Movie Review: Suicide Squad
Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars
Often expectation becomes a heavy form of bias when going into watching a film. I watched Gone Girl knowing there’s a big twist, which led me to not being surprised when the twist occurred.
For Suicide Squad, I briefly glanced at the media reaction, the ratings, and asked a couple friends for their quick thoughts.
“It was good, but-,” said just about everybody.
My expectation bias led me into Suicide Squad trying my best to like it, and for a while, I did. Suicide Squad was tiptoeing a concealed threshold of being ‘pretty good’ versus ‘kinda okay’. The threshold preventing Suicide Squad from being a great film is explained below.
What I realized as the credits rolled is that it’s very hard to be a superhero movie today, which sounds like the title of an article I’ll probably write in a few days.
There’s a lot to consider with how to tell the Suicide Squad story. What character’s do you focus on? What’s the role of the Joker? Who’s the enemy? Basically, writer and director David Ayer had a 1000 piece puzzle set to decipher.
Viola Davis as Amanda Waller directs the Suicide Squad’s gang of DC comics Supervillains playing the puppet master in which she had potential to be the true villain of the film. Masterminds and manipulators play a lot better as villains.
Instead we got a witch god. There was a decent amount of work done to avoid caring about Cara Delevingne’s character, June Moone/Enchantress, who also has a love interest tie to the main good guy Rick Flag. Could his name get any more patriotic? More or less, that love interest gets a bit messy when Harley Quinn and The Joker are a much more scintillating couple.
Will Smith’s Deadshot is practically the movie stealer and a bunch of C-list villain’s came along for the ride. Amidst his villainous ways, Will Smith remains the moral center, and we’d much rather see him earn retribution as a father to his promising young daughter.
Outside of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Rick Flag, there’s a boomerang guy (Boomerang), the evil Johnny Storm (Diablo), and Flag’s appointed guard Katana who does about what you’d expect if you were named Katana.
So what about Jared Leto’s Joker? The Joker plays a tertiary role of scheming up his usual tricks. It’s a commendable performance that fans aren’t going to appreciate due to the amount of hype involved being that Leto is the first live action Joker since Ledger. The Joker’s screen time is minimal, as it was the only way he could mix himself up in the fray.
With all these combustible elements packed into 2 hours, Suicide Squad suffers from similar ills the Avengers films suffered. The more main characters you produce, the less time they have to shine.
When the Diablo lets loose his big secret, his defining moment, it’s forgettable. Harley Quinn’s reaction shows why she deserves infinitely more focus. At this point, the movie lost patience and began spiraling downward.
The plot is about a witch whom Viola Davis’ ruthless Amanda Waller loses control of. Waller sends her Suicide Squad under Rick Flag’s command to save Waller in the midst of a god destruction apocalypse. Apparently, the Justice League, who were mentioned and made brief cameos, sat idle at the sight of the entire east coast of America going to hell.
This leaves a group of villains who want nothing more than to escape custody to be forced to work together or their heads will be exploded by Wallers’ or Flag’s watch tool. The movie opened with brief backstory’s told by Waller, highlighting the emotional pressure points which would follow the characters throughout the film. To this point, we have a good watchable superhero film.
The Joker floats in and out on a bloody mission to rescue Harley Quinn. And if we know anything about The Joker, he’s quite persistent. The Joker’s subplot makes for a nice distraction when actions scenes finish banging about.
Then it came time for the villains to become heroes and a lot of things that made some semblance of sense stopped making sense.
There’s some positives to be taken away that will likely get lost in the shuffle. Suicide Squad did a take on Creed’s statistical graphic popups when describing each character. They went by too quick to read which was a slight disappointment. Still a nice touch.
The opportunity for a buddy cop film with Deadshot and Rick Flag held serious potential if we forgot we were watching a DC film.
Harley Quinn succeeded as comic relief, the drool-worthy sex appeal, and a psychotic deranged killer which is a true triple crown accomplishment.
The most telling moment of the film was when heading towards a beam of light in the sky, Smith nearly breaks the fourth wall and says, “So I guess we’re heading to the floating trash vortex in the sky, right?”
Smith should’ve asked what’s the purpose for a ring of trash to be circulating a beam of light? Aesthetics?
