The Worst
It Has Roughly 28 Opening Scenes.
OK, this is an exaggeration, but “Suicide Squad” has like five introductory scenes (introducing Deadshot at least twice) and doesn’t know where to start. It’s constantly restarting itself, adding origin story after origin story and since there’s really so little plot, the movie spins its wheels in this cul de sac and doesn’t even really take off until 30 minutes into the movie. What a chore.
Deadshot & His Daughter
It’s not that Will Smith is bad in the movie — he’s often underrated as an actor, and his willingness to appear in an ensemble piece like this is admirable for a star who’s sometimes let ego dictate his choice of parts. He’s completely fine as Deadshot, though it’s not likely to be remembered as one of his finest hours. But the film’s actively harmed by the need to humanize the character with the addition of his daughter. We hear that he’s a remorseless killer with a bodycount in the hundreds, but all we see from him is remorse, with his cute child there to remind us that he’s Not That Bad A Guy, and his sympathy extending over to sparing Harley Quinn and almost always wanting to see the mission through. If you want to make him a good guy who’d been dealt a bad hand, fine, if you want to make him a cold-eyed killer discovering compassion for the first time, fine, but Smith’s character seems to be working at cross-purposes to the movie and its message of ‘stay evil, doll-face.’ It smacks of notes from a star wanting his character to be more sympathetic, and turns the character into any other Smith hero, really.
An Awful, Unrelenting Soundtrack
A couple of years ago, before “Suicide Squad” was announced, I made a joke on Twitter about DC planning a movie to be released in August 2016 called “Fluardians Of The Flalaxy.” It turned out that that prediction was weirdly close to the truth: ‘Squad’ takes all kinds of cues from James Gunn’s film, but in so many ways fails to take the right lessons from it. The soundtrack is a major case in point. ‘Guardians’ had a well-curated, consistent collection of 70s and 80s soft rock that did a lot to help sell a mass audience on its weirder elements. But ‘Squad’ just bombards you with music, 23 separate music cues smothering Steven Price’s score (which is otherwise pretty good). But what’s worst is that they mostly feel haphazard and obvious, from “Sympathy For The Devil” dropping in early on, to Rick James, Eminem, Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and “Spirit In The Sky” (the latter a cue used in the ‘Guardians’ marketing campaign and soundtrack even). Picking the right song for a movie is a fine art, and it’s one that David Ayer and/or Warner Bros. don’t appear to have any appreciation for here.
There’s No Real Team Bonding
Near the final battle, as El Diablo steps up, he says something along the lines of “I’ve already lost one family, I’m not going to lose the other” before he sacrifices himself for the others. It’s a sweet thought, but it rings entirely false, unless his definition of family is ‘a bunch of people I stood next to for six hours.’ After an extended getting-the-gang-together first act, the team are immediately thrown onto a plane, then dropped into the middle of the action. We get little sense of how they operate as a unit, and the only time they really get to breathe and bond is when they stop for a drink at a bar before the final confrontation (and even that gets derailed by another tragic backstory monologue). That scene is one of the few moments where we get the sense of how they operate as a team, but the finale acts like they’re long-time blood brothers. The Marvel movies are so successful not because of their action scenes, but because people like seeing how the characters play off each other, and butt heads, but “Suicide Squad” tries to shortcut all of that.
The Villains Are Generic & Dull
I wrote at length last week on how poor villains are in blockbusters at the moment, and “Suicide Squad” only reinforces that. Cara Delevigne’s Enchantress, an ancient god of some kind or something, essentially comes across as Vigo from “Ghostbusters II,” if Vigo had taken too much MDMA and was dancing on their own in the corner of a club while trying to do a bad Tilda Swinton impersonation. And her ‘brother’ is a CGI character apparently copy-and-pasted from a leftover VFX file from “The Mummy Returns.” They’re unthreatening, they’re boring and their plan (‘destroy the world,’ we think?) is utterly generic.
Another Goddamn Glowing Portal In The Sky
I swear we were calling for a moratorium on glowing portals in the sky in superhero movies (or any movie, really) at least four years ago. And yet these films keep going back to that well — this summer alone, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Ghostbusters” and this have all featured vaguely glowy, whirly stuff as the big threat of the movie. Presumably, studios have some market research somewhere that suggests putting that shit in a trailer suggests scope and scale, but it’s become utterly, utterly boring at this point. What possible reason could you have for going there again?
Margot Robbie’s Accent
The Australian actress’s take on fan-favorite character Harley Quinn was one of the most eagerly anticipated elements of the movie. Robbie, a very good actress, is mostly good in the film — she’s light and surprising and capable of bringing out pathos even with bum hand she’s dealt in terms of material. But we wish that she’s be reined in on the accent, a sort of stereotypical ‘I’M WALKING HERE!’ New York thing that’s broader than her performance, and also comes and goes at leisure. It walks up to the line of irritation and then twirls over it, and feels like another example of a director indulging his actors rather than guiding them.
The Weird Visual Aesthetic Clash
The widely-reported reshoots for “Suicide Squad” were dismissed by the people behind them as just adding an action sequence or two, but almost from its first minutes, the film shows every evidence of being something that tried to change its very nature through post-production. The film’s aesthetic, for the most part, is more in the mold of “Seven” or Ayer’s previous movies — dark, dour, color-drained (it’s interesting looking back at the early trailer that leaked after 2015’s Comic-Con, which is strikingly different from the rest of the campaign). But the soundtrack, the graphics (which the film is swimming in early on), the studio logo, even something like Boomerang’s shoe-horned in pink unicorn thing, all suggest a brighter, more colorful, more ‘fun’ movie. Whether or not the film is Ayer’s final cut, as he claims, it’s clear that there was an attempt to course-correct after the reception to “Batman Vs. Superman,” an attempt that if anything makes the film worse, not better.
Will Smith’s Mask
I’m aware that the character Deadshot is normally buried behind a mask, a mask that he dons early on in the assassination sequence in which we see him show off his skills. But it comes back later on in a completely extraneous way (the character never feels the need to wear it in the other scenes), and it feels less like the filmmakers wanted to nod to the fans, and more like Will Smith didn’t want to come to work for a week or two. We’d initially wondered if the sequence in question was one added in reshoots, when Smith might have been busy on “Collateral Beauty,” but there are glimpses of it in a trailer that pre-dates the pick-ups. Either way, it’s pretty distracting.