Studio meddling and weak script undermine potentially great movie

Rating: 4/10 (15 August 2016)

Overall: Suicide Squad opens in a ham fisted and slow manner, which immediately puts the pacing on its back foot. By the time action starts to pick up about half way through, the poorly written and clichéd characters have not given me any reason to be invested in the story and thus not really have any care for the action. It's a shame, because this was a great opportunity for DC to step out from behind Marvel with something unique that had a great pedigree of comic history and talent involved. Instead, this is a mess of uninteresting story lines coupled with a collection of half-baked characters that result in a boring film. 4/10
Detailed Breakdown:
Story: The biggest issue with this story is that it lacks a cohesive perspective; Deadshot and Harley Quinn are given minimal backstory, with Deadshot being the only one that is given an emotional grounding. That leaves the audience without an anchor point for their involvement in the story, which when coupled with blaise visuals and hackneyed writing, gives the story no characters for us to really care about. Without characters to care about, the story is scattershot and weak, underlining this lack of perspective and robbing the film of any momentum. -3
Characters: Overall, the characters do a seemingly alright job at building chemistry and gelling as a team. The real big problem is that this one movie has too much to do, so it tries to force us to feel something for them rather than letting it occur naturally. Will Smith plays Deadshot well, effectively portraying a preternatural assassin and is easily the strongest performance in the movie. However, Jared Leto and Margot Robie's Joker and Harley Quinn are both poorly thought out and weakly portrayed. Jared Leto is not in the film nearly as much as you are led to think, but the time he is in the movie is both annoying and distracting; you never felt any real menace from his performance, no maniacal energy that is a perfect and complete foil for Batman. He feels like every "crazed gangster" character that we've seen in crime movies the last 15 years. But, the real tragedy here is Harley Quinn, which was either written or edited terribly. When she is working with the team, she is constantly reaching for one-liners that are obvious and poorly written and her history doesn't make sense or have any impact on the story. Overall, the characters in this movie are generally one-dimensional and the performances pretty much reflect that. -3
Production Design: Pretty bland overall. Costumes are well put together, with Deadshot's costume really standing out as each part of his costume having actual functions. Harley Quinn's gun was also well designed, bringing a certain anarchic grace to the pistol. Other than that, the design was not anything special. 0
Music: This soundtrack was distracting and forced. The problem here is not so much the pop score rather the soundtrack is used in lieu of character development, which ultimately comes off as heavy handed. Furthermore, when using a pop soundtrack, there should be a connecting theme beyond the fact its "movie music". There is no connecting theme than trying to hit over the head repeatedly with how cool it's trying to be, which only glaringly points out how it's trying to cover over weak editing and storytelling. -4
Misc: With the prevalence of films being adapted from deep mythologies with years of backstory and lore to draw from, it's easy to fall into the trap of "well, it explains it in the book/comic/etc.". A movie needs to tell it's story, completely, within its running time. If the viewer isn't given an emotional anchor because of how the story is told, then the movie failed. Harley Quinn and The Joker have an incredibly rich and deep relationship that spans years of comics and movies. None of that complexity made it to the final film.
Movies like this will continue to fail if they rely on external media to do the heavy story telling lifting. While films can, and should, draw inspiration from a myriad of sources, these sources should not be used as shortcuts from what the job of writers and directors: to tell a story.