Director : David Ayers
Year Of Release : 2016
Principal Cast : Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez, Adewale Akinnuoya-Agbaje, Karen Fukuhara, Cara Delevigne, Scott Eastwood.
Approx Running Time : 135 Minutes
Synopsis: A secret government agency recruits some of the most dangerous incarcerated super-villains to form a defensive task force. Their first mission: save the world from the apocalypse.
*****
Given the critical drubbing endured by 2016’s other massive DC superhero film, Batman V Superman, expectations for Suicide Squad were both significantly lowered and brusquely oversimplified by one of the best trailer campaigns of the year. The film’s signature move was all about the DC villains, a pantheon of weird, wacky and grotesque creatures and meta-humans tasked with taking on missions for the US Government: the premise had long been a staple of the comics books in which these varied antagonists starred, but many fans were kinda caught off-guard by exactly why DC would go head-first into uncharted waters when their hero-starring feature films, namely the aforementioned Batman V Superman, and the less-than-impressively-regarded Man of Steel, had kinda gotten things off to a rocky start. It would have been a bit like Marvel giving us Guardians Of The Galaxy before Iron Man and The Avengers.
Ahhh dammit. Dammit all to hell. Suicide Squad just ain’t great. It ain’t awful, or at least as awful as some have suggested, but there’s some serious problems here I doubt a re-edit or deep cutting could fix. If the theatrical version was a confused mish-mash of ideas wrapped in fancy pop-culture-pleasing soundtrack choices, then the Extended Edition does little to quell those complaints. As pleasing as those Bohemian-Rhapsody-inspired trailers were, the film’s inherent problems can’t be overcome with flashy editing or Creedence cues. Neither can it be improved on by increasingly gratuitous shots of Margo Robbie’s exceptional derriere, which comes in for a lot of focus no doubt to keep the fanboys (and fangirls) watching. Mixing parts of The Magnificent Seven, a slew of The Expendables, a truckload of DC easter-eggs and as much villainous heft as a standard Marvel movie, DC’s third franchise film wobbles its way through indistinct action scenes, half-baked character development and permissive misogyny.
Key to the film’s wayward introspection is the fact that each scene seems to exist in and of itself, joined merely by convenience and lacking a rigid throughline for the entirety of the plot. What little compassion the audience might have for anybody in this film is buried beneath a quagmire of quantitatively worse exposition. As cool as you think it is to see the bad guys go round, there’s a reason we tend to root for the heroes in stories. Quinn, Deadshot and Joker aside, there’s precious little in this film to really latch onto, which is a shame. Betwixt the faceless denizens of the Bad Guy, a giant Azgardian-looking thing related to Enchantress, and the slathering of nightmarish cinematography, Suicide Squad’s faux-philosophising gets in the way of what should be an awesome smackdown show. Grand destruction ensues, sure, as our “heroes” go toe to toe with a power that’d make Superman shit in his cape, but it’s maddeningly ineffective no matter how many visual effects are thrown at the screen.
There’s a lot to unpack in Suicide Squad, most of which has to do with just how such a jumble occurred under the watch of a director of such remarkable perspicuity. Studio meddling? Ill-advised focus on too many mismanaged subplots? Perhaps. I’d suggest the overproduced expectation, a disjointed sense of purpose (is it an origin film – nope, but maybe it needed to be…) and insufficient motivational scaffolding as key reasons it’s a film of entirely too much style and far to little substance. If you can believe it, Suicide Squad is actually a worse film than Batman V Superman, and that’s the most disappointing aspect of the whole thing.
Naturally, you can expect sequels and spin-offs until the Rapture.
I haven't seen the extended version, but I don't think it can fix my biggest gripe with the film, our actual bad guys. Enchantress and her brother were just horrible. Still, I actually like Suicide Squad, which I can't say for BvS. It was far more coherent. Sure, both films shoehorned in too many easter eggs, but they felt more organic, less intrusive, here. That went a long way with me. Aside from that, I enjoyed Deadshot and Harley Quinn a great deal. The film does have plenty of problems, which you point out, but I did enjoy it.
I'd dispute SS was more coherent than BvS, mate, but I get what you're saying. The characters are specifically the Bad Guys but the film tried to shovel in a bunch of empathy for them in that "they're not all THAT bad, just misunderstood" or some such nonsense. To be fair, I'd love to see an Ayer approved director's version (his original cut) to see where and what the studio meddled with to make this such a mess. Harley and Deadshot were easily the film's best characters – and don't get me started on that abomination pretending to be the Joker.