Review: Suicide Squad...

DC Blows Itself Up (Again)

Between Trump, Brexit and the DC cinematic universe, it's been a banner year for people who clearly do not have a plan. After Batman v Superman was met with howling derision from critics and face-saving conspiracy theories from the internet, DC's Suicide Squad offered a chance for course correction.

Forget the scowling faces of BvS, we were told, this was going to be fun! A super-powered Dirty Dozen popping with colour, herded by David Ayer, who's well experienced with in-the-thick-of-it masculine ensembles like Fury and End of Watch. What we actually got is another stunning miscalculation, an overbearing tonal mangle bearing the obvious imprints of anxious studio interference.

Warner Brothers have, incredibly, responded to one badly constructed shitshow by releasing a second. At this point the best way to summarise their creative strategy is that gif of Sideshow Bob slamming his face into an endless series of rakes.

As in the comics, the Squad is a government-backed taskforce of incarcerated villains sent on risky missions in exchange for lenient sentencing and prison perks. It's a post-Superman world and Agent Waller (a stone-cold Viola Davis) is building the anti-Avengers, kept in line by Joel Kinnaman's Rick Flagg, a soldier with as much personality as his name suggests.

The team's de facto leader is Will Smith's Deadshot, whose superpower is being really, really, really good a shooting guns. Margot Robbie is Harley Quinn, with a few loose screws and a mallet she likes to whack things with, bouncing with verbal tics. There's also Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), an Aussie bank robber whose abilities are totally irrelevant (why didn't they make this a heist movie?), morally troubled firestarter Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, buried behind makeup).

On the periphery is Katana, Japanese girl which a sword who barely speaks, and the Enchantress, who goes rogue to provide the bad guy to the bad guys. Did I mention these were the bad guys? Because the movie does. A lot. They're craaaazy! Like Jared Leto's Joker, it's trying much too hard.

Suicide Squad is a promising concept squandered by sloppy storytelling. Because most of us are coming to this roster fresh it's hard to replicate the dissonant thrill of villains as antagonists, and the film tries to cheat its way out with backstory infodumps and Street Fighter stat cards, falling over itself to introduce and re-introduce characters.

For all the showboating about "the worst of the worst", there is remarkably little villainy on display, and so the moral arc towards doing the right thing doesn't land. And apart from Harley's quippy routine the bad guys don't seem to be having much of a good time.

The crew is called into action by an attack on Midway City, where Enchantress and her crappy CGI Aztec god brother thing are trying to destroy the world with a sky portal cliche. The mission, which takes up about two acts, has no memorable action set-pieces and looks like someone smeared lard over the lens. There's a scene before the final fight where the squad abandon their brief and just grab a drink at a bar, shooting the shit.

The betrayal that gets them there doesn't make sense and the dialogue is stilted and the stakes are non-existent, but even then there's a glimmer there of what the movie could have been. You realise that apart from Smith and Robbie, who prove their movie star worth, these characters have barely spoken to each other the whole movie. Between the complicated plotting and backstories and introductions and end-of-the-world destruction and boring shootouts that go on forever and Batfleck cameos I guess there just wasn't enough time to work on the basics. Better luck next time, guys.

Conor Smyth is editor at belfastfilm.net.

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