I was expecting more

Rating: 2/10 (7 August 2016)

I was very excited to see this movie. I'm not familiar with the characters from the comic books, but a gang of super villains turned super heroes seemed like a lot of fun. What I discovered was that the super villains weren't so super, the graphic design was bland and the action generic. All of which did not lead to an engaging movie. The short of the story: Post Batman vs. Superman, Batman puts a few bad guys in super villain prison, an even badder guy shows up, a proactive political type takes the initiative to let the bad guys out to get the badder guy and save the world. Sounds cool, right? The problem is that, for the most part, the characters and action were flat with no payoff. Back in the good ol' Arnold/Sylvester 80's action movies you got a story setup where the only way out was through, action that was ridiculously over the top but creative, comic relief (with quotable cheesy one liners) and a satisfying ending of poetic justice. Suicide Squad did not follow this formula and would have been better if it had. Where did it go wrong? First, the characters. The only character with a real attempt to add dimension to was Deadshot. The only real problem with Deadshot was that Will Smith played the character and Will Smith has a tendency to be Will Smith in every movie. There was some backstory on Harley Quinn and Diablo, but nothing that added any real value to the story. All of the other supers were basically red shirts.
One of the biggest letdowns for me was Harley Quinn. Before seeing this movie I read so much about how she was the highlight of the show, but the character really missed being a lasting classic character on so many levels. I was expecting a complex mix of manipulative powers similar to Black Widow, but more flirty with a big dose of Hannibal Lecter. What we got was an attempt to convince everyone she was crazy by saying off the wall things and laughing all the time. The same is also true for the Joker, who goes hand in hand with Harley. What made classic insane characters work like Hannibal and Heath Ledger's Joker work so well was that they were based in real characteristics of mental illness and the criminally insane, not the superficial "voices are telling me to kill everyone" that we get here. Criminal insanity is the inability to tell right from wrong, or as I see it, complete loss of any type of empathy for others or a conscience. It is often accompanied by a view that the whole world is doomed anyway, so why would you work to better it or care what happens to it, which would be an easy perspective to pull off with any of these characters.
My biggest issue with this movie is that the super heroes were not very super. It seemed that they needed saving more than Generic Soldier #X. Even in the universally panned BvS each character had complimentary abilities needed to solve a problem. Except for Deadshot no one's abilities were used very much at all.
The real mystery of the movie was why the director approved faceless potato men as the graphic design of the villain army soldiers. Not scary.
The Good? I gave this 2 stars solely for Viola Davis. She shows how a good actor can turn a sow's ear of a script into a silk purse. She knocked the character of Amanda Waller out of the park so hard that she seemed out of place here. This character was the only redeeming aspect of the movie. Amanda was the politician trying to save the world, but in the process was more evil than any of the super villains. It was a dose of reality that may be lost in the shadow of a bad movie overall, but was brilliant in concept. A subtle yet chilling badness that should have been applied to Harley Quinn as effectively. Both characters could have been equally strong and vicious, but yin-yang opposites. That could have been interesting to explore.
The verdict? Pass on this one. If you want good over saturated superhero movies re-watch The Dark Knight and the original Avengers again, or maybe one of the X-Men movies.