Movie Review | Suicide Squad (Lights, Camera, Action!)

Suicide Squad (UK Rating: 15)

Suicide Squad starts off with the various characters being introduced, with small clips featuring their own real-life pop songs playing in the background. It's heavy exposition, with the screen telling viewers who these characters are by giving bits and pieces of information about them. Deadshot gets a scene at a shooting range showing his shooting accuracy and speed, then he gets another pointless scene that again shows his accuracy, and later in the movie the same thing happens once more. Yes, everyone now understands who Deadshot (Will Smith, Men in Black series, I Am Robot, Enemy of the State) is now - move on already! Then some of the characters get another intro, making the whole beginning sequence overly long. Not the best way to engage audiences from the off...

After that, it is finally time to start actually getting the squad together, kicking things off with a scene in a prison that shows the personality of each of the characters. It is a by-the-numbers, mundane way of warming up the crowd, and eventually those bums in seats will start to get twitchy as onlookers grow tired of it. After all, these sequences take up about 30 minutes of the total run time!

When the actual mission starts, it becomes clear that the characters won't actually get fleshed out and receive any meaningul development, other than the skindeep coverage early on. Many of them simply have a side that wants them to live as normal human beings and not do all kinds of bad stuff. Wait a minute, though, wasn't the first part of the movie focused on how they were all supposed to be the ultimate evils, downright dastardly folk? This type of character ambivalence might be acceptable if there was actually any point to it, but in this case definitely isn't. In fact, at one point they actually sit down at a bar and decide that 'Hey, you know what, maybe we're just evil.' No explanation given, just Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, The Legend of Tarzan, Focus) making a simple point and suddenly everybody just goes on to the next scene. The suicide squad doesn't get to know each other much, they don't have to learn to work together, they never clash, and their backstories could have come into play in the movie more than they did. There is so much that misses the mark, which isn't conveyed in the trailers, so be prepared for disappointment if the teasers grabbed your attention.

Harley Quinn claims to be psychotic, but all she ever is in this movie is 'quirky.' When somebody claims dourly that they want to go somewhere and do something serious, she just replies ''I'll come!'' She puts on a shirt in the prison that says ''Daddy's little monster.'. The idea behind Harley is simply that she is a sexualised and juvenile youngster that makes some silly quips. She never actually shows her insanity - she never starts doing disturbing things. As for the much anticipated Jared Leto role of The Joker, his role is mostly put on the sidelines for flashbacks, which try to establish how he managed to turn Harley insane, but it's actually never explained. The Joker is supposed to use mind games to play with people, and to bluff, to scare, and be otherwise nasty and cruel, but this is never shown. Basically, from what is shown, Harley was in love with The Joker from the start (for no apparent reason), and that made her accede to his demands and somehow made her decide to jump into a vat of acid. At least the animated show added the information that Harley herself could relate to Joker because of him supposedly having an abusive father. At least it explained that she thought he was a tortured soul desperately trying to find his way in life. Every time The Joker comes in, the movie starts feeling completely different, as though it's trying to be more character-oriented, but then it fails to flesh these characters out. There's even a big plot-hole concerning Joker at the end of the movie.

When it comes to the jokes, rather than The Joker, the film also fumbles. It almost never manages to make you even crack a smile, as the gags are very predictable. Maybe if the suicide squad actually functioned more like a team and managed to play off of each other, it could have been amusing. Of course, how funny you will find the movie depends on your sense of humor, but chances are it won't be very fulfilling.

The final battle takes place in a thick fog, making it hard to even see what is going on, and whether or not the fight is painful to the team or the enemy. It also doesn't have any visual style - it just feels like they're fighting in a steam room. Overall, the action is repetitive and bland (heck, there are three helicopters that crash in separate scenes), so this scene does not help elevate the movie.

4/10

Subpar

All-in-all, Suicide Squad is nothing more than mediocre. If only the action were slightly more memorable, but even that was too much to ask for. The characters are very poorly developed and sometimes not even explained, the movie takes far too long to pick up speed (and to become even remotely fun), and the members of the team don't actually function as a squad. There is no suicide mission, only suicide when it comes to the plot, the characters, and even the action. Looks like most of the critics were right, after all...