Still succeeds despite that one, huge shortcoming

Rating: 7/10 (4 August 2016)

And by one, huge shortcoming I mean that PG-13 rating.
Wow, if ever a rating killed the potential a film had it would be this one. What an R rating could have done for this film, well... We'll all have to imagine it somewhere in the back burner of our fan-tasies.
Despite that oh so obvious attempt to make the PG-13 rating work, it still has merit in being just a fun, hot mess of a film.
The film gets things rolling very well right from the start. It's not a slow build up. Nice to finally see the scenes from the trailer in the correct order (probably not in the order you thought).
Introduced are Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Boomerang, Diablo, Killer Croc, Enchantress and a host of other characters. For a cast this size, I'm impressed that the film neatly managed to squeeze screen time for every character without throwing any under the bus. What's more it managed to make us feel for the characters. That would also be a challenge for a cast this big, to zero in on and focus on their deeper personas, but the film manages to do so effectively particularly with Harley Quinn and Deadshot, who by the way, are the film's best characters. Margot Robbie deserves a few award nods for her take on Harley Quinn.
As the trailers implied, the film gathers them up and spits them out in front of an enemy no one is prepared to deal with. They have just the right amount of devil may care attitude to carry out the job. This is where the film weakens a bit. Yeah, it's a scary foe, but we're left wondering, "With an enemy that fierce, where's the panic? Where's the wider sense of something going horribly horribly wrong." We never really get a broader scope of what it implies for the rest of the world. We see it purely from the angle of the insiders.
This "insider view" is constant and consistent throughout the entire film. Whatever the world is seeing (something we often get in most comic book films) we're not seeing it. Everything is from our anti-heroes' point of view. This is one of the things that separates Suicide Squad from other films. It paints a dark but rosy outlook that we often don't see in most comic book films.
In the end this is a very character-driven film. The action sequences work well, funny bits here and there, but if your'e not rooting for these guys by the end, you're obviously not a fan of interesting characters.
One thing I'd like to add. Zack Synder's fingerprints are all over this film (making a film into one long music video is basically his signature), but luckily there are very few slow motion scenes.