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Suicide Squad Review: “It Isn’t Terrible”

Published

10 years ago

August 6, 2016

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Lack of Team Dynamics

♦ Tripwire’s editor-in-chief JOEL MEADOWS grabbed his long range rifle and his deadly nanites and took a look at Warner Bros’s latest attempt to kick start the DC Cinematic Universe, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad…

Suicide Squad

Director: David Ayer;

Stars: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Jared Leto, Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez

If you read a number of the reviews from places like Variety and Forbes this week, you would go in expecting a disaster of the magnitude of Fox’s horrible Fantastic Four from 2015. David Ayer’s loose adaptation of DC’s gang of psychotic supervillains has had a little bit of a checkered production history and when Zach Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice had a respectable but disappointing box office when it was released in the spring, suddenly the onus was on this film to do Captain America: Civil War numbers and really engage with the cinemagoing public.

So is it an unmitigated disaster or an enjoyable summer superhero blockbuster? Answer: a little from column A and also from column B. It starts very strongly, introducing the gang that Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is assembling to protect the world from super-powered threats. Smith, getting top billing, is assassin-for-hire Floyd Lawton, aka Deadshot. Margot Robbie is the beautiful but deranged Harley Quinn, incarcerated girlfriend of her soulmate The Joker, played by Jared Leto. We also have super-powered Hispanic gangbanger El Diablo (Jay Fernandez), Aussie robber Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), scaly supervillain Killer Croc (played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and disgraced US army officer Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) who is there to keep them all in check. We get a couple of cameos from Batman (Ben Affleck) and The Flash (Ezra Miller) which are fun.

The big problem with it is that it suffers from a lack of cohesion and while there are some nice character moments with a few decent performances from the likes of Leto and Robbie, the villain here (a former member of the Squad) looks like she has stepped out of a late 1980s electronic music video. The sheer quantity of central characters is also to its detriment, making it feel rushed at times. Ayer’s direction isn’t bad but tonally, just like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad would have been improved by more moments of levity. They are also trying to pack too much into one film, like Batman v Superman, and so, at times, it suffers from Spider-man 3 syndrome. In addition, the soundtrack does feel a little dated at times.

There might have been a very entertaining and enjoyable film somewhere here, but it would have taken a director and a screenwriter with a lighter touch to really bring it out. It isn’t terrible: Robbie is very watchable as Quinn, Leto is mesmerising on screen as The Joker and the rest of the cast are pretty decent. But it does feel like a wasted opportunity where it really could have been so much more. So let’s file this under frustrating.

JOEL MEADOWS

Suicide Squad is out now in cinemas in the UK and US