Suicide Squad director David Ayer and the folks behind the DCEU achieved something I didn't think was possible -- they made a 90s blockbuster in 2016. Perhaps with the reemergence of late sequels like Jurassic World and Independence Day: Resurgence, I shouldn't have been surprised, but nevertheless, the refurbished day-glo vibe of the third entry in D.C. Comics' nascent cinematic universe caught me off guard. I anticipated a copycat production that aimed to match Guardians of the Galaxy's quippy "bad guys gone good" atmosphere, but I didn't imagine it would be filtered through a lens from twenty years in the past.
All the elements of the Clinton-era blockbuster are there though. Will Smith gives the standard Will Smith performance, one that could have easily been transplanted from Men In Black or, heaven help us, Wild Wild West. There are dry cool action movie lines aplenty. And there's a cartoony, almost surreal vibe to the entire film, that makes Suicide Squad seem divorced from the attempts at realism embraced in Batman Begins and closer to the cornucopia of neon camp in Batman Forever.
That doesn't make Suicide Squad a good film. To the contrary, the movie has severe editing and pacing problems; its characters are laughably thin, and its internal logic waxes and wanes from scene to scene. Like its predecessor, Batman v. Superman, the film is a mess, but it's at least a much more interesting mess. For whatever the mishmashed psuedo-philosophical appeal of Zach Snyder's prior Superman flicks held, the films have a certain antiseptic quality to them, a sense that this is all taking place in a gray scale, emotionally detached world. Suicide Squad is full of color, literally and figuratively. It's profoundly weird; it bounces between tones, characters, and stories with schizophrenic abandon, and it doesn't exactly work, but by god, at least the thing has an identity.
Unfortunately, it's an identity that finds its closest companion in Poochie, the x-tremely cool new dog soulless studio executives shoehorned into The Simpsons's show within a show, Itchy & Scratchy in a abortive attempt to make it appeal once more to the kids of today. Suicide Squad feels cooked up to much the same end, with a creeping sense that the executive at Warner Bros. tried to put Captain Planet and the collective inventory of Hot Topic in a blender and came up with this transparent attempt to be as hip and edgy as possible. The result is a film that makes the cardinal sin of coolness -- it's painfully trying to hard at it, in a tin-eared fashion.
That effort at tone does at least distinguish Suicide Squad from its fellow superhero flick brethren. That's not enough, however, for it to escape the pitfalls of poor pacing, structure, and characterization, that doom the effort from the start. The film moves like an old car, revving up and seemingly about to shift into second gear, before stalling out halfway through the trip and having to be resuscitated yet again every half an hour or so. The flm opens with nearly a half hour of a straight up, exposition-filled introduction to the characters, which in keeping with the powerpoint presentation Wonder Woman watched in BvS, seems to suggest that the DCEU is wholly incapable of bringing new characters into the fold organically, but rather has to spend precious, momentum-killing minutes out-and-out describing who these people are and what they're like in the world's capiest Miss America pageant.
The pacing and structure doesn't improve from there. Our heroes (or rather villains, a point with which Suicide Squad beats the audience over the head with a spray-painted 2x4), are then suddenly thrown into a life and death assault on major metropolitan skyscraper with supernatural crud swirling around it. From there, the movie vacillates between choppy, empty action scenes punctuated with brief moments of downtime featuring insipid attempts to add to our understanding of these characters, with a tacked on Joker caper taking place in parallel, which never feels of a piece with the rest of the story. The movie has a herky-jerky quality to it, never quite becoming a unified whole so much as a series of vaguely related scenes that feel more episodic than propulsive.
That might be excusable if those breaks in the action were better used or populated with characters who felt like real, albeit exaggerated people instead of stick figures with various cliches and stereotypes attached to them. Again, Will Smith plays every Will Smith character you've ever seen in a big budget Will Smith movie. Gone is the actor who transformed himself for Ali or found the humanity even in reheated schmaltz like The Pursuit of Happyness, and back is the actor's now tired, smart-aleky shtick, replete with a generic tragic backstory, sad-eyed moppet, and for inexplicable reasons, the wardrobe of Shaft. By contrast, Viola Davis offers one of the film's few bright spots character-wise. Her take on tough-as-nails Amanda Waller can only go so far in rising above the material, but she forcefully conveys Waller's harsh pragmatism and steel in a way that make me hope she gets to reprise the role in a better film.
Nearly everyone else in the picture is a one-line stock character or worse, a mildly offensive stereotype, each of whom barely gets enough character development to justify their existence as anything but set-dressing. The remainder of the ensemble is reduced to a broad type: generic military guy, cliched stoic Asian sword-wielder, stereotypical black guy who demands access to BET. And that doesn't even include Captain Cannon Fodder, who gets a perfunctory, one-line introduction late in the film and dies ten minutes later. Even El Diablo, one of the film's few attempts to give one of the members of the titular Suicide Squad other than Deadshot and Harley Quinn some real personality, is a cringe-worthy Mexican stereotype who gets a "too little, too late" tragic monologue in the last third of the film. Not only do these characters get too little time in the film for the audience to actually get to know them or care about their fates, but Suicide Squad worsens the situation by effectively declaring them a family without having earned that distinction, leaving them as a group of thinly-drawn baddies who suddenly love and are willing to die for one another simply because the film says so.
That doesn't even take into account Suicide Squad's bizarre villain, Enchantress, whose superpower is apparently smoke cloud-adjacent sexy dancing. She's an odd choice for an antagonist in terms of tone, and her attempt to take on the protagonists in hand-to-hand combat despite her magical abilities, drips with the narrative and financial necessity of a third-act fight sequence. When she's not attacking Waller's impressed mercenaries in flavorless battles via her version of the Putty Patrol, she's barking banalities in a faux-forgotten tongue amid the usual CGI tumult. to rapidly diminishing returns.
The only two characters to truly stand out (give or take Waller) are the two that gave fans the most reason for concern going into the film. Harley Quinn is the biggest victim of the Poochie-esque characterization that plagues Suicide Squad, but Margot Robbie commits to the performance and breathes life into the character, bringing an extraverted, but pathos-laden spark to Quinn, as Paul Dini's original creation from Batman: The Animated Series is made flesh. The character is saddled with ridiculous dialogue, an opaque, wonky backstory, and the brazenly sexist way in which she's framed within the film (the Community line, "What is your name, Exploitia?" comes to mind), but Robbie makes the best of it, imbuing the character with the fractured wit and wackiness that have made Harley the best addition to Batman's rogues gallery in decades.
At the same time, I didn't necessarily love Jared Leto's Joker, but I was at least intrigued by him. The DCEU, almost by necessity, needed to go in a new direction with the character to step out of the long shadow cast by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Leto's Joker, true to the unexpected throwback vibe of the film, is half-Jim Carrey's Riddler and half-Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter. We only get the occasional intrusion from him here, but it's enough to pique the viewer's interest without letting the necessarily outsized character wear out his welcome. The take is not without its flaws. Joker's laugh doesn't really work (it's a little too Penguin-esque), and the hints of the shared history between him and Harley we get are muddled at best and off-putting at worst, but there's a distinct, outlandish, even sexual vibe to the character that immediately distinguishes the Clown Prince of Crime as something legitimately different in a film trying with all its might to be trendily off-beat and quirky.
And yet for all those strained attempts to be in-your-face and totally eXtreme, for all the reams of terrible dialogue destined to be laughed at instead of laughed with, and for all the hastily thrown together pop songs that start out fun but quickly feel gimmicky and forced, there's one superlative sequence that shows what Suicide Squad might have been. Late in the film, the antagonist uses her mystical swaying powers to give the subset of the characters that matter a glimpse of what they truly want in this world. These scenes embrace the true tragedy of the movie's protagonists, and touch on the worthy idea at this film's core which ends up so poorly realized during the rest of this film's run time -- that this is a group of broken people struggling for what they want but know they can't have, united in their pain and buoyed by the chance to commiserate and achieve something together.
That germ of emotional and narrative stakes is lost in the onslaught of the stop-and-start storytelling, the botched attempts to make the films characters as memorable as they are meme-able, and the numerous narrative shortcuts the film takes, but at least it's there. Suicide Squad is a peculiar translation of the excesses and eccentricities of 90s superhero filmmaking realized in odd detail two decades hence. For better or worse, there's a Schumacher-esque flair to the film, a sense of unrestrained but also unrefined colorfulness that permeates the picture. But for this film out of time, that bears its heart-on-its-sleeve weirdness proudly, the weirdness is only bleached skin-deep.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-08-16T13:41:01Z
Suicide Squad director David Ayer and the folks behind the DCEU achieved something I didn't think was possible -- they made a 90s blockbuster in 2016. Perhaps with the reemergence of late sequels like Jurassic World and Independence Day: Resurgence, I shouldn't have been surprised, but nevertheless, the refurbished day-glo vibe of the third entry in D.C. Comics' nascent cinematic universe caught me off guard. I anticipated a copycat production that aimed to match Guardians of the Galaxy's quippy "bad guys gone good" atmosphere, but I didn't imagine it would be filtered through a lens from twenty years in the past.
All the elements of the Clinton-era blockbuster are there though. Will Smith gives the standard Will Smith performance, one that could have easily been transplanted from Men In Black or, heaven help us, Wild Wild West. There are dry cool action movie lines aplenty. And there's a cartoony, almost surreal vibe to the entire film, that makes Suicide Squad seem divorced from the attempts at realism embraced in Batman Begins and closer to the cornucopia of neon camp in Batman Forever.
That doesn't make Suicide Squad a good film. To the contrary, the movie has severe editing and pacing problems; its characters are laughably thin, and its internal logic waxes and wanes from scene to scene. Like its predecessor, Batman v. Superman, the film is a mess, but it's at least a much more interesting mess. For whatever the mishmashed psuedo-philosophical appeal of Zach Snyder's prior Superman flicks held, the films have a certain antiseptic quality to them, a sense that this is all taking place in a gray scale, emotionally detached world. Suicide Squad is full of color, literally and figuratively. It's profoundly weird; it bounces between tones, characters, and stories with schizophrenic abandon, and it doesn't exactly work, but by god, at least the thing has an identity.
Unfortunately, it's an identity that finds its closest companion in Poochie, the x-tremely cool new dog soulless studio executives shoehorned into The Simpsons's show within a show, Itchy & Scratchy in a abortive attempt to make it appeal once more to the kids of today. Suicide Squad feels cooked up to much the same end, with a creeping sense that the executive at Warner Bros. tried to put Captain Planet and the collective inventory of Hot Topic in a blender and came up with this transparent attempt to be as hip and edgy as possible. The result is a film that makes the cardinal sin of coolness -- it's painfully trying to hard at it, in a tin-eared fashion.
That effort at tone does at least distinguish Suicide Squad from its fellow superhero flick brethren. That's not enough, however, for it to escape the pitfalls of poor pacing, structure, and characterization, that doom the effort from the start. The film moves like an old car, revving up and seemingly about to shift into second gear, before stalling out halfway through the trip and having to be resuscitated yet again every half an hour or so. The flm opens with nearly a half hour of a straight up, exposition-filled introduction to the characters, which in keeping with the powerpoint presentation Wonder Woman watched in BvS, seems to suggest that the DCEU is wholly incapable of bringing new characters into the fold organically, but rather has to spend precious, momentum-killing minutes out-and-out describing who these people are and what they're like in the world's capiest Miss America pageant.
The pacing and structure doesn't improve from there. Our heroes (or rather villains, a point with which Suicide Squad beats the audience over the head with a spray-painted 2x4), are then suddenly thrown into a life and death assault on major metropolitan skyscraper with supernatural crud swirling around it. From there, the movie vacillates between choppy, empty action scenes punctuated with brief moments of downtime featuring insipid attempts to add to our understanding of these characters, with a tacked on Joker caper taking place in parallel, which never feels of a piece with the rest of the story. The movie has a herky-jerky quality to it, never quite becoming a unified whole so much as a series of vaguely related scenes that feel more episodic than propulsive.
That might be excusable if those breaks in the action were better used or populated with characters who felt like real, albeit exaggerated people instead of stick figures with various cliches and stereotypes attached to them. Again, Will Smith plays every Will Smith character you've ever seen in a big budget Will Smith movie. Gone is the actor who transformed himself for Ali or found the humanity even in reheated schmaltz like The Pursuit of Happyness, and back is the actor's now tired, smart-aleky shtick, replete with a generic tragic backstory, sad-eyed moppet, and for inexplicable reasons, the wardrobe of Shaft. By contrast, Viola Davis offers one of the film's few bright spots character-wise. Her take on tough-as-nails Amanda Waller can only go so far in rising above the material, but she forcefully conveys Waller's harsh pragmatism and steel in a way that make me hope she gets to reprise the role in a better film.
Nearly everyone else in the picture is a one-line stock character or worse, a mildly offensive stereotype, each of whom barely gets enough character development to justify their existence as anything but set-dressing. The remainder of the ensemble is reduced to a broad type: generic military guy, cliched stoic Asian sword-wielder, stereotypical black guy who demands access to BET. And that doesn't even include Captain Cannon Fodder, who gets a perfunctory, one-line introduction late in the film and dies ten minutes later. Even El Diablo, one of the film's few attempts to give one of the members of the titular Suicide Squad other than Deadshot and Harley Quinn some real personality, is a cringe-worthy Mexican stereotype who gets a "too little, too late" tragic monologue in the last third of the film. Not only do these characters get too little time in the film for the audience to actually get to know them or care about their fates, but Suicide Squad worsens the situation by effectively declaring them a family without having earned that distinction, leaving them as a group of thinly-drawn baddies who suddenly love and are willing to die for one another simply because the film says so.
That doesn't even take into account Suicide Squad's bizarre villain, Enchantress, whose superpower is apparently smoke cloud-adjacent sexy dancing. She's an odd choice for an antagonist in terms of tone, and her attempt to take on the protagonists in hand-to-hand combat despite her magical abilities, drips with the narrative and financial necessity of a third-act fight sequence. When she's not attacking Waller's impressed mercenaries in flavorless battles via her version of the Putty Patrol, she's barking banalities in a faux-forgotten tongue amid the usual CGI tumult. to rapidly diminishing returns.
The only two characters to truly stand out (give or take Waller) are the two that gave fans the most reason for concern going into the film. Harley Quinn is the biggest victim of the Poochie-esque characterization that plagues Suicide Squad, but Margot Robbie commits to the performance and breathes life into the character, bringing an extraverted, but pathos-laden spark to Quinn, as Paul Dini's original creation from Batman: The Animated Series is made flesh. The character is saddled with ridiculous dialogue, an opaque, wonky backstory, and the brazenly sexist way in which she's framed within the film (the Community line, "What is your name, Exploitia?" comes to mind), but Robbie makes the best of it, imbuing the character with the fractured wit and wackiness that have made Harley the best addition to Batman's rogues gallery in decades.
At the same time, I didn't necessarily love Jared Leto's Joker, but I was at least intrigued by him. The DCEU, almost by necessity, needed to go in a new direction with the character to step out of the long shadow cast by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Leto's Joker, true to the unexpected throwback vibe of the film, is half-Jim Carrey's Riddler and half-Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter. We only get the occasional intrusion from him here, but it's enough to pique the viewer's interest without letting the necessarily outsized character wear out his welcome. The take is not without its flaws. Joker's laugh doesn't really work (it's a little too Penguin-esque), and the hints of the shared history between him and Harley we get are muddled at best and off-putting at worst, but there's a distinct, outlandish, even sexual vibe to the character that immediately distinguishes the Clown Prince of Crime as something legitimately different in a film trying with all its might to be trendily off-beat and quirky.
And yet for all those strained attempts to be in-your-face and totally eXtreme, for all the reams of terrible dialogue destined to be laughed at instead of laughed with, and for all the hastily thrown together pop songs that start out fun but quickly feel gimmicky and forced, there's one superlative sequence that shows what Suicide Squad might have been. Late in the film, the antagonist uses her mystical swaying powers to give the subset of the characters that matter a glimpse of what they truly want in this world. These scenes embrace the true tragedy of the movie's protagonists, and touch on the worthy idea at this film's core which ends up so poorly realized during the rest of this film's run time -- that this is a group of broken people struggling for what they want but know they can't have, united in their pain and buoyed by the chance to commiserate and achieve something together.
That germ of emotional and narrative stakes is lost in the onslaught of the stop-and-start storytelling, the botched attempts to make the films characters as memorable as they are meme-able, and the numerous narrative shortcuts the film takes, but at least it's there. Suicide Squad is a peculiar translation of the excesses and eccentricities of 90s superhero filmmaking realized in odd detail two decades hence. For better or worse, there's a Schumacher-esque flair to the film, a sense of unrestrained but also unrefined colorfulness that permeates the picture. But for this film out of time, that bears its heart-on-its-sleeve weirdness proudly, the weirdness is only bleached skin-deep.