Geek Errant Reviews: Suicide Squad

The DC cinematic universe isn’t saved yet. Suicide Squad is better than Batman V Superman, sure. But not a whole lot better.

It’s a character piece first and foremost, with some very well acted characters. Just a shame the script and production don’t match up.

 


The opening sequences where the audience is introduced to some of the characters in their natural habitats were pretty good. Mostly. Deadshot had a very entertaining introduction showing off his no nonsense character traits, plus his action skills. Will Smith is delightful, and does a lot of work carrying this film.
Captain Boomerang gets the first real onscreen footage of The Flash to boost people’s knowledge of the character and thereby justify his own presence in the film at all.
Even Harley Quinn gets introduced pretty well. Her life of crime in Gotham is hinted at, (and a confirmation that Joker and Harley murdered Robin) mostly in relation to the Joker, though I’d have preferred that she gets to demonstrate her own character, rather than being reacted to by other people.
Even Amanda Waller is introduced impeccably, with her completely holding her own against all these assassins and criminals, by sheer dint of charisma in her cool command of a frosty dinner with the government agents.

All of the characters are very well portrayed by their actors with Jay Hernandez as Diablo and Cara Delavigne as Dr June Moon/The Enchantress really giving sterling performances when the script and direction allows. Diablo gets the only consistent arc of the film, a pyrokinetic pacifist suffering from loss and afraid of the damage his powers can do. He eventually learns how his powers can help his new family, and goes through a whole redemption arc. It’s pretty great, though I can see people’s point in being disappointed that the first Latino superhero is codified as a gangster.
Delavigne as Dr June Moon is stellar, a deeply unsettling portrayal of a woman who knows that at any moment she could lose control of her body and do awful things. The special effects on The Enchantress are excellent, her body being hidden by dark muck and shadows. There’s a fantastic scene where The Enchantress takes over by clasping Dr June’s hands from inside the body, and just flipping her inside out.
Then, as with most of the movie, it takes a dive in the second half. They move to an ethereal mystical lightness motif, with delavigne reduced to having her words distorted through a filter and flailing her arms mysteriously on set. Especially in contrast to the spooky, The Ring style depiction before, this is disappointing.

Speaking of bad CGI, the less said about the other villain, the golem-esque brother of The Enchantress, the better.
The issue is in that the film has no clue when to stop introducing these characters and just make the plot happen. Deadshot gets multiple opportunities to showcase his skills before the mission even begins.
Some characters get nothing at all, like Katana, who just turns up out of nowhere before the mission starts, her cutaway exposition scene literally happening five seconds after she first appears.

Mostly, the movie just has terrible pacing and a very confusing structure. The build up to the suicide mission feels like it takes half the movie. Then the team crash lands in the city (and I’m still not sure how, because they get shot down, and the enemies don’t seem to use guns) has a couple of random battles while they make their way to the plot marker, then the twist about the mission is revealed. Joker interferes, the team discovers the truth about The enchantress and their mission, they split up, they get back together through choice and go fight enchantress in one big happy family fight.

The latter half of the movie is rushed, and has some really strange moments that just don’t help the film at all. At one point the team is told they’re free to go, and Captain Boomerang instantly splits. This makes sense in universe. He’s been running off at every opportunity. The rest of the group have a change of heart and go save the world.

Except then Boomerang just appears in the next group scene, with no explanation.

(I will not accept the answer, “oh, boomerangs always come back).

It’s like they just forgot he had left in the script. It smacks of slapdash carelessness.
I get the film has had production problems and was written in six weeks in the first place, but these are problems that were also in Batman v Superman.

All the way through this, Jared Leto and his entirely boring depiction of the Joker are engaging in a horribly wasted sub-plot about the Joker wanting Harley back. There’s a real sense of potential in the b plot here. Harley’s whole arc is coded in terms of her finding her own sense of person and being able to find a new family in the squad. She gets shown being manipulated, tortured, used and then abandoned by the Joker. So it makes sense that when the squad starts coming together, she would join the new family.
Literally, when she’s shown her heart’s desire, it’s not just Joker specifically, she wants a family. And that’s a cool plot resolution, have Harley choose the new family over the abusive old one. Especially when it seems Joker is dead.
Except that doesn’t happen. The end of the movie has Joker coming out of nowhere, breaking into the most high security prison, and taking her with him. Because Joker makes money, and Harley makes money, so character consistency dies to production needs.

It’s just another example of how this movie is disappointing. I would love to see more of these characters in another setting. In fact, the opening sequences for each character were my favourite part. They showed that there was a whole world beyond the scope of these two movies, actually doing some background work on the DC Expanded Universe. But this movie as a whole is just messy and confused and dull. There’s only so often a studio can blame production problems and scripts before you have to start looking at the people setting deadlines. Maybe now’s the time to start.