I picked up DC's movie franchise offering Suicide Squad a few weeks ago and got around to watching it. I admit though I've hardly read any of the comics, I am a fan of sorts of the original Brave and Bold team and have seen this team from afar when they showed up in issues of Justice League and suchlike. I've always read good things about the comic and the previews of this movie looked intriguing.
Now for some comments but loaded with SPOILER WARNINGS.
The GOOD - Loved Margot Robbie and she of course steals this movie. A beautiful and toxic villain who never becomes a hero but only ever a protagonist, she seems the most like what a real sociopath might be like in this scenario. They cheated with Deadshot, making Will Smith's rendition a bit too friendly for my tastes given his past. There's a chummy ease with him too soon in this flick but I do love his visuals and the shooting if fun in a gaming sort of way. The other baddies were dandy, especially the reluctant El Diablo. Katanna looked cool, but alas that's about it. Nice textures often in the movie but its darkness hurt the clarity of some of the fight scenes. Loved Batman, wanted more, and the Flash cameo was a dandy.
The BAD - The movie begins several times and frankly got me a bit annoyed since it seemed to set up its villainous heroes over and over again. Frankly it felt like one structure was decided upon and later a decision was made to make Will Smith and the beautiful Margot Robbie the features (they already were) and so undercut their own kick off to the movie. Bad beats to begin. Then we get a very very convoluted set up, but I'll forgive that since we have a bunch of main characters to establish. But the almost immediate twist making former member Enchantress the villain of the piece threw it all into the masher since it had almost no context to reside. I'd never seen her as anything but a villain, so any sense of a twist was remote and indirect. The emotional connection to June Moon was not strong enough to make this turn valuable to me as a viewer. Frankly this was the second movie in this franchise, not the first, so it always felt I came in at the middle of something.
The UGLY - And let us talk villains since I had to look up Incubus to even find out his name. That sort of stuff makes me mad when I watch a movie and maybe I missed it in this one, but I never got nearly enough set up for the relationship between the Enchantress and Incubus and why they do what they do. We needed a few moments to fully confirm their past so that their future motivations made more sense. Amanda Waller was sure strong enough but her cold blooded nature was too much when she gunned down her own men. That's beyond hard, that's villainy. I got tired of the Joker, there was too much of an attempt to make him relevant to a plot he clearly had not much to do with. The needed to use Joker's screen time to establish Slipknot along with the other Squad members. His cannon fodder role might be all to apparent to fans but for us in the audience of the movie you might as well has put a sign on his neck when he shows up at the last minute and dies almost immediately. Terrible terrible terrible.
SPOILERS OVER.
I wanted to really enjoy Suicide Squad, expected to really love it based on the previews, but frankly it lost me by the end finale which sadly reminded me way too much of The Ghost Buster movies for me to really feel that the grim and gritty nature of the set up had paid off. They seemed to not really know how to end the movie they set up and the pacing and blocking was off and left me confused a lot of the time.
As the third installment in the the DC movie saga this one does show what else is happening in the world of Superman and Batman, but sadly I was not as impressed as I wanted to be.
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