Suicide Squad Lives Up to its Title

         When director David Ayer was first announcing Suicide Squad he noted in comparison to Marvel that DC has the better villains. Which is true. The Batman Rogues Gallery alone consists of half the most memorable greats in the genre. A few of them even appear in this movie about a team of villains forced to work together to bring down a greater evil. Which sounds awesome. What could go wrong?
          Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) as a solution to alien or terrorist threats, assembles a team of dangerous super-criminals who if they don’t die on missions and succeed, will be given an alleviated sentence. This team includes hitman Deadshot (Will Smith), crazed former therapist Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Australian master-thief Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), and the reptilian Killer Croc (Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje) among others. They are led on their first mission by Rick Flag (Joel Kinnamen) who has a personal connection that may endanger it.
          It’s important to know that Suicide Squad is not the movie it was advertised as. The team is tasked with facing a very supernatural enemy which most of them, with the exception of Diablo (Jay Hernandez) are pretty ill-equipped to deal with. And it also doesn’t help that this story never grabs you, feeling very generic and derivative a lot of the time. In addition to that, the exposition and general structure is really poor. The pacing in the first quarter is all over the place and the presence of the Joker (Jared Leto) in this movie is clearly an afterthought.
          Maybe the biggest issue with this character is that he’s given little screen-time for a debut outing. Which with a villain of this calibre is not a good thing. And what we do see of this Joker is pretty disappointing. He’s more of a psychotic drug-dealer than an insane criminal mastermind. There’s none of the meticulousness or sense of the humour that the character is known for throughout his incarnations and on top of all that, his role in this movie is pointless except to explore the backstory of and provide conflict for Harley Quinn. As for Harley, Robbie’s terrific hitting the right mixture of deranged and sexy (though at times there’s a little too much fan service). The character’s personality and inflections are spot on. But her arc is really irritating as it’s all concerned with her unhealthy romance with the Joker. Not only is it likely to annoy fans of both characters, but Harley’s dependence on him really takes away from her own identity and doesn’t allow her any growth whatsoever. 
          But what about the rest of the suicide squad? Some don’t make an impression (the one you think is going to die first does). Deadshot is pretty cool, but he is just Will Smith being Will Smith. Nevertheless, he carries a lot of the film. Flag is the typical boring leader and Cara Delevingne overplays Enchantress quite a bit. Killer Croc is alright, his make-up is great. The biggest surprise though is Captain Boomerang. Jai Courtney up till now has given almost exclusively bad performances, but he’s a real revelation here, playing a very fun character with a number of enjoyable quirks. Waller is pretty by-the-book but Davis is great as usual. I like how the movie emphasize she’s just as the bad as the team she’s building. 
          The action scenes are good, Deadshot in particular gets an impressive one early on. But the visual effects are pretty unimaginative. The set-up the main villain creates for themselves is closer to the Gozer scene from Ghostbusters than the recent reboot. And some effects can be obnoxious. A number of the Joker-Harley sequences are really overdone -like the moment where Joker cradles her in a vat of bleach. And one of the climactic scenes is shot in gratuitous slow motion. The soundtrack is great but it’s edited incredibly poorly. So many sequences that don’t need it are accompanied by pop music. It’s trying to give off that erratic upbeat energy that Guardians of the Galaxy did so well, but the songs can be really distracting and are trying way too hard to fit the films’ identity. The costumes are really good though.
          Suicide Squad lives up to its title a little too much. It constantly feels like it’s trying to prove itself with its over-ambitious story and tie-ins to the DC universe. Where it’s best is in its character interactions which I would have liked to have seen more of. I also would have liked the plot the trailers seemed to imply -that the squad is being assembled to take down the Joker (it certainly would have given Harley a more interesting conflict). But as is, it’s pretty disappointing. 
          It looks like DC’s last hope is Wonder Woman. Fortunately the Wonder Woman trailer looks amazing. Unfortunately, so did Suicide Squad’s.