For being a bunch of bad guys, as they repeatedly remind each other and the audience, the supervillains of Suicide Squad sure do act a lot like their do-gooder counterparts.
They trade the same punchy banter as they square off against hordes of faceless goons in eruptions of bloodless PG-13 violence. They rehash the same superficial conversations about evil and justice in a world becoming more populated by “metahumans,” or “inhumans,” or whatever comic book phrase for “people with weird powers” this particular movie studio has the rights to use. To save the day, the members of the ragtag posse must set aside their differences to defeat a supernatural final boss destroying a city with all the computer-generated passion of a video game.
In other words, Suicide Squad, with its unconvincing attempts at subversion and try-hard coolness, is a semi-competent but unexceptional genre film in a genre that’s becoming increasingly rote and bloated. It’s much easier to endure than the plodding Batman v Superman, which further introduced us to the DC Comics Universe this film inhabits, but the seams of its focus-grouped construction show more clearly.
That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have its splash pages, its exciting moments possessed by a certain comic book elan. Unfortunately, almost all of those come early on, as our stars squad up.
Viola Davis, better than she needs to be, is Amanda Waller, an amoral government spook assembling a team for off-the-books missions. Most of her recruits are already in the same prison, and willing (with some coercion) to work in exchange for time off their sentences. Stylish flashbacks zip by to show how they wound up behind bars.
Professional hitman and model NRA member Floyd “Deadshot” Lawton, proficient with an arsenal of guns that makes the Second Amendment look quaint, is established as the film’s faint moral conscience. Partly because he’s played by Will Smith, as charismatic as ever, and partly because of a daughter alarmed at how Dad makes his living.
Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) is the former prison psychiatrist turned psychopathic femme fatale by her clownish Romeo, Batman’s most famous nemesis. (The gratuitous leering at Robbie’s body and the odd stereotyping of Killer Croc, a lizard man who wants to watch BET in his sewer cell, feel like relics of an era Hollywood desperately needs to leave behind.) Jay Hernandez is “El Diablo,” a former gangbanger with the metahuman ability to start very big fires and the distinction of being — as far as I know — the first Latino superhero/villain depicted on screen.
Padding out the ensemble: an Australian guy with a boomerang, an evil sorceress, and some other characters who won’t make for great action figures.
Jared Leto’s Joker, who gets 75 percent of the movie’s marketing campaign and maybe 2 percent of the movie, is not a member of the squad and is presumably here as throat-clearing for future movies. Leto is mostly riffing on Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character, a little more handsy, with a gift card to Hot Topic and awful taste in tattoos.
After the introductions, Suicide Squad becomes a very familiar journey downhill. It’s on to the mission — save the world, defeat this supernatural enemy, learn to like each other — and a film that doesn’t have the guts to let its characters behave badly.
Director David Ayer, who is no auteur but showed a knack for visceral action sequences in the World War II tank battles of Fury, here settles for slo-mo and frictionless movement in the film’s dull fight scenes. How many of the other failings of Suicide Squad can be pinned on Ayer is unclear, considering just how much the film feels as though it was patched together in an editing room by a committee of men and women very anxious about box office receipts: the uneven pacing, the misplaced scenes, the plot holes, the tonal whiplash, the neutered attempts at edginess.
Whoever decided to set a Spotify playlist to shuffle (Eminem’s “Without Me,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” and Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” whir past in close to five minutes) for most of the movie’s runtime deserves particular scorn.
With some judicious cutting, you could uncover in this movie a 20-minute montage — you can even keep Spotify on shuffle — that playfully tweaks the superhero formula and gives in to some nihilistic good times letting the villains run loose. As is, though, Suicide Squad is further proof that bad guys don’t necessarily have all the fun.
