So, you'd probably guess from my snarky intro that I thought Suicide Squad was kind of silly. But you're wrong - I thought it was a huge mess. I'm actually inclined to give it a lower rating than I've ended up giving it because I've already been wronged by DC in this way before - only five months ago, actually. I still consider Batman v Superman to be the worse film, but they both suffer from many of the same core issues, all of which lead back to ineptitude on the part of Warner Bros. If anything, though, Suicide Squad is more frustrating because unlike BvS, I saw glimmers of things that could've been interesting or fun. So in a way, it was actually more disappointing.
Suicide Squad's first trailer sold it as what David Ayer's apparent original vision for the film was - a dark, thought-provoking action thriller about a team of misfit antiheroes employed by a sadistic cold-blooded government agent to take down other forces of evil. Evil working for secret evil to combat obvious evil. It works well with the whole almost neo-noir levels of nihilism and ambiguity regarding morals and justice in the Gotham/DC universe. Partway through marketing, though, the film suddenly became a sort of color-drained Guardians of the Galaxy for the Hot Topic crowd with blaring pop rock tunes, flashy zany characters, and tons of reshoots and re-cuts to compensate for the change after numerous test audiences found the original film to be too dark and upsetting. Warner Bros/DC panicked and created this instead, and the result is something that can only barely be called a finished product.
Now, knowing the backstory of this movie's cobbled-together production process and the unsettling influence of social media on its release is only gravy in the discussion of why this movie is bad, but it adds some healthy perspective as to where these flaws can be drawn from. The biggest and most glaring problem, to me, with this film is the editing and direction, most likely because these jobs were originally handled by one person each and then sent off to be redone by about seven or eight people in post. The film has almost zero flow, with jarring tonal shifts not just from act to act but from scene to scene. There are jittery flashbacks, awkward insertions of humor, and no structure to how the story is told - we're introduced to most of our characters in the first 30 minutes via Viola Davis's show-and-tell monologue, then introduced to most of them again in subsequent individual scenes, and then other main characters are haphazardly tacked on throughout the setup for the second act that is actually the setup for the real story of the film. Oh, and we don't get an action scene until about halfway through the movie.
Taking again from the playbook of Guardians (often right down to the actual choice of songs), this film is full with popular classic rock and pop songs. And by "full", I mean it has literally a couple dozen of them, and almost all of them feel inappropriately shoved in. Yet another symptom of post-completion studio meddling, many of the scenes feel like they were shot entirely separate from the song accompanying them, and so they often feel jarring and tonally inconsistent, and often these epic song breaks only last for about 30 seconds to underscore establishing shots. The film cuts off "Bohemian Rhapsody" before the atmosphere it creates really gets to go anywhere before fading into generic blockbuster score.
Entire sequences feel tacked on, such as a very awkward 30-second brawl between Harley Quinn and some faceless zombies in an elevator that progresses absolutely nothing in the story. By the way, the action feels just as jumbled as well - while DC has expanded their color palette vaguely beyond grays, blacks, and browns, almost all the scenes are unimpressively shot or borderline incomprehensible at times, and when they are visible, they're still toothless and tensionless. Lots of guns and punching, but very little stakes (probably because the film is too manic and jarring to establish any sort of comprehensible rising action).
We can talk forever about whether this movie is a product of a true visionary director having his vision taken from him by the studios, and David Ayer is admittedly much more of an auteur than Zack Snyder (though that's not saying much). But some fundamental script and structural problems, much like BvS, make me think that this movie wouldn't have been a complete success had it not been messed with afterward. That said, I'd be more willing to forgive muddled characters and incoherent storytelling, which aren't too uncommon in big blockbusters, if the presentation of such flaws was actually enjoyable.
To close out, let's talk about those characters, by the way. The standout performances by far were Robbie as Harley Quinn, Will Smith as Deadshot, and Jai Courtney as Boomerang, of all people. Along with Hernandez's Diablo, these are the four most interesting and entertaining characters, the former three because of their performances and the latter one because of his actually well-handled backstory. Robbie saves the under-written Harley with her comedic charm (although by the end of the film she gets too far into quippy territory and some of the humor is really reaching), and Jai Courtney manages to play a human being with a personality for the first time in cinematic history. Deadshot and Diablo are given appropriate backstories, unlike the vast majority of the characters who do almost nothing and who we are expected to believe are best friends after three hours of minor violence and are expected to fall in love with and care about after 80 minutes of scattershot psychedelic flashbacks. Enchantress is a laughable villain, both in writing and performance. It would've made perfect "so bad it's good" cringe fodder if this film had more fully committed to its wackiness (it becomes suddenly dark and emotional in the second half, especially during a nice bar scene, and it's actually enjoyable, but at that point completely unearned).
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| Fun fact: This shot is literally not even in the actual film. |
The biggest disappointment by far is Jared Leto as the Joker, whom the marketing hyped up quite a bit. Apparently the majority of the footage for the Joker was left on the cutting room floor, primarily because audiences didn't like watching a bad guy abuse his girlfriend. I'm almost glad we didn't get to see much of the Joker though, because Leto's performance was a lot like Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, in that he tried to sell almost sexual writhing, growling, and eccentricity as mental instability and depth. It didn't work for Lex, and it doesn't work the Joker, and now we are entering a cinematic universe where the two biggest comic book supervillains of all-time are played by actors who read their lines like this guy from Foodfight.
Overall, Suicide Squad isn't nearly as dour and joyless as Batman v Superman, but is just as slapped together, incoherent, messy, sloppily written, and too much too early for the DC cinematic universe, which is now 0 for 3 for me. It has some decent performances and a few short moments that are cool, but these are too short and too few and far between to recommend sitting through the entire movie for them. Instead of constructing scenes that flow together in a coherent structure to tell a story, DC has focused on creating "moments" that are marketable and digestible at the expense of creating a story and characters that have actual weight or logic. It's not absolute unforgivable garbage or anything, but at least for me, it too often toed the line of boring and desperate, neither of which are favorable. If you're a DC fanatic and/or have loved the last two DCEU films, however, you will probably enjoy yourself seeing some likable characters come to life. I, on the other hand, can't say I'm too excited for whatever DC has in store.
Grade: C-
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