trainwreck of ego battles

Rating: 1/10 (12 August 2016)

with all of the hype generated around the commitment of the actors to their roles, this movie really boils down to a handful of actors all jockeying for a chance to steal the show and possibly launch a film franchise. you have will smith trying to steal the show with a lovable father/worlds greatest assassin (does he take her with him on his constant international travels? ya think?) with a heart of gold representation of deadshot. but the film maker also decided to really commit to the harley quinn narrative, and in order to introduce her to the audience as well, they needed an origin story to compel the new audience members to connect to her. which meant that the joker had to come along for the ride, and of course in order to play the joker you have to deal with the fact that the last guy knocked it out of the ballpark, and you will never live up to that. which seems to have motivated Jared Leto to latch on to an extremely undeserved ego trip over his character. he is a supporting character to a side narrative, and yet he battled to turn himself into a central character by "sacrificing" for the role so much the director felt compelled to shoe horn in some more screen time. when in all honesty, it would have been WAY more compelling and creepy if this movie had not even revealed who the next joker would be, by always playing the joker as a shadow figure. that way the obsession and devotion that harley gets to play with is projected on to a character that is unknowable and unrelatable to any of the audience. it would have really given room for her to explore the depths of harleys idol worship if the joker had essentially been "kaiser soze" for one film. but instead we got a hot topic die antwood and a cutesey bad boy crush. meanwhile a slew of lesser known actors are all desperately trying to get noticed by committing so hard to their characters they ended up making it all about themselves. what you end up with is a shallow caricature development movie with a bunch of off brand comic book characters who's backstory needs to be shoe horned in to a feature length film.
on top of bad writing, and over over the top character choices. the look of the film was reminiscent of 1987's Masters of the Universe. for an action and visual effects driven story, there seems to have been given very little effort toward filming it in a visually interesting way. in fact the very few cinematically artistic moments that appear in the film are all devoted to the sub plot with harley and the joker. which is only supposed to be harleys origin story, not the main focus of the whole film. the rest of the film has lots of poorly lit battle sequences in city streets, with propane poofers back lighting rubber suited stunt men. oh, and there are a ton of random laser shots flying around for good measure....