K-SCORE: 11
Writer / Director: David Ayer
Starring: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jai Courtney, Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Jay Hernandez, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Cara Delevingne
“even the end credit scene doesn’t make sense”
Spoiler Level: Moderate
I for one am shocked, shocked! that anyone thought this might be good in the first place. Just because it’s an easy story to write, full of characters that people already know, and stars that everyone already likes, doesn’t mean that I had any hope that it would be anything other than total crap when thrust into the hands of the studio that birthed Man of Steel and the guy who wrote the first Fast and Furious monstrosity. In Suicide Squad they’ve managed to create a film so imbalanced in every aspect that it falls flat on its face every time it tries to take two steps forward.
“This hole threatens to turn everyone into crumbly claymation golems that aren’t too difficult to dispatch.”
The primary draw is a team of villains forced to do good-guy things, only their motivation for doing these things is just that a bitchy older lady with way too much government power considering her level of responsibility literally put bombs in their brains. It’s a plot-cheat so horrible that it is used at every turn to shove the awkward hodgepodge of characters down exactly the same path and ruin any potential for development. The absurd way in which this band of villains is used is only part of the problem with their usage overall. This Amanda Waller used sensationalistic tricks to convince generals to start using the Suicide Squad before there was even a problem. Then when one of the would-be squadmates breaks free of Waller’s “kill you at the push of a button” genius-plan, she tears a giant hole in the sky that’s sometimes the size of a building and sometimes the size of Lake Michigan. This hole threatens to turn everyone into crumbly claymation golems that aren’t too difficult to dispatch. The Suicide Squad never coalesces into an actual unit. David Ayer clearly never knew how to actually use the characters he had because Killer Croc, a samurai-wielding woman who speaks no English, and Jai the boomerang throwing loser Courtney literally just walk around with the others not doing anything. Even if these characters had defined powers and even if they were used in conjunction, it’d still be a broken ensemble. You can’t team up some guy who can literally light entire buildings on fire with his mind, someone who just throws Australian toys, a talented marksman, and Harley Quinn, who is crazy but at a superhero level is just a hundred and twenty-pound girl with a baseball bat. They’re different genres of superpowered and belong in different stories with different styles.
“Waller and her idiot hubris-spitting sidekick Captain Flag were the real villains of the film”
Screwing up the primary draw for the film is bad enough to make the thing borderline unwatchable, but even if they’d gotten it right, Suicide Squad would still be irreparably broken. The pacing is wonky as hell. There are flashbacks to shed a weird light on backstories we already knew, tangents that run parallel with the chronology of the film but don’t actually progress anything regarding the character conflicts or central plot, dream sequences that make no sense, and dramatic side conversations between ancillary characters that temporarily make you forget what movie you’re actually watching. Nothing fits together. The Joker and Batman are both in this film, but never involved with the city-destroying, world-ending conflict that lies in the movie’s voodoo heart. Superman is mentioned and then not around, which only makes you wonder why the fate of the world is left to Deadshot and Quinn for this particular sky-portal doomsday scenario. And though I thought it was clear that Waller and her idiot hubris-spitting sidekick Captain Flag were the real villains of the film, they completely get away with almost destroying humanity and torturing the people they used to undo their mistakes. Captain Flag (uh, it’s painful just to type that) even gets the girl at the end, all sane and normalized again, though I kind of liked her better in her enchantress garb. Hell, even the end credit scene doesn’t make sense. I watched it twice and I can’t tell what Ben Affleck’s Batman is trying to suggest to Waller. That he keep top secret files so that the government doesn’t have to bother with it?
Again, I’m not at all surprised. Their priorities are all messed up. It’s clearly another case of a studio and a director shooting scenes for a story they haven’t written yet, which just never works. Suicide Squad is a total redo, a scratch and rebuild job. The only people I thought were good were Will Smith and Margot Robbie, and I feel bad for both of them. Will Smith because it looks like he’s trying in every scene to centralize the film’s concept while simultaneously actually creating something entertaining to watch and because he’s failing. Margot Robbie because she’s very compelling as Harley Quinn, but the performance is wasted on a film with no valuable direction and a director who is so fetishistically obsessed with the clown villainess that he puts her in white t-shirts and hoses her down before shooting scenes that don’t even take place in the rain.