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Suicide Squad
STARRING: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, Tommy Lee Jones
DIRECTOR: David Ayer
Genre: Superhero
Rating: PG-15
123 mins
Another week goes by, and another superhero film arrives on our doorstep.This one is a little different though, with our ‘heroes’ really being a team of fictional supervillains sent on an impossible mission to their impending doom.
On a wider level, this film was seen as the saviour of the DC Cinematic Universe after the widely-panned Batman v Superman. The hype has been at atmospheric levels since the first (admittedly awesome) trailer kicked off a juggernaut of a marketing campaign, with fans eager to see a superhero film from the other side of the fence.
Sadly, and it brings me great pain to report this, Suicide Squad is probably the worst of the lot.
The very thin plot essentially starts with Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) seeing the arrival of Superman to Earth as a wake-up call. She uses the fear his power instils to bully the US Government into letting her assemble Task Force X, a group of their worst incarcerated criminals.
The intent is to send the team on suicide missions (hence their nickname) against super-powered threats in exchange for time off their rather lengthy sentences. Thus, the movie cues the stylistic intros for hitman-for-hire Deadshot (Will Smith), violent and Joker-obsessed Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), black-magic witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), tatted-up pyro El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), human crocodile Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Australian pile-of-useless Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney).
Imagine for a moment that Marvel Studios had decided to launch its vast cinematic universe with the most recent effort, Captain America: Civil War. That is to say, the movie didn’t merely have to introduce Black Panther and reintroduce Spider-Man to its roster; it also had to introduce Cap himself, and Iron Man and Black Widow and Falcon and Vision and Scarlet Witch and everyone-else down the line. It needed to set up backstories and narrative arcs and romantic entanglements for everyone involved. It needed to explain what brought them together. And, it needed to do all of this in about 15 minutes in order to subsequently come up with a lame supervillain for them to fight.
That’s the mess Suicide Squad finds itself in, and that’s the first act alone. It doesn’t get much better from there … in fact, it gets worse.
Yes, the introductions to the characters are snazzy and have a certain zany charm, but these people never get fleshed out with any sort of depth. The film essentially tells you ‘Deadshot has unerring aim, Harley is a search engine of underworld intel, Croc has monstrous strength, person X has Y ability, so you can see how they’d be useful, etc’.
The film should have been marketed as a disaster movie, because the entire thing is one long nosedive. When the Squad goes on their first (and only) mission to stop a vague, world-ending scheme, it’s never quite clear what the mission is or how they’re going about attaining their goal.
Action scenes happen, but they’re little more than time-filling montages as we watch the team bulldoze through dozens of henchmen that pose zero threat, even to one of the protagonists whose weapon of choice is a boomerang. Enough said.
There’s never a sense that this specialised team was truly needed for this particular mission, and the efforts to engage the audience’s emotions fall flat. A few manipulative techniques, such as flashbacks to before their jail terms, attempt to show the heroes to be good guys who simply made mistakes and are trying to right wrongs, but this is a lame way of filmmakers trying to justify us cheering for a group who are undoubtedly very, very bad people.
The performances themselves are a mixed bag. Will Smith is the most well-rounded character and plenty of his dialogue has the snap and crackle of the actor’s younger days. Robbie shines as the enormously-popular Harley, swapping between sincerely cheery and bonafide crazy at will, and Davis is unflinching and uncompromising as Waller.
The rest may as well not have bothered, with all the depth of tissue paper. At least that serves a purpose.
While Leto’s Joker does get a decent bit of screen time, his subplot abruptly cuts across the movie rather than move in tandem with it, never amounting to anything of substance. His character feels forced upon the movie rather than smartly woven into it, almost as if the studio is saying: “Look guys, we have Joker in the film, come see it!” It goes without saying that Leto is no Heath Ledger though, or even Jack Nicholson.
With the Joker not being utilised as the main villain, we’re instead forced to endure some out-of-left-field antagonists that are a perfect example of everything eye-rollingly bad about comic-book movie villains. Generic plan, no compelling motive, immediately forgettable.
On this form, it is obvious DC are lagging way behind their rivals at Marvel. They’re still scrambling around desperately for a formula that works, never mind sticking to one. It is difficult to see where they can go next from here: their cross-comic mash-up was a huge failure up against Civil War, and this was meant to be their version of Guardians of the Galaxy, the massively successful and acclaimed summer blockbuster of 2014 which focussed on lesser, relatively unknown heroes.
Maybe it’s time to put up a signal in the night sky and cry for help. Christopher Nolan’s silhouette, perhaps?
Showing at: Novo Cinemas, Cineco, Seef I, Saar, Al Jazira, Wadi Al Sail, Dana Cineplex
Rating: 2/5
