Great acting. Bad...editing?

Rating: 4/10 (10 September 2017)

I'll write about some of the things I haven't seen in the reviews yet so far.. I don't think it's possible at this point to spoil too much for anyone here because chances are, if you care enough about this movie to come to this review board then you've probably already seen the movie, and if you haven't seen it then you probably don't care enough to come to this review board :-) That being said;
1. This film won an Academy Award for best hair and makeup. It should have won an award for best trailer, because the trailer for this film has become famous in itself for being somehow better than the actual movie! I'll give you an example: when Mr. Boomerang Guy says "You know what they say about the crazy ones.." and then Harley glances over at him "Huh?" it works perfectly in the trailer, right? Unfortunately (spoiler alert) this scene falls completely flat on its face during the course of the actual film. That is just one of seemingly dozens of scenes that were ultimately (bizarrely) disappointing due to either bad writing, bad directing or bad editing. SO many bad lines of dialogue in this. I cannot fault the acting, because well, obviously it COULD have worked, just look at the trailer. Who knows, maybe someday it will attain postmortem status as one of those so-bad-it's-good cult classics, but I don't see how because in the end (spoiler alert) just a very run-of-the-mill superhero action flick which could have been spat out by one of those giant room-sized computers from the 50s.
2. Jared Leto's Joker is not the same as he comes off in the previews. Jared does the same thing here as he did when he played the villain in Panic Room where he imitated Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden. Here, he simply imitates Heath Ledger's Joker and winds up struggling as a cheapo, poor man's knock-off. God, I wanted to like that portrayal. I will get back to the Joker in a minute, because..
3. This film relies HEAVILY on Margot Robbie delivering slick one-liners like, all the time, interspersed with gratuitous shots of her stripper outfit only covering half her butt. Granted, without Harley Quinn's charm this entire movie would be catastrophically one- dimensional. However, they should have taken the same approach with her as they did with the Joker and used the character sparingly.
4. The Joker scenes that you actually DO get to see seem intentionally short and sweet to emulate Nolan's sparse use of Joker in The Dark Knight, but because of this directorial decision the Joker scenes instead end up feeling like a watered-down afterthought. This writer- director didn't develop the character enough! I give credit for trying something new-ish, but Leto doesn't even really get the chance to spread his wings and do much Joker stuff here so it fails at achieving the abstract vision that they were apparently going for. Like, why does he drive a hotrod? Why does he have capped teeth? And I hope you didn't want to see Batman himself, because he's only on the screen for about 12 seconds total! Again, probably not the actors' fault. Understandably they didn't want to make this into a Joker/Batman movie, whatever.
5. The obvious CGI wasn't TOO terrible, but then again, anytime you are aware you are looking at CGI while watching a movie it is a problem that the production team SHOULD feel compelled to contend with. Thankfully, the characters that do rely on CGI (Mr. Crocodile Guy, Mr. Fire Guy) are saved by their good acting.
If this movie is your type of thing you should probably just continue to love it and not read the reviews here because some of them are severely harsh. Overall, it's quite evident that this writer-director was trying to go for a more comic book feel for this film than the majority of recent Gotham-themed features, but now I feel I must quote Deadshot: "What are we, 12?"
I mean, how much extra money did they need to pay Will Smith to yell the line: "Lady, YOU ARE EVIL!!"
(spoiler)