Trying to do a little too much

Rating: 5/10 (10 August 2016)

One of the annoying things about travelling overseas is that it can be quite difficult getting to see a movie that one wants to see. For instance this film opened later in Singapore and Germany than it did on Australia, however in the Netherlands and Belgium it was playing, and fortunately for me it was playing in English (with French and Flemish subtitles – which can be annoying as when the characters are speaking in another language you don't get the English translation, and unfortunately I don't speak Latin).
Anyway, the film is set after the events in Batman vs Superman and forms another of the DC Extended Universe films (and Batman does make the occasional appearance). However, unlike the previous films what we have are basically a bunch of criminals, or should I say super villains, who are thrown together and made to go and save the day against some even more powerful supervillians. The idea is that now Superman has gone, but his enemies remain, then we are going to need some pretty impressive people to save the world.
The problem that I found with this film, and it is a pretty big problem, is that the story seems to be way too rushed. In fact they not only rush through the section where all of the characters are introduced, but they then rush through the section where the bad guy is introduced, and there is little in the way of building up as to why this happened – it is implied but this isn't the sort of movie where things should be implied.
They also introduce the Joker into this film and the problem with that is that it is going to be incredibly hard to be able to top Heath Ledger's performance – okay maybe they weren't even trying but the problem is that Ledger's shadow will always be hanging over the character and it is going to be a very hard act to follow. In my opinion I was never all that impressed with the original Batman movie, so outdoing Jack Nicholson (if that is even possible) was never going to be a huge task, not so much because of Nicholson but because of the material that he had to work with. However, Ledger defined the character in a way that it feels as if nobody can effectively follow in his footsteps.
The other problematic thing that I found, which is generally the case in a lot of films like this, is that there are so many characters it is quite hard to give them the air time that they need, to the point that Deadshot and Harley Quinn literally dominated the screen and everybody else was simply there to make up the numbers. As such, with the film being rushed, and the attempt to create as much detail with the characters in the limited time available sort of resulted in a movie with a lot of ambition, but an execution that simply didn't work out.