Suicide Squad: Bad Guys or Nice Guys, I'm Confused?

Rating: 5/10 (10 August 2016)

Warner brother's Suicide Squad hit the theaters this past weekend and to say I was enthusiastically anticipating this film would be putting it lightly. After all the Avengers assembling, Guardians of the Galaxy guarding and Fantastic Four flopping, I was ready for a super hero film a little on the opaque side. The Dark Knight seemed years ago, and after the disappointment of Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, I just had the feeling DC was going to get this one right. I was wrong.
Before I get into everything that's wrong with Suicide Squad, let's cover what's right about this movie. Thumbs up number one: Will Smith. It's been a long time since the old "Big Willy" from the Independence Day and Bad Boys days has been on screen, but it was good to see that Will still has some street swagger left in him. His Deadshot is just the right mixture of gangster bravado mixed with family sentimentality to make him a likable man whose life work just happens to be murdering people.
The scene stealer in this movie however, is Margot Robbie. Everything that's this film was suppose to be is summed up in her part as Harley Quinn. She's messed up in the head, but she's really very intelligent. She is in love, but it's fatalistic. She's crazy, but insanely beautiful, a serious paradox for most men to grasp and she uses that as her ace in the hole brilliantly.
Now, what's wrong with Suicide Squad; it's too nice. This movie should be the super hero version of Apocalypse Now, and it actually starts off like that's what the audience is going to get. We're introduced first to Amanda Waller (played by the always perfect Viola Davis). She's conceived a plan to protect the people of Earth from Superman type meta-humans who don't share the big guy's love for the planet. She wants a team of some of the worst criminals on the planet, expendables, who if they can't repel these super threats, then they die in the process, and no one will care.
The trip through the mega-maximum security prison where Waller's Suicide Squad will be drafted is the best part of the movie. With an awesome shadowy soundtrack featuring the likes of The Animal's House of the Rising Sun and the Stones' Sympathy for the Devil, we get a grand tour of the facility and see the atrocious and inhumane way that these meta-menaces to society are held captive. Beaten, prodded, electrocuted and starved this should guarantee that a healthy dose of hate and rage towards the system has been installed in each of Waller's chosen few. But that doesn't happen.
Instead, these heinous criminal, once taken from their respective cages and dungeon pits, and put together for the first time, and get along better than a jamboree of boy scouts. I kid you not, this psychotic group of low lives jell together better than the Avengers, X-Men and Fantastic Four combined. And for this type of movie, that's not a good thing.
There is no internal fighting, no trying to be the top guy, no indignity of being told what to do. When they find out that the mission they thought they were on was bogus, do they tear up the city? No, they just take it in stride and even buddy up with Colonel Flagg (the unimpressive Joel Kinnaman), the man who has lied to them and threaten to kill them if they don't cooperate.
The jovial "cheerfulness's of this "Suicide Squad" is symptomatic of this movie's problems. Nothing works the way it should beginning with Jared Leto's Joker. Leto's take on the pasty- faced madman isn't bad as much as it's misplaced. His story and involvement with Harley Quinn seem to be some kind of "bonus movie" added to this film to give it some extra spice. Unfortunately, it just adds to the confusion.
The film's focal villain, The Enchantress (the equally unimpressive Cara Delevingne), may be the worst super villain since Richard Pryor's Gus Gorman in Superman III back in the day. The totally unbelievable love story between The Enchantress' alter ego, Dr. June Moone and Colonel Flagg is completely forgotten when the movie hit's its anti-climatic ending (which is a second rate CGI rip-off of the Avengers).
While Smith and Robbie give top-notch performances, the rest of the cast just seem to be there marking time, ready to give whatever uninteresting scrap of dialog they've been tossed to fill screen time.
Writer/Director David Ayer, who successfully pulled off such grim thrillers as Training Day, and Fury, appeared to be a great choice for making DC's first gritty super hero film outside the Batman trilogy. However, he seriously drops the ball on this one. This isn't the grim, anti-hero vessel we were promised. This is just a cookie-cuter super hero film with no substance; no cohesiveness and nothing left to savior once the credits begin to roll. The cinematography was spot on and it appeared that DP Roman Vasyanov followed his own vision about how this film should look despite what was happening with the script and direction.
Overall, Suicide Squad fails to deliver in much the same way that Batman Vs. Superman hit the wall. Both film seemed to lack vision or direction and didn't do enough to take advantage of potentially powerful and fascinating characters. What should have been DC's finest hour turned out to be nothing more than a big fat lie wrapped in a pretty box.