Suicide Squad Movie Review

I don't usually call movies convoluted messes. I'm too nice for that.

But Suicide Squad is a convoluted mess.

Suicide Squad felt like fragments of scenes and plot strung together to resemble a movie. The story sluggishly stumbles from point to point, stopping only for the odd quip, sloppy action scene, or flashback (and there are LOTS of those here). At one point, the Skwad's heli got shot down with gunfire for no reason other than to make them go on foot, with no explanation as to who shot them down or why. An hour or so in, as the Skwad trudges along towards a still-unknown objective, the guy beside me in the theater whispered "Hindi ko na magets kung anong ginagawa nila (I don't get what they're doing anymore)". And I begrudgingly agreed. 

And it's tragic, because the cast obviously did their best with what they were given. Will Smith was great as Deadshot, the assassin with the heart of gold. He got most of the good lines and was front and center of some of the major action set pieces (as is tradition, since this is Will Smith, people.). Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn was cool and was a more violent and insane version of her Batman: The Animated Series character, and I admit I laughed along with the rest of the cinema with her ditzy lines. The rest? They may as well be generic mooks for what good they were for. Adam Beach literally got two lines of dialogue as Slipknot, Jai Courtney's Captain Boomerang was horribly underused, and Karen Fukuhara's Katana basically walked in at the last minute, and we're supposed to care that she's crying for her dead husband?

And don't get me started on The Joker. Jared Leto's performance was unsettling at parts, downright corny in others, but he has absolutely no business in this movie other than to provide backstory for Harley Quinn in what little screen time he's given. If you're watching this for the Joker, take your expectations down a couple of notches. You'll thank me later, but then the movie devolves into a messy final fight against a Big Bad that neither puts the Squad in a good light nor makes a lick of sense, and you will totally forget about him anyway.

I really, really wanted to like this, I really did. The trailers made it look oh so awesome, but what we got was oh so not. Suicide Squad goes down as one of the many disappointing misses of the DC's burgeoning cinematic universe, and does not give me much confidence for the rest. Watch for the pew pew and Harley Quinn in booty shorts, if nothing else.