After the divisive
Man of Steel and the burning heap of infant corpses that was
Batman V Superman, DC and Warner Brothers needed
Suicide Squad to be the critically beloved success that would redeem their cinematic universe and help them catch up to Marvel. They needed it so much, in fact, that they descended on the film like a pack of starving jackals, tore it to shreds, and tried to fix everything they didn't like in the editing room, all in the name of making it a more appealing mass success. As its reputation on the internet has proven by now, this was not successful.
Suicide Squad is a difficult movie for me to review, because my overall opinion on it changes practically by the minute. The late-stage executive meddling is more visible than any other film I've ever watched, in that it feels like a load of completely different movies with wildly varying purposes, tones, and story arcs were sent into a shredder and the scraps were mindlessly shoved fistful by fistful into a projector. On a moment-to-moment level, the film goes from working almost perfectly to not working
at all and back. Nevertheless, everyone else on the internet has a hardline opinion on it, so I'll try my best to solidify a coherent one.
Thus, we begin with the story, which is the one aspect almost nobody in their right minds has praised.
Suicide Squad barely has what one would consider to be a story, even in a barebones sense. It's by far the film's greatest failing. It begins with an impotent whimper in the form of around twenty solid minutes of backstory exposition (which wouldn't be necessary if they'd taken the time to set these characters up as side villains in other movies), carries on with no purpose for some time, and then ends with an impotent whimper through lifeless battles, meaningless sacrifices, unearned pathos, and obligatory teases for the future. It has absolutely no second act to speak of, and the third act manages to both arrive too soon and feel too late. Character arcs and plot points appear and disappear at random as edits and reshoots vivisect the existing story, and utter nonsense seeps in at the most random of times to provide lazy deus ex machinas.
The tone, too, swerves uncontrollably from scene to scene. While Marvel's films usually do a great job blending drama and emotional payoff with wry humor, DC has thus far had trouble striking a consistent tone for their movies, and
Suicide Squad is perhaps the worst off for it. It tries to be the anarchic good time seen in the trailers, but it bends to the breaking point to fit in with Zach Snyder's dour grimdarkness. It tries to be as wild and out-there as
Deadpool, but it forces itself not to do anything that might offend mass audience sensibilities or scare away the kids. It attempts to commit to a devil-may-care attitude for the majority of the runtime, but continuously shackles itself to utterly empty romance subplots and other bog-standard tropes that make the attempted rebelliousness ring hollow.
It's all sloppy shit, is what I'm saying.
It doesn't help that at its most basic core, the plot does not fit the characters or the basic premise. I have no idea how much of the "story" in its current state matches David Ayer's original intent, but whether the fault lies on his shoulders or the executives, it's baffling how it came about. The Suicide Squad are supposed to be an off-the-books hit squad sent to run suicide missions and assorted dirty jobs for the government, with their infamous criminal status and explosive devices giving their superiors plausible deniability if the job goes wrong. This premise is stated almost verbatim by Amanda Waller in the opening moments of the film, but it then goes off the rails and tries to shape these loons into an anti-Justice League of sorts. Their first operation is both domestic and supernatural, something that actual superheroes are already equipped to handle and the SS are woefully unsuited for, and the "plausible deniability" -- the sole reason for assembling the task force in both the comics and the movie -- is shot when the main group is given backup in the form of a few dozen Marines anyway. In short, the story goes out of its way to rip its own core concept apart for no logical reason. It's
Gotham levels of insistent self-sabotage.
The characters are what make or break this movie, and that would have always been the case even if it had been a masterpiece. So before we get to them, let's run down the other elements. The cinematography is... fine. Ayer's direction is standard and safe, and the action sequences are choreographed competently. The visuals aren't immediately as dry and monochrome as previous DC efforts, but the over-saturated neon colors look pointlessly gaudy, and those somehow get washed out to more grayed hues before too long. The musical selections consist of virtually every popular song you've heard in movies before, from "Fortunate Son" and "Spirit In The Sky" to the oft-promoted "Bohemian Rhapsody", shoved into individual scenes in mind-bogglingly rapid succession with none of the grace of
Guardians of the Galaxy, which
Suicide Squad blatantly aims to emulate.
All right. Woo! With all of that out of the way, time to talk about the thing that matters most for
Suicide Squad: the Squad itself and the characters surrounding them. Important to note here is that despite all of the on-the-nose talk about them being "bad guys," the film rarely commits to demonstrating that with more than petty acts like stealing from storefronts or mouthing off. In the shackles of the PG-13 rating, and with the extensive edit deleting many of the more directly villainous scenes for our main characters, we're mostly just left with fairly asshole-ish anti-heroes. But do they still work?
First up, the two leads. Preternaturally skilled marksman Deadshot is the clear everyman, with an easy-to-understand skillset, a sympathetic focus on his love for his daughter, and a defined moral code regarding his assassinations (though one revolving around the old "women and children" thing, which I can't stand in this day and age). Will Smith is as charismatic as ever, capable of both zinging off decent-to-great one-liners and selling the emotional focus he gets toward the finale. He's not the most groundbreaking character out there, but Smith's performance elevates him.
Far more original and interesting is Harley Quinn. This being the first live-action portrayal of the character, Margot Robbie had a lot on her shoulders, and the widespread praise she's earned is deserved. She sells the madcap zaniness the character is known for, and while the undercooked script doesn't give her nearly enough chances for my liking, she performs well when the time does come for the crazy affectations to slip away and reveal the damaged intelligence and fundamental decency inside her. She's also believably physical as an acrobatic fighter, and an encounter she has in a glass elevator provides one of the more memorable action sequences in my mind. All of that being said, I don't much care for her costume, she can't hold a single accent for
shit, and the flaws in the characterization of the Joker (more on him below) rub off on her in their flashbacks.
Count me among the skeptics who were then shocked by how well Captain Boomerang turned out. Jai Courtney has amassed a reputation as a black hole of charisma, sucking in all of the life and energy of any film he's in and leaving nothing in its place -- the human equivalent of beige. However, let loose to play a boomerang-tossing bank robber with his native Australian accent, he's surprisingly entertaining. The movie neglects him more and more as it goes on, and he only gets to throw two or three boomerangs in the entire thing, but his lovable sleaziness, unrelenting dickery, and head-tilting mannerisms go a long way toward making him one of the few characters who actually feels like a real villain. He has a groan-worthy running gag involving a plush toy that reeks of Ayer or the studio desperately trying to cram him into a Deadpool archetype, but other than that, I quite enjoyed his presence.
Rounding off the four squaddies I enjoyed is El Diablo, a Mexican gangster with pyrokinesis who's reformed into a complete pacifist. Jay Hernandez's performance isn't as standout as the other noted three, but his character's profoundly sympathetic backstory and insistence on never again using his powers makes him far more interesting than a lot of his teammates. He does get saddled with a baffling thing about the Squad being his "family" that requires more suspension of disbelief than
Fast and the Furious for how unearned it is, and his character arc ends on a sour note, but he still stands capably with Deadshot, Quinn, and Boomerang.
The rest of the squad don't do so well.
- Appointed military leader Rick Flag is a generic everyman soldier ripped straight out of a mediocre FPS, and his romance with the woman possessed by Enchantress is something the audience is never made to care about -- Deadshot's very presence renders him redundant, forcing one to wonder why, beyond the obvious role as a middleman between Waller and the Squad, he was even included.
- Killer Croc looks great and has a wealth of sympathetic backstory to be mined in the comics, but he's given absolutely nothing to do other than sit in the background growling and chuckling through the other characters' conversations. He barely even gets to fight, and his fights mainly consist of boring throws and slams. He's set up for a big moment toward the end, but it fizzles out to nothing.
- Katana looks great and is potentially interesting, but she pops up so awkwardly and late in the story that I genuinely forgot she was going to be in here, and I continued to sporadically forget about her throughout, despite the forced attempts to make me care about her backstory and the cool sword moves that I -- as a noted fan of both Japanese stuff and swordfighting -- should have been all over. There was no reason not to introduce her along with Flag and attempt to develop her alongside him, since she's his bodyguard.
And the less said about Adam Beach's Slipknot, the better. Not that the movie has much to say about him anyway. Hell, I'm not even going to bother giving him a picture or a bullet point.
Moving on to the
actual villains...
woo boy. The Big Bad and her helper do not get things off to a good start. Enchantress and her brother Incubus are some of the very worst comic book movie villains I've had the misfortune to experience. Enchantress at least starts off fairly cool, with her
The Ring-inspired appearance pictured above, some wicked special effects shots, and a decent set of powers. However, once she goes rogue and regains her real body, it all goes down the tubes. She looks improbably shitty in both design and CGI, such that I'm still in disbelief that she wasn't simply kept in her stringy-haired form for the whole thing, and her world-ending scheme is utterly nonsensical, generic, and as sympathetically complex as a Hanna-Barbera cartoon villain's plot. Cara Delevigne, who has yet to impress me with any of her filmography, compounds the bad taste left in our collective mouths with flavorless hammy acting and a constant hula-style dance so pointlessly bizarre that I struggled to comprehend it as it unfolded before my eyes. Incubus is even worse, merely a dumb brute covered in hilariously trashy CGI who's made out to be a big deal, but winds up being not even worth his own paragraph.
Viola Davis's Amanda Waller comes out immeasurably better, and I have no doubt that she would have stood tall even in a film with remotely good antagonists. Her terrifying power takes a few scenes to be properly showcased, but when her ball gets rolling, she steals the show. Not quite a textbook sociopath, but nowhere near a normal human being, she plays every other character like flashy marionettes to suit her ends. Even when she's at an obvious disadvantage, she feels like the most dangerous person in the room. She does have a central action that strikes me as out-of-character and poorly handled, even with my limited knowledge of her comics incarnation, but it doesn't diminish her overall presence. I doubtlessly want to see more of her in future DC Universe films.
And so, we come to the biggest and most divisive talking point in the film. The character I was most looking forward to, and the one that could have either stolen or demolished the whole thing.
What did I think of Jared Leto's Joker, from the roughly fifteen minutes of screentime he still has after nearly all of his scenes were cut from the theatrical release? I'm... honestly still not sure. I've been stewing over my opinion on him for two days now, and I've settled on a number of different viewpoints. I appreciate the different take he's conjured up, blending parts of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger into a psychotic mob boss with his own territory and themed gang. I also like his "exhausted old man" laugh, and the tattoos -- while completely unexplained and therefore pointless -- didn't bother me too much.
At the same time, his actual performance is all over the place. In interviews, Leto has explained that they shot each Joker scene multiple times with a slightly different take on his Joker -- a different attitude, a different level of expressiveness, a different manner of speaking, etc -- and the scenes in the film are from all different takes, which makes his character flow about as well as the movie does. In some scenes, like his pivotal action sequence, I loved his more understated-yet-theatrical mannerisms and wanted to see more of him. In others, like an extended flashback scene in a strip club where he apes a wild Jim Carrey performance and gets off on the idea of Harley having sex with a black man (I am not exaggerating -- it feels like it was written by the alt-right "cuck" crowd), I cringed and wanted to shoo him away with a broom. The Joker who says "I'm gonna hurt ya really, really bad" is not the same Joker who practically jumps on a table and screams "HUNKA HUNKA" with gibbering facial motions.
He's underwritten, yet overplayed. Too intense, yet not intense in the proper way like Heath Ledger. He doesn't really serve any purpose in the main story, and in the flashbacks to his and Harley's initial relationship, he's softened by the studio's removal of every typical abuse connotation and comes off like a fangirl's bad fan fiction portrayal. Honestly, he should have either been saved for the solo Batman film and kept purely in the shadowy background here, or just been made the main villain or otherwise a larger instigator of conflict. I do want to see him opposite Batman, when he'll have more time to develop under Ben Affleck's sterner direction and be able to show what makes this Joker worth watching -- assuming Leto gets to keep the role, given his hostility toward the studio for cutting the role he immersed himself in.
All in all,
Suicide Squad is a choppy, sloppy mess of a film carried by some compelling performances and decent ideas, but ruined by studio interference, poor direction, shit storytelling, a godawful main villain, and general franchise impatience. However, I was solidly entertained through most of it, and as it's nowhere near as irredeemably wretched as films like
Batman V Superman or
Fant4stic, I don't believe it deserves anywhere near the universal thrashing it's gotten. Go see it if you're curious, you've been longing for a live-action Harley Quinn, or anything else you've heard appeals to you -- otherwise, let's all wait for
Wonder Woman and hope I don't have to make so many concessions if and when I review that.
Rating: Damaged, But Still Breathing