I was looking forward to seeing this movie ever since the first trailer had come out. While not a fan of the new DC movie universe, I was very excited for Suicide Squad. The trailers made it look different than any other comic book movie I had seen before. And I was very optimistic about Jared Leto's Joker.
And now that I've seen it, I feel like I have a few things to say about this movie. This will not be a legitimate review, it's just me sharing some of my thoughts about this movie. Therefore I apologise in advance for the unstructured randomness of this post.
First things first: Jared Leto and Margot Robbie stole the show as Joker and Harley Quinn. They had this interesting story going on throughout the movie, with Harley's origin story and their abusive relationship. I loved Leto's Joker. He was terrifying at times, and completely unhinged. And at the same time, his relationship with Harley gave him some echo of humanity. The Joker/Harley subplot was by far the most memorable one.
Which is a good thing, because the main plot was messy, incoherent and not that interesting. The main villain was Enchantress, and she wanted... well, I'm not exactly sure what she wanted, but at some point in the movie, she took over a city and created an army out of innocent people. So Amanda Waller assembled the new Task Force X, aka the Suicide Squad, to take down the witch. And as a main baddy, Enchantress left me unimpressed. She looked good in her mud and chain bikini, but she was boring and I didn't understand her motivations.
The main villain should have been Amanda Waller - the ruthless A.R.G.U.S. boss who pulled all the strings and had every member of the Squad in her pocket. There was tension between her and the Squad members - obviously - and that tension could have been explored more. That's where the weight of the story should have been put.
Like I already said, the movie was messy. Storywise, it was a mess. And the pacing was unbalanced. Too bad, because there were so many amazing scenes and interesting stories in the middle of this mess, and had they been put together in a more coherent narrative, Suicide Squad would have been a fantastic movie. I understand that it's difficult to balance all the stories in one film, and give all these larger than life characters equal screen time. The thing is, the Enchantress story took way too much time, and that time could have been given to the better characters.
I'm also a bit frustrated about the amount of the scenes that (allegedly) didn't make the final cut. Some of those we saw in the trailers and they looked really good. I just hope it wasn't all part of a master plan by the Warner Brothers to release an extended cut of the movie a few months later just to scrap some more cash out of the fans' pockets.
Okay, corporate conspiracy theories aside, I do wonder what the movie would have looked like with the deleted scenes.
Visually, this movie was a treat. It reminded me of Tim Burton's Batman movies, in regards to the tone and the atmosphere: dark and violent, but still colourful and fun.
Good job, David Ayer for placing all the easter eggs in the film and paying homage to the previous movies and comics in the DC universe.
Suicide Squad was good but not great. Very entertaining. It got me a little bit interested in the DCMU, and now I'm looking forward to seeing some of these characters again.
My rating: 6/10 stars on IMDB.
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