Suicide Squad
is finally here from writer director David Ayer, the man who brought us movies
like Training Day ‘yes’, Sabotage ‘meh’ . And if you guys know anything about
this movie or these characters, you know that it is an assemblage of the
baddies, this is like the Justice League of the bad guys. Viola Davis wants to
recruit these people to go out into the city to defeat this thing that's
wreaking havoc in the middle of the city, and a beam is shooting up to the sky
and it's a big deserted City and there's a battle so you know it's a comic book
movie… or the new Ghostbusters… that happens a lot in movies is what I'm saying.
Now I was
really excited for this movie, not just because I enjoy the comics and I love
these characters, but because of the cast involved and the director. I think
Training Day is an excellent movie, and I like end of watch maybe even a little
bit more. I think David Ayer is super talented, so I was so excited to see what
he can bring to this universe because not only is he directing, but he's also
writing so that's a big creative talent working with all these awesome
characters, and a plethora of great source material we'll talk more about that
in a minute.
Let's talk
about pros first: Will Smith as Deadshot, I really like this character, he's
one of the very few people in this team that’s given any bit of
characterization. He has a daughter, you learn a little bit more about his past,
there's a really integral scene involving another DC Comics character that
gives him some humanity, and it makes you feel for him. I also thought he was
very entertaining and a lot of his jokes hit. That's another positive, this
movie is more lighthearted, it does have humour, and it feels like the
characters are having fun. Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, she was exactly like
the animated series character, she did a great job capturing that characters
unhinged insanity while also, similar to Deadshot, having just a small thorough
line of humanity peeking out of it.
The first 20 to
30 minutes or so we're pretty good, although there is a lot of people telling
us about characters. There's a big difference between us watching something
happen to a character, and another character that we don't know just coming in
and saying “here's what you need to know about this person, because we don't really
have any time to set up these characters, let's just get to the big beam in the
sky”. For instance, if you had never heard of Superman before, or he was a more
obscure comic book character, and he comes on screen and somebody says “this is
Superman, his planet was destroyed, he has no family, feel bad for him”. That's
essentially most of the characterization we get for the members of the Suicide
Squad, except for Deadshot and Harley Quinn, and a lot of their stories are told
through excessive flashbacks.
The brief
appearances by Batman were awesome. Ben Affleck once again looks amazing as this
character and I want to see Ben Affleck as Batman in a great movie. Also,
believe it or not, Jai Courtney was not awful, he was actually pretty good as
Captain Boomerang and a fun and likable presence… miracles do happen. And last
on my list of pros is Jared Leto as the Joker. I think that he is doing
something really cool. I think that he's doing something very different, I like
his portrayal of the Joker. It wasn't exactly like Nicholson, it wasn't exactly
like ledger, it was sort of a combination of the best of the both, and he also
had some really cool visual things going on with his face and his outfits,
there were some good moments with him, and that leads me into my cons.
When I said
there were some good moments with the Joker, that's absolutely what I meant. He's
barely in this movie, don't go to this movie excited about Jared Leto as the Joker,
because you're not going to get much of it. His scenes are so minimal that when
I think back on the movie, I can't think of that one scene with the Joker. I
can't think of a standout scene, he doesn’t have an interrogation scene like in
the Dark Knight. He doesn't have a ‘Ahh, and I thought my jokes were bad scene’
he has nothing like that. He's just got a couple lines every here in there
scattered throughout the movie, that was a big disappointment for me because a
lot of the marketing kept his performance very under wraps like it was this big
awesome thing, but in reality they just didn't have that much footage to work with
because he's barely in this movie.
The second and
third act is a gigantic city scene, it all just kind of bleeds together and
becomes one big messy scene. I could tell they were trying to make a more contained
film which I am all for, I love contained movies, I love smaller movies that
have big ideas to take place in one small environment, but that claustrophobia
just wasn't there and that feeling of in the moment, real-time action just
wasn't there because there is some seriously choppy editing going on here, and
a ton of shit was cut out I KNOW it. There has got to be a ton of deleted
scenes on this Blu-ray, and I am really curious to find out about that, because
there's also a lot of scenes that do feel very much so tacked on. There's this
elevator fight scene with Harley Quinn that really felt like it was a reshoot scene.
From the
beginning of the second act all the way to the finale, it just felt like so
much had been cut out and removed from this movie, to where it was just bare
bones action sequences and a few conversations. Now there was one aspect of
this movie that I was very curious about because it was kept from almost all
marketing, and that is the villain. Now if you don't know who the villain of
this movie is and you don't want to know who the villain of this movie is, I'm
going to talk about the villain now. I don't consider it a spoiler but if you
don't want to know who the villain is or my thoughts on said villain, then I
will let you know that I'm about to discuss it. That's my way of respecting you
guys.
The villain in
this movie is in Enchantress, she’s this which character who can do all kinds
of crazy things, she has a relationship with one of the people involved with
the Suicide Squad, and so there's some tension there because she's also this
which enchantress that can take over people and make them do things, and she
turns a random person into Incubus, and this guy just kind of starts wreaking
havoc and she just starts running around and doing like hip moves and making like
weird faces and twirling her arms around. One of my friends said she looked like
she was hula dancing most of the time, and I gotta tell you guys straight up,
there were aspects of this finale that reminded me of Fan4stic, it is THAT
messy. At one point one character is in dire danger and you're positive this
character is dead, things that are like tentacles are like going through this
person's body and shit, and like five minutes later this character just walks
on screen their clothes are perfect there's no dirt there's no sweat and there
like “hey what's up - I'm fine”
So in truth,
the storytelling here is very poor, it's a very choppy film, there are entire
things that just feel ripped out and left on the cutting room floor. I'm very
curious to see what this Blu-ray looks like in the special features. There are
good portrayals some of these characters in this movie like the Joker, like
Harley Quinn, like Deadshot. There are aspects of these characters I really
enjoyed, I wanted way more Jared Leto, because I was intrigued by what he was
doing. There are some good jokes, there are some fun scenes but the action
sequences feel very pedestrian and there doesn't seem to be anything special
about them, there's just a lot of weird shapes coming out of the sides of the
frame and people slice through them and shoot them and nothing really happens
of much weight or importance. Suicide Squad, while better than Batman v
Superman in my opinion, was still disappointing.
Grade - C+
Also another quick pro, the score by Steven Price is very good as well
