Suicide Squad Review

So Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn’t the comic book movie everybody thought it would be and will be another movie that will be divisive amongst fans, but the anticipation for Suicide Squad is high. Not only for being the third film the DCEU, but because this focuses on the biggest supervillains in this universe. Just like Guardians of the Galaxy, we haven’t seen these characters on screen before and just might be the best movie in the DCEU by far and it’ll be new to non-fans who aren’t familiar with them. Let’s not forget that the trailers were absolutely amazing. And just like this summer movie season, it’s another disappointment.

Writer/Director David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury) truly did his best and it feels like his style of entertainment. The problem is it didn’t have a good narrative to follow. Some scenes and action sequences are sometimes random and rushed so quickly at the snap of a finger.

The squad itself was good. Individually not so much. The positives that I took from this were Will Smith and Margot Robbie. Will Smith as Deadshot was awesome. He’s the most developed out of everybody giving him a great background to his character and gave some humor in this giving some charisma as well. Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn was both beautiful and crazy. She perfectly ensues that villain while also looking sexy. Viola Davis as Amanda Waller was scary. She wants the worst of the worst and we got them. In my opinion, Jared Leto is a great actor/singer showing he’s a great multi-talented person. But as the Joker, not so much. This just wasn’t a great performance and he’s not in the movie that much, which is one of the many problems, but the scenes he’s in didn’t have any impact in the story to which it made it seem like he’s an extended cameo. His portrayal is much different from Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger by capturing this as a psychopathic but just didn’t pull it that through. If he appears in future films, he needs to get better. Otherwise, it was a mediocre performance.

So other than Deadshot and Harley, the character development is very weak. Not enough background information about each one and that kind of means you don’t care who might die. Like Katana (Karen Fukuhara). Was she necessary to be apart of this? Nope, and might I had she was introduced in the worst exposition ever? Even Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang was decent. One of the things that was probably never revealed until now was the main villain, Enchantress (Cara Delevingne, Paper Towns). She was never marketed it as the film’s antagonist, but this was without a doubt one of the worst villains on screen. Why is she wreaking havoc in the city is very incoherent and there was a scene where it’s so cringe-worthy it felt like a stroke just happened and the reason why the squad needs to go on this mission could’ve been handled better. Anything other than this would’ve made for a better movie. If that could happen, how about we don’t have on that involves some sort of beam in the sky? Because of that always the centerpiece of every action movie nowadays. Once we enter the city element, it wasn’t exciting and I stop caring for a while.

The soundtrack is tracking on both sides to where sometimes a contemporary song for a scene if good, but during the first half, there’s a song that always plays scene after scene and at first was fine but after the seventh song played, it gets lazy after a while. But I loved hearing Twenty One Pilots’ “Heathens” during the end credits. And by rushed mentioned earlier, it feels like a lot of scenes that were in the trailers didn’t make it in the final cut or filmed as flashbacks. Which explains why the editing that’s noticeable and most of the dialogue was just clumsy exposition.

This isn’t the next Fantastic Four. It’s definitely better than this and it isn’t a real disaster, but this is the most disappointing movie I’ve seen in a long time.

The direction wasn’t handled well, the writing was a mess, and a lot of the action sequences at times worked while others didn’t make this the comic book movie that should’ve been great, Suicide Squad was just a massive letdown as a DC comics fan. There are positives, but there’s really nothing about the plot to fully make this impactful. 

Grade: C-