Suicide Squad Review

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was not a failure, not commercially anyway; $800million at the worldwide box office is nothing to be sniffed at. It also wasn't the disaster that the critics would have you believe it was, yes it was incoherent and a bit too po-faced but it was still a perfectly average film. Warner Bros however didn't see BvS: DoJ as the success it could have been, it didn't break a billion, which the title alone should have done, and it didn't successfully tap a large fan base that could maintain a DC cinematic universe to rival the daddies of Comic Book Movies, the Disney owned Marvel. So it's hardly surprising when you read of a panicked Warner Bros fretting over their next big project, Suicide Squad.

Suicide Squad centres on a group of bad guys held up in Belle Reve prison who are utilised by government ball-buster Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to take down a 'metahuman' adversary in exchange for a reduction in their prison sentences. Director David Ayer has delivered thumping thrill rides in the past such as Fury and End of Watch, as a former US Naval officer his skills would seem to lend themselves to helming such a vessel, so sad then that this film really is a sinking ship.

Ayer seems obsessed with trying to make this film 'cool' and one of the main ways he thinks he can do this is by adding a pop soundtrack to the film. The problem is that when you have a pop soundtrack, each track needs to be meticulously chosen in order to lend itself to the scene, it needs to have purpose, Ayer wants to be like a Tarrantino or a Scorsese but for the most part it feels like he’s accidentally left his iPod on shuffle and it’s just blaring out songs.
It also isn't helped by the fact that the early moments of the film have the attention span of a toddler on a sugar rush, the songs change every ten seconds and it flits all over the place like its suffering from ADHD. It also doesn't really know how it wants to begin, it introduces its characters in a very formulaic way, then introduces them again, before introducing them a third time, all three times being as awful as the first.

The characters themselves vary in their levels of interest. Will Smith is as charismatic as you'd expect from him in the role of the ultimate marksman Deadshot, but he's working with thin material, the only thing that defines Deadshot is that he's a father, and we are continuously reminded that he's a father and that he has a daughter and hey, he isn’t that bad because he's a father to his daughter, it’s incredibly one note and underserves a talented actor.

The other main star of the cast is Margot Robbie as the psychotic Harley Quinn. Again, Robbie is excellent in the role with her line delivery on point throughout the whole film, but if Fury had you suspicious that Ayer doesn’t know how to write women, then Suicide Squad will 100% confirm it. She's a character defined only by her obsession for the psychotic killer The Joker, the violence depicted towards her in the film makes for uncomfortable viewing throughout, and the later betrayals of what they've set her character up to be are entirely illogical.

The rest of the 'Squad' have their parts, Jay Hernandez's El Diablo is played as sympathetic despite his entire arc of the film being wholly unsympathetic. Joel Kinnaman plays squad leader Rick Flag, and he brings all the charisma you'd expect from his reputation, which mainly involves him standing around with a head too small for his body and reading lines with all the passion of a man who starred in the dreadful Robocop remake. Then there's the rest who barely register besides Jai Courtney's mildly amusing Captain Boomerang, though one must really question the logic of challenging the might of a ‘metahuman’ with a guy whose soul attribute is that he throws boomerangs.

The much talked about performance of Jared Leto as the latest iteration of The Joker will actually leave most viewers underserved, but even then there are major problems with his depiction. The Joker should be either fun or nihilistic, with the best depictions being both, in the case of Leto he's neither. This Joker doesn’t give off any sense of fun more irritation, and there’s also no sense of threat, the terrifying performance by Heath Ledger has been traded in for something far more constructed, there isn’t a sense that this man is psychotic when he has tattoos and gold jewellery and a very conscious sense of style, he feels like a man who's spent about an hour getting ready before he walks into the room.

The problem also lies in the respect that Ayer has shown the character, this is a big character and deserves a big introduction, but in Suicide Squad he's introduced in flashback just sat at a table. It would be harsh to judge this character on the glimpses that have been given so far, but there seems like there’s a lot of work to be done.

The worst thing you can say about this film is that it’s not actually a film. A film trailer is a series of edited footage, usually done to music that gives the impression or semblance of a plot or narrative. The reasons that the trailers for Suicide Squad were so promising is because that’s all the film is, a series of clips edited together to give the semblance of a narrative, it's like Ayer directed several grating music videos and just strung them together incoherently , the result is a fiercely irksome mess.

For all its faults BvS felt like a film with a thousand bright ideas crammed into the same story, whereas Suicide Squad is a vacuous, empty, hollow shell of a film, it's probably going to find as big an audience as BvS did, but for DC to build a sustainable universe with longevity they need to produce quality, and a good film this ‘aint. (1 Star)