My Long-Winded Suicide Squad Review

I tried to keep out any major spoilers, but there definitely some in here anyway.

So I went to see Suicide Squad on Thursday night. I was really looking forward to this one, I think it was really well marketed. It gave off a strong vibe of something different, something unique. Something a bit scary and fucked up and also really funny and just not at all what superhero movies have been lately. That said, all the negative reviews persuaded me to temper my expectations to a large degree, so when I went I was still excited but, we’ll say, cautiously optimistic.

Here’s the thing. Suicide Squad is a deeply flawed film. There are weird plot elements, there are a number of characters and arc that are under served, there are clichés and overused plot elements and all sorts of other little problems throughout. There was enough wrong with this movie for me to thoroughly dislike it.

So why did I like it so much?

Honestly, for all its flaws, glaring as they were, I genuinely enjoyed myself. It didn’t blow me away. It certainly didn’t live up to my highest expectations. But I had a good time, and I’m more than willing to forgive most, if not all, the issues I had with it.

The only answer I can come up with is charm. I feel like the movie had real charm, and if there’s enough of that I can forgive just about anything. Will Smith had charm. Margot Robbie had charm. Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez, Joel Kinnaman. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, under all that Croc makeup, had charm. Narratively, I was given nothing to believe that this group had bonded over the course of the film. But they sold it to me anyway.

There was plenty more to like about the movie. The action, once it actually got moving, was decent. The movie looked great, from the costumes to the special effects to the opening and closing credits. Even the darker vibe worked for me, and I usually get annoyed by movies that are too-dark. (Of course, this is a Suicide Squad movie, not a Superman movie.)

So let’s get into some Pros and Cons:

PROS:

The Cast

This was a very well-acted film. The standouts were the obvious ones: Will Smith as Deadshot, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Jay Hernandez and Diablo, Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc.

Smith brings his signature mix of humor and pathos, playing a killer-for-hire who doesn’t feel any remorse for what he’s done, but clearly pines for his daughter in a way that, I’ll admit, got a bit heavy-handed at times, but was for the most part a strong grounding element.

Robbie is about as Harley Quinn as you can get this side of Tara Strong. She brings the manic energy and twisted sense of humor that’s made the character so popular in the comics, but just when you think Harley’s nothing but a mindless psycho, she’s able to show real heart, and even utilizes her psychiatric background to provide a bit of therapy.

Hernandez as Diablo is a somewhat underdeveloped character, especially considering the major role he plays toward the end. This might have been deliberate, but I still think they could have given him a better introduction to the audience. Still, he manages to bring it hard, and was a surprise favorite.

And Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc was just about perfect. He had only a few lines, but I think that worked best for his character. He didn’t need an extended arc, he just needed to show up when he was needed. His few lines of dialogue were perfect, and he crushed it in the actions scenes exactly as a bruiser should.

The Wall:

Yes, she gets her own sub-header. Half my excitement for this movie was specifically to see Amanda Waller. And Viola Davis was exactly perfect. She was cold, she was fearless, she was badass. And yes, I acknowledge that the entire plot revolved around Waller completely dropping the ball. That’s on her. In all honesty, though, I think that works really well for this movie. The whole concept behind Suicide Squad is that when you bring together a team of villains to do a job like this, the results are going to be unpredictable. The idea is that the whole concept is an exercise in playing with fire. That’s what Waller does.

And outside of the plot, Davis nailed the character. One of my favorite moments is an exchange between Waller and Boomerang toward the end of the movie, and I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but it’s about as Waller a moment as you can get (and, to be honest, it’s a great moment for Captain Boomerang, too).

The Soundtrack:

You remember the, like, mid-to-late 90s? When there were just a ton of great movie soundtracks. Half the time the movies were crap (*cough* Spawn *cough*), and the music wasn’t even in the movie, or it was shoehorned in with some kid listening to five seconds of it on their car radio or something, just to get it on the album. Man, I miss those. I’d love to see soundtrack albums make a comeback, and I hope this is the start of that.

I was psyched for Suicide Squad’s soundtrack specifically because it has a new Grimes song on it, Medieval Warfare, which doesn’t disappoint. But there’s much more to love on there. Skylar Grey’s Wreak Havic, Grace and G-Easy’s You Don’t Own Me. And, look, there is never a reason to cover Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s a perfect song. But. Panic! At the Disco does a pretty solid job of it. So I don’t mind it.

CONS:

Harley’s “Shorts”:

They look stupid. Like, really stupid. I can’t fathom what they were going for with that. Sexy? Wedgie? Sexy wedgie? Whatever, they look stupid and I hate them. I don’t even care if she wears the original costume or not, just put her in something that doesn’t look stupid.

Pretty Much the Entire First Act:

There’s a sequence, which probably only lasts for about twenty minutes, but feels like half the movie. Amanda Waller is talking to some General or something, who I would swear from the trailers was played by Clancy Brown, but turned out to be some other dude whose name I don’t feel like looking up right now (edit: I think it’s Ted Whittall as Admiral Olsen.) She’s basically explaining her whole Task Force X plan to him, totally Walling it up, positively giddy at the idea of getting “the worst of the worst” for her squad.

And then we go through a series of short, poorly edited flashbacks that show Deadshot, Harley, Diablo and Boomerang all getting caught. And that’s fine, including those scenes is fine, but making them flashbacks, and having another character narrating who these people are in great detail, really takes any tension out of them. They become exposition, nothing more. Most of these scenes didn’t need narrated at all, and we already knew these characters were in jail, we saw them there. We could have opened with these introductory scenes in real time, then cut to them in prison, then have Waller chatting up the military. More economical, more engaging, etc.

Add to that another sequence where Waller and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) are touring the prison, meeting all these characters once again, and it’s just a lot of bloat, a lot of time spent learning the same things over and over again. It genuinely felt like half the movie had gone by before the first realtime action scene with these characters.

The Villains:

By the villains, I mean the antagonists, since basically everyone in this movie was a villain. Cara Delevingne did a perfectly good job as both June Moone and the Enchantress. I have no qualms with that part of it. I just think everything else to do with her was poorly, I’d say lazily, done. I was never sold on the relationship between Flag and Moone. That was meant to be his entire motivation, and it just never clicked for me. There was very little time spent there, and once again, we were told, by Waller, that he was in love with her, and were pretty much just expected to believe it.

Beyond that, there was a lot of sort of lazy hand-waving around the whole plot. They never even bothered to explain what her evil plan even was, just that she had some ill-defined supernatural sky beam with a whirling vortex of debris around it. It felt like they just couldn’t be bothered to develop a real plot for her, like it was just background noise.

There’s a scene where she’s got her vortex going, and she’s just kind of doing an arm-wave shimmy thing in front of it, generic spell-casting stuff, and the team is trying to sneak up on her and put together a plan of attack. And it felt like one of those points in a video game, where the big boss battle is coming up, and you have to run around and talk to all the party members and make everyone is fully equipped and so on, and the bad guy is just off in the background trapped in some pointless repetitive animation, waiting for you to finish up and select “ready to go” to trigger the next cut scene.

Katana:

This one really bugged me. I have no problem with Katana per se, but it was never really explained what she was doing there. She just showed up, and Flag was all “She’s with me,” and there was like one bit where they explained how her sword worked and something about avenging her husband’s death, which explains nothing about why she’s on Flag’s or Waller’s or whoever’s side. And then all of a sudden she was just not anymore, everyone fucked off to have a drink, and she went with them. She had almost no dialogue, and when she did it was in Japanese. I can’t help but think she was really important in an earlier draft of the script, and then they just cut her arc out, but left her in.

And yeah, Slipknot was pretty lazily done, too, but he was only in like two scenes, and I thought it was pretty funny how he went out. Clearly he had the same issue of having more of an arc in a previous draft, but it was important for him to stay in just for that minute.

So that’s my Pros and Cons list, and I think that pretty much wraps this review. I feel like there was something else I wanted to mention, but I can’t think of what that might be. So that’s that.

Okay, okay, I was kidding, I’ll talk about the Joker.

First, I think it’s important to point out that I don’t have the same nerd-boner for the Joker that most people seem to have. I think there have been some really well-written stories featuring him, sure. But I never got the whole “he’s Batman’s greatest villain” thing. I think people just like the idea of a charismatic psychopath, which is fine, but it’s not my thing. Give me a Riddler or a Mr. Freeze or a Bane any day of the week. There’s so many fun ones to choose from.

That said, I really dug the last Joker (Heath Ledger, as if I need to remind you), like most people, and Nicholson is a classic, and so on. So I was really interested to see where this one went.

The fact is, it’s really hard to make a solid judgement on this, because he didn’t have that much screen time. I can definitely see where they’re going with the character. More of a drug-lord vibe than anything else, excess, violence. Gangland royalty. And I like it. This is a Joker that we’ve seen in the comics before. He wasn’t always just some psycho, he’s led the Gotham underground before. And I think it fits for the next generation of Batman movies. It gives you places to go.

Whether or not Leto actually pulled this off in a satisfying way is a much different question. And, like I said, it’s hard to tell. There are moments where I think it worked perfectly. There are moments where he’s truly frightening, where he really carries the air of a feared and respected gang leader, and still has that unpredictable mad streak.

There are also moments where it’s obvious he’s trying really hard to seem crazy, and he just comes off as someone trying really hard to seem crazy. And those definitely didn’t work for me. They were few and far between, but again, so were his scenes.

Of course, I know there’s a lot of talk about the Joker/Harley relationship that was seen in an earlier cut, a much more obviously abusive relationship, and honestly, that would have made more sense to me. Trying to spin that mess as anything other than abusive just rubs me the wrong way.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see where he turns up next, with or without Harley.

So that’s that. Clearly you can see that there were a lot of serious issues with the movie. But, like I said, it still worked for me. I still enjoyed it for the most part, once things got moving. And I definitely think that can be attributed to the strong performances by the cast.

Anyway, the movie’s been getting a lot of hate, and a decent amount of it I think is overblown and unwarranted. And I’ll say this, to cap things off. I didn’t care for Man of Steel. Like, at all. (And, btw, I really hated Snyder’s Watchmen, if that matters.) I didn’t even bother with BvS, it looked terrible, and when everyone said it was terrible I believed them, and I even read all the plot summaries and reviews, and everything I got from them told me it was an incoherent mess and not worth my time.

And look, I’m not all of a sudden going to run out and go see BvS or anything. But I do kind of get now why fans of the movie were getting so defensive. There are people that are clearly taking a lot of pleasure from tearing these movies apart. Hell, I was enjoying seeing it get torn apart.

(This is not to say I endorse writing petitions to have review sites shut down or anything, that’s just dumb.)

So there it is. My brief Suicide Squad note that blew up into a really long review. If you stuck with it this far, congrats! Go have a drink! (I mean thanks for reading!)