"Suicide Squad" review

Leave the petitions to shut this blog down at the door.

"Suicide Squad" may very well be a microcosm of everything wrong with Hollywood’s practice of allowing executives and mandates to create films for marketing rather than the artists that they actually bother to hire for their actual assembly.

Intending to play out as a superhero themed dirty dozen featuring a host of super villains united against a threat to their common goal of survival, using the struggle as a means to study the human condition by questioning our preconceptions of human evil, the end result feels more like a gambit for the money attracted by the perceived balls to the wall insanity and high concept bizarreness of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and its unexpected popularity with those both fond of and ambivalent towards the superhero genre.

Unfortunately for Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment, their panic driven course correction incited by the backlash of “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” have robbed the movie of a somber tone and darker sensibility that probably would have served it far better than the suffocating, pretentious, faux-philosophical droning of that film.

Even sadder is that poor David Ayer, try as he might, manages to do both visions of “Suicide Squad” justice but fails to make them both work at the same time.

I can’t even truly nail down where to begin on this one. I really can’t.

“Suicide Squad” is a perplexing, perfect storm of creative and production contradictions that never meld into a confident show but also manages to not bore.

It piles the schlock on so fast and so clumsily that it quickly becomes a mess that is almost perversely fascinating to watch, yet pull a 180 degree turn that humanizes, justifies, and endears everything that it introduces just long enough to have you asking for more before completely dropping the ball again as if it forgot how to catch the damn thing to begin with after marathon running and super leaping to catch it gracefully with a single hand.

Too polished to be a B-movie, too sloppy to justify all of the production that went into it, yet it never lets go of your attention.

For every great thoroughly developed piece of the equation, there’s another that slips hard and a third that leaves you questioning why they even bothered to set it up. Will Smith and Margot Robbie’s renditions of Deadshot and Harley Quinn are easily the scene stealers of the entire film. Their motivations, psychoses, and overall personalities are the most well rounded of the entire ensemble and regardless of whether or not there may be an element of nepotism in this due to the star power of their actors, the money was well spent as the two perform well both separately and together.

The excellence of their performances almost manages to shine through the complete lack of detail to the rest of the overstuffed cast of characters, ranging from the unique but underutilized Jay Hernandez as El Diablo, a pyromancing super human that brings the emotional and philosophical complexity to the film that it desperately wants to explore, to the Jared Leto’s erratic take on the Joker that feels like an attempt at chasing Ledger’s ticks but comes off more as a bad Johnny Depp impression.

Everybody else is left to collect the easiest checks of their entire career, including Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, whom the film never manages to figure out if he’s a bland offset to the more colorful characters of the movie worthy of being on their mission or a flat out joke character whose almost aware of how lame he is, as well as the characters of Katana and Killer Croc, both of which say and do so little that I practically forgot that they were even in the movie until the camera accidentally pans over them in action shots.

It also becomes abundantly clear that Marvel isn’t the only studio with issues crafting decent villains.

Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor may have been one more problematic element of an immensely problematic production but what personality he manages makes him look like Heath Ledger’s Joker compared to Cara Delevingne’s embarrassing Enchantress, whose pitifully one note presentation isn’t helped by her actress’ clearly bored performance and a design aesthetic more concerned with showing off her skin and sensuality than actually leaving an impression.

By all accounts “Suicide Squad” is a top to bottom mess in almost every territory; the writing is thin, the climax becomes cliché, too much time is spent on too many characters when, of the 8 characters comprising of the team, only about 3 or 4 actually matter to the plot, and above all else, the film just can’t figure out what it wants to be. This movie is so clumsy, that its first 15 minutes is just a briefing on who all of the characters are with fully produced flashback sequences and character title cards.

The heavy drama and philosophical debate on the worth of criminal lives is just too undercut by the underlying comedy wanting to liberally borrow from a better made alternative that it wants so desperately to be that it even manages to slide in an entry from its soundtrack.

Yet despite everything labeling the film the outright disaster that it very possibly is, the craftsmanship on what matters actually manages to make it somewhat likable.

Ayer may not be able to properly integrate the more reflective material with the outright comedy the studio wants to push but he does manage to do both pretty well. The one liners and ribbing popped out by the cast feels about as natural as their eventual contemplation on how low one can go for mass murders and sociopaths to find something morally unacceptable, if such a line even exists.

“Suicide Squad” is not a good movie at all and occasionally flirts with “so bad, it’s ironically entertaining” territory. However for every major screw up made, it hits a high point so pitch perfectly that it can’t be written off as a total failure, evening out to guilty pleasure status.

I never exactly believed that this movie was destined for greatness but I was hoping for something better than this. For now, the DC Extended Universe shall continue to wait on its first strong feature. That having been said, with a definitive plot, areas of noteworthy performances,  and clearly defined characters, even if they aren’t taken full advantage of, this is a step in the right direction from where things were.

For better or worse, DC is improving.

4 Mistah Jay’s out of 10