DC have got a long way to go to catch up with Marvel when it comes to movies.
After the disastrous critical failure of Batman vs Superman, it's clear they needed to spruce things up a bit, and you really would have had to have been under a rock for the last couple months not to have seen the banners, billboards, tv spots, and multiple merchandising tie-ins to DC's latest ensemble the-bad-guys-are-the-good-guys action mash-up, Suicide Squad.
Who the main character really is in Suicide Squad, it's a little hard to say. We begin with the mind behind the whole idea, military officer Amanda Waller, a high ranking strategist who is selling her idea of an elite team of super-villains, to be used in the event of a superhuman terrorist threat. With the powers of the mysterious Enchantress under her thumb, she begins assembling her team, selecting the finest thieves and hit-men from the darkest cells of Belle Reve Supermax penitentiary.
Amanda's trump card, the incredibly powerful Enchantress, has an ulterior motive. That of the destruction of the human race, naturally, and when given a little too much leeway with her powers, soon seeks out the means to put her apocalyptic plans into action. When Enchantress and her demonic minions begin laying waste to a major American city, Task Force X, the titular Squad, are put into action under the command of hard edged soldier Rick Flag, not to save the day, but just to rescue a person of value from the equation and get out of there alive.
The set up and the swift devolution into anarchy leading up to the actual mission is a big chunk of the films run-time, and if there's a first place you could criticize Suicide Squad, it's the pacing. A little too much time spent here, not enough there, and then a sudden apocalyptic threat, doesn't go down so smooth. The ride to the films third act is bumpy to say the least. Fortunately, the characters that populate the film are where the majority of the fun to be found lies.
The best performance in the film, without much surprise, is of course Will Smith. He's Will Smith, playing Will Smith, and as always, it's great fun. He has a character arc, a snappy personality, scene after scene introducing his incredible skills and the force that drives him. He is of course the big star of the piece, so naturally a ton of screen time is going to be devoted to him, but it would have been nice to see more of the other enjoyable members of the group, like Captain Boomerang, who gets a laugh from the audience on the majority of his dialogue, or the great Killer Croc, both of whom we get next to nothing of by way of backstory. Some characters, like Kabuki and Slipknot, displayed prominently on posters and promotional material, barely make an impact on the film's events at all.
There are many fine performances among the multiple cast members, like Viola Davis as the stern faced Amanda Waller, the cold commanding military commander who organised the whole shindig. She's a great character, but needed a bit more variety to her scenes than stone faced dialogue, in my opinion. El Diablo, who takes the role of the heart of the team, is lovable, enjoyable to watch, and just plain kicks ass when he needs to. Rick Flag, the commander of the team, is a confusing character however, he's not at all badly acted, he's just not a likable character. Everyone knows the goody-goody 'soldier' among the dirty dozen is always the boring character you root to get killed. So why then was Flag such a huge part of the film? He gets more screen time than everyone but Smith's Deadshot, and his love affair with Enchantress is actually the film's main character based plot. He doesn't seem to be intended to be likable, and he's not particularly heroic, not even in the 'honor among thieves' way.
A film with an ensemble this big isn't without some obvious duds, of course, and Suicide Squad does have a few turds in the punch-bowl.
Harley Quinn is a character that people have waited YEARS to see on the big screen. She's one of the most significant comic characters of modern day, and possibly the most popular female DC character ever. The character we get here, is something of a disgrace. Almost every line Harley delivers is a flat joke, and she comes across as a dull imitation. Her accent is sporadic and uneven, her personality is unclear and undefined. She's referred to as crazy a half dozen times in her first scene, yet at no point in the movie acts remotely insane. In fact, we see her clearly change her attitude to give the appearance of being crazy to others more than once, giving the suggestion that the entire crazy thing is an act put on by a completely sane character.
Harley Quinn wasn't the worst character in the film however. The Razzie without a doubt goes to Enchantress, who I really don't think could have been worse.
A body swapping Goddess of the old world controlled by Amanda Waller, Enchantress delivers a frankly nonsensical performance as the film's main villain. The visual design we see on the movie posters, a green skinned, black haired hag, looks fantastic for the few scenes she's in, and blissfully keeps her mouth shut, but for the most part of the film she takes the form of an idiotically gyrating everyday white girl who looks like the Empress from The Neverending Story, delivering stilted dialogue in a dopey deep voice. A huge amount of plot development is devoted to the relationship Flag has with the 'real' girl trapped within Enchantress, but as an audience, it's impossible to connect with this relationship as we never meet that character. We see a few scenes of an awkward, gawky woman in big spectacles deliver a few lines, but we don't see the lovable character she's apparently meant to be, and that we should be rooting to escape Enchantresses control. A poor villain is an inexcusable error in a superhero film, and having a great antagonist for our Squad to battle against would have changed the dynamic of the entire film for the better.
Of course, they did have that antagonist there the whole time, which is frankly baffling. The character everyone wants to know about, the latest in a long line of performances that define the way a comic book villain can be played, The Joker.
Leto's performance is definitely not the character we know from the comics. He's a street smart gangster, obsessed with obscene displays of wealth and outrageous showmanship. We wouldn't see the comic book version of the character owning a high end strip club, wielding a gold plated pimp cane, and driving a purple chrome Lamborghini, but this is a new Joker, and he's king of the underworld. The few flashback glimpses we see of The Joker and Harley running things from their ivory tower, the criminal world operating in fear of them, are great to see, and there really is no excuse that this wasn't the plot of the film. Why have a character like the Joker, well known as the most popular comic book villain IN HISTORY and use him for less than ten minutes of screen time?
Suicide Squad is not a bad film.
It's extremely popular to hate it right now, and I think it's not getting fair treatment as a standalone film. It's being lumped into the fun-to-tear-apart DC cinematic universe.
Although it is full of references to the larger world around it, the glimpse of the Flash isn't really ham-fisted in for example, and the sporadic appearances of Batman are actually pretty cool. Although I fully expected it to be the case, I didn't feel that it's PG-13 rating severely castrated it either. There weren't any obvious scenes that felt distinctly hampered by the lack of an R rating. If an R rating had been the case, we might have seen more dynamic enemies than faceless, safe-to-slaughter blob people, however.
A bad film has wonky parts that fit together poorly into a displeasing whole.
Suicide Squad has the parts. They're there. The cinematography is great, the soundtrack is top tier, and some of the characters are tremendous fun. The parts just don't fit together all that well. Massive slow motion scenes slow down the great cinematography, the soundtrack is SO full of hits, they play ten seconds of a genre defining song before cutting it off to move to the next track, three or four times in the same scene. Why put these enjoyable characters in a story that doesn't fit them? With protagonists so full of life, why make the villain a goofy caricature devoid of personality with the poorest acting performance in the entire film?
It feels like Suicide Squad wasn't quite the main event, and that this was the sequel, or the spin off, even. They had a great villain, in the form of the Joker, and they put him in as many scenes as they could manage, so why not just make the film about him instead of the uninteresting, uninspired and frankly unenjoyable Enchantress?
Something could be done with Suicide Squad. Whether they are waiting for the home media release to re-edit it and force everyone to pay for it again, like they did with BvS, we'll see.
