’s buddies with Superman, if he had that same dream again, it’d probably be different.

He no longer fears that the Kryptonians are here to enslave us.

And hopefully he also no longer thinks he needs to wear long trench coats in the desert, especially when preparing to engage in hand-to-hand combat while already wearing the Bat costume.

And let’s be fair — we’re rationalizing Batman’s psychic vision, which has ABSOLUTELY NO PLACE IN A BATMAN MOVIE.

DOOM DELUISE: Do you want to wrap this up, or would you like to talk about the things you thought were good, if you haven’t touched on them already?

JIM DOOM: Well, we didn’t touch on Wonder Woman at all.

I thought she was amazing.

And I would be willing to guess, with no joking attached, that part of how she emerged as such a show-stealer is because she was essentially to-the-point and fun, probably not due to being an over-thought, over-rotated part of Snyder’s painful thematic overreach.

He was so busy squeezing the joy out of Batman and Superman that she was basically able to emerge unscathed.

The approach to her character was so simple, and not at all weighed down by nonsense. None of the agonizing flaws in his portrayal of Batman and Superman are present in her.

She was bright. The tone of the movie changes when she’s on screen. It was refreshing. I wasn’t sold on the casting initially, but I am a convert.

I’d love to see them cast someone like Gina Carano, but I was happy with how she turned out.

Other than that, I guess I’ll just state clearly that I think this was still an incredibly flawed movie.

But I hated Man of Steel.

And to me, this was a big improvement over the flaws of that movie in ways that really mattered, to where even with the remaining flaws, I’m much more optimistic about where they’re headed.

Except for Suicide Squad. That looks like a mess.

DOOM DELUISE: They’re currently doing reshoots! That’s always a good sign, right?

JIM DOOM: It’s to make it funny or something, right?

DOOM DELUISE: Yeah.

JIM DOOM: I assumed it was probably joyless like Snyder movies, and now they want to make it like Deadpool.

DOOM DELUISE: All of the many thousands of negative things said about this movie, and their one takeaway was that it’s too serious.

JIM DOOM: Or I wonder if they just saw Deadpool’s success and were like, “Oh wow, we can do that — we got our Deadpool right here! Except no jokes.”

Who would have ever thought to put jokes in a movie starring the Joker?

DOOM DELUISE: I’m surprised nobody saw Will Smith arrive on set and thought to ask him if he knows how to do comedy.

JIM DOOM: I’m surprised nobody saw Will Smith arrive on set and assumed he was at the wrong movie.

The guy won’t do Independence Day 2 but he’ll do Suicide Squad?

“I’ll do Suicide Squad, but just promise me it’s not going to involve action-humor.”

8 months later

“Mr. Smith, we’re going to need to add some action-humor.”

DOOM DELUISE: “Man, movie producers just don’t understand.”

JIM DOOM: Wouldn’t it be great if Martin Lawrence was in the Suicide Squad too?

DOOM DELUISE: Oh man, that’d be awesome.

JIM DOOM: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Katana, Killer Croc and Martin Lawrence.

DOOM DELUISE: I love Martin Lawrence. One of my all-time favorite comedies is Nothing to Lose.

JIM DOOM: It fits so well!
suicide squad movie poster