Suicide Squad Review: Awful All Around

I didn’t have any expectations for this movie. But I was still unprepared for how bad it turned out to be – too much exposition, head-scratching editing, subplots that go nowhere, and the laughable big bad.

Here we have an array of potentially endearing misfits played by little known to heavyweight actors. They all did well with the material they’re given, even when the screen time is disproportionately distributed. The casting is a great fit except for the Enchantress and Joker. Cara Delevingne is just bad. Jared Leto is a wannabe gangster posing as Joker.

Instead of using the dynamics of the group, the script focuses on the movie’s bankable actors while the rest are relegated to back-up players. A big chunk of the screen time goes to Will Smith and Margot Robbie, whose character backstories kept muddling up the plot.

The movie spends more time on over-sentimental flashbacks than showing the audience what makes these characters the worst of the worst. They’re pegged into cliched caricatures – the gunslinger on a mission, the crazy hopeless hobo, the oriental warrior on a quest for vengeance, the brony wildcard, the love-struck straight arrow, the misunderstood creature, and the repenting gangster.

It doesn’t help that the action doesn’t put their abilities to good use. Aside from Joker’s unnecessary cameos, the fight scenes are generic with predictable slow-motion shots. Diablo, whose powers are a perfect fit for some big-screen mayhem, has two good scenes as if DC were scrimping on effects.

The antiheroes have plenty of time running around and reflecting on their life before they can finally come together and defeat the big bad. It’s not even clear how this big bad is going to destroy the world. It can only create weak henchmen and get destroyed by predictable tactics. In the end, the magic of friendship and flipping motivations saves the day.

Somewhere inside this latest DC failure is a story about how the government is no different than the criminals it locks up, but it’s lost in a movie where everything is poorly executed and crippled by a PG rating.