Suicide Squad (2016) | Film Review

Man, I really do love DC. If you were to drop me on a deserted island and tell me I could only have comics from one publisher dropped off every month, I’d go with the house that gave us Superman, Batman, Swamp Thing, The Flash, and so many amazing others in a heartbeat.  There’s just something about those characters and stories that sing to me more than any others do.  That said, I should make it clear from the beginning that I’m not the biggest fan of the movie-universe that DC has, so far, been constructing.  I really didn’t like “Man of Steel”, and “Batman v Superman” was a disappointment, but a lot of that I blame on the handling of Superman/Clark Kent.  Ben Affleck’s Batman was fantastic, the snippets of Wonder Woman left me drooling for more, and the hints at what lay ahead definitely have me intrigued.  Supes aside, there were also story and stylistic issues that definitely got under my skin.  However, when we get down to the brass tacks, I only hope for the best as DC moves forward. Each and every time.  These are my favorite characters, and I really do want to see justice done to their rich and worthy history.

“Suicide Squad” is DC’s latest effort to expand on their ever-growing franchise that began with “Man of Steel” and continued with “Batman v Superman”. In what I think was a bold and unique move, they decided to make their third entry all about the baddies.  Damn, I gotta say, everything I saw leading up to this film really got my juices flowing.  The casting was spot on, the trailers rocked, and EVERYTHING was pointing towards a fun time for all.

And boy-oh-boy did this movie get off to a great start, and it wastes no time in getting down to business. We start off with government heavy-hitter Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) making a pitch to her superiors on what she thinks is the key to dealing with the recent rise of meta-humans throughout the world.  She wants to take the worst of the worst – many of them meta-humans as well – and turn them into an elite, and expendable, strike force.  Since they are all currently incarcerated, they don’t even have to waste time running all over the place trying to catch them.  They’re ripe for the picking.

Headlining her A-list are the master assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), the nuttier than a fruit cake and just as sexy Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), pyromaniac Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Australian boomerang expert Captain “surprise” Boomerang (Jai Courtney), human/reptile hybrid Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), master of ropes Slipknot (Adam Beach), and magical blast from the past Enchantress (Cara Delevingne).  Whew, that was a mouthful.  If you think I’m going to go into detailed descriptions of each of these characters, you are definitely mistaken.  I’ll let you learn about them all on your own, though I will have some things to say about some of them.  Leading (or should I say babysitting) this motley crew is uber-soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), and his backup, the sword-wielding Katana (Karen Fukuhara).

And jumping in and out, from time to time – just to mess with everyone’s day – is the much talked about Joker (Jared Leto). I’m pretty confident you all know that guy.  That’s why he gets his very own, itty-bitty paragraph.

Anyways, as I said before, they are all (well, mostly) given a great introduction. One of my biggest worries going into this was how they were going to handle bringing the audience up to speed on all these folks.  After all, they aren’t near as well-known as their do-gooder nemesis’.  Thankfully, director David Ayer nailed the first half hour or so with a fun, playful, and action-peppered opening that gives us just enough about each to know where they come from and where they stand.  This was really well handled, and is easily the strongest part of the film.  As that first act played out, I really was on the edge of my seat.  I was witnessing greatness and was sure that I was finally going to see DC nail one out of the park.

Boy, was I wrong. As the team suits up and prepares to do some good, things go sideways, both for the team and the audience.

Let’s start with the team first. After the Enchantress decides to go off and do a little hell raising (emphasis on the raising), the squad is dispatched to the city core, which has become an inter-dimensional portal populated by Enchantress minions with heads that look like bloated blackberries.  The fruit, not the phone.  Their mission is to get to the rift at the center and take down the Enchantress before she destroys everyone on the planet.  If they fail, or try to escape, Flag is under orders to detonate miniature explosives implanted in their skulls.  As they make their way through the new wasteland, they bicker, bond, crack jokes, shoot up things a lot, and deal with the Joker, who has his heart set on reuniting with his beloved Harley Quinn.  Ahhhhh.  Heart emoji.

Now, for us, the audience. After a stellar beginning, the worm suddenly turns and we end up being dragged through a mess of a middle act.  For a team with such unique and varied powers, they sure don’t use them much.  What plays out is basic action-flick fare, with guns blasting and blackberries exploding all over the place (still talking about the fruit).  It’s choppy and disjointed.  I kept waiting for someone to start leaping though the air, doing their meta-human thing, but it rarely – if ever – occurs.  There is no originality to the set pieces, and it felt more like a night at the shooting range than a battle for the planet.  Your name is Captain Boomerang.  Throw a damn boomerang.  And that is pretty much the entire second act.  A lot of running around blasting stuff.

What the hell happened? I was really enjoying this for the first bit.  Things do improve as we move into the final act – they start using their powers more, the stakes get higher, and things get more supery-dupery and emotional – but it’s a definite case of too little, too late.  The damage has been done, and there’s no going back.

Sigh. It really does pain me to write this because there is so much good wallowing in the morass on screen.  It’s like they took a lot of cool characters, genuinely funny dialogue, some decent action, oodles of potential, and just mashed it all together to create something that is definitely not the sum of its parts.

Actually, let’s focus on the good a bit, because it is there. I already talked about the outstanding first 30 or 40 minutes, and it does deserve mention again.  The main cast can’t be beat, with Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman, and Jay Hernandez being the standouts.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that Smith and Robbie get the most screen time and the best bits, and they deserve it for what they bring.  Smith is the clear thinker with the most to lose (besides his head), and Robbie is the wild card we just can’t take our eyes off of.  Brilliant work by both.  Kinnaman is the straight man of the group, and he’s great at corralling the lunacy he’s been charged with keeping in line, but he has a lot of emotional weight to bear as well.  And  if you had told me that the tattooed dude with the burning touch would end up being my favorite of all these characters, I would’ve said you were crazy, but Jay Hernandez became the heart and soul of this.  There were moments in the story where my heart truly ached for him.  And when his temper flares, it really does burn bright.  It’s too bad that pretty much the rest of the team had to suffer because of shortened screen time.  They were all good, but could have been so much better if they had been given the chance to stretch.

The darker aesthetic of the DC world really suits the material here. It is a common complaint concerning the earlier films, but is the perfect setting for this gang of malcontents.  Their world can only be a dark one.  This is the world of the Suicide Squad, and it is a dirty, nasty place.

To counter the violence and the emotional distress, there are lots of laughs to balance things out, and the interactions between the squad members are just as often joyful as they are cantankerous. Bringing more lightheartedness into this universe is definitely the right move.  The killer soundtrack helps a lot in that area as well, and will certainly get the blood pumpin’.

And what about the Joker? Well, his is probably the most anticipated character in all of this, and Jared Leto has definitely put his own stamp on the Clown Prince of Crime, but I found him to be pretty much a mixed bag.  At times he was the Joker we all know and love, and then he was Scarface, then a pimp, then the nutty Romeo.  He nailed them all, it’s just that they didn’t quite mesh, and he didn’t laugh a whole lot.  But the Joker was there, somewhere.

Mixed bag. That’s the perfect description for all of this.  A lot of good ultimately brought down a few notches too many by unimaginative and choppy action scenes, a mess of a story, under-utilized characters (hell, one them might as well have not shown up), head-scratching decisions on the part of the director and writers – in particular a really WTF moment involving one of the squad that should result in dire consequences but goes nowhere – and some tonal and pacing issues.

It certainly isn’t the disaster some are making it out to be, but that is faint praise. The unique story and early peeks promised us a lot, but in the end, only some of those promises were kept.  I will certainly smile when I think back on some of this, but when Waller next turns these freaks loose, I’m going to need my bad guys treated a whole lot better.