It is no secret that Warner Bros. is already eating dust when it comes to successfully bringing out DC Comics' characters onto the big screen that aren't named Batman or Superman. And that should come as no surprise, seeing how Suicide Squad is littered with glaring cliches and doesn't have the slightest clue of where its headed.
On paper, the premise of Suicide Squad should definitely work. A team of villains is grouped together by the government to be used for covert operations, all in the name of national security. The team is formed by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), while Deadshot (Will Smith) and Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman) lead the team, with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Katana (Karen Fukuhara), El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) completing the rest of the Suicide Squad.
They battle Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) in an end-of-the-world scenario that's obviously too much for them, but ultimately do due to contrived writing. It's the kind of meaningless plot that's usually left for big franchises like the recent X-Men: Apocalypse, and Suicide Squad fails to do anything with it.
With several of the cast struggling for screen time the lesser ones are shoved aside, to the point where a majority of them could be cut out from the movie and it wouldn't even matter. All sense of character development are left to poorly done flashbacks and muddy exposition (which end up being too much), before being thrown into a series of shoddy action sequences for the rest of the movie.
The end result is an tremendous amount of set-up, and by the time it really gets started, it's full of endless filler.
One of the glaring problems with this movie is how they're constantly reminding us through corny dialogue that they're the bad guys - "Remember, we're the bad guys" - but never really do anything bad. There's something wrong when Amanda Waller (she kills her own people in cold-blood) is the most inherently evil one among your group.
But the biggest fault with Suicide Squad is their failure to make us care, even for a bit. With the exception of Deadshot and Harley Quinn, these characters are just devoid of personality and obviously added for humor and eye candy. Joker (Jared Leto) had the potential to be something memorable but was unfortunately relegated to some thug.
On a more positive note, the cast did their best with what their given. Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Viola Davis are stand-outs in their performances.
To be honest I'm baffled why Warner Bros. green-lighted something like Suicide Squad very early on in its DC Extended Universe movie initiative, shoving aside the opportunity to release solo movies of DC's other A-list superheroes much earlier. It doesn't really make much sense when you look at the world the DCEU is trying to build. They're pushing out these relatively unknown characters too fast, and I think Suicide Squad suffers because of that.
The most likely scenario is that the executives at Warner Bros. saw the overwhelming success of Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy (which also features a ragtag collection of obscure characters) and thought they could replicate that same magic. And judging by its choice of humor and soundtrack, it's probably true. The only difference is, this one is terrible.
Rating: 2/5
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