What a waste of a good concept

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 2016)

Dumb, dumb, dumb. How do you start with this terrific premise and end with a movie this stupid? It's as lazy, plodding, predictable and improbable as Batman V Superman, although slightly more entertaining.
Margot Robbie is an actress with a lot of natural screen presence, but it was squandered in her over-the-top kittenish performance. We get no real look into her thoughts or motivations, just her "crazy act."
And Will Smith, arrrrrgh! It's like he has an al a carte menu for acting. One wisecrack, check. One in-your-face staredown, check. One "slap dat bitch ona ass," check. He just Will Smiths around, only it's not cute anymore. Totally phoned it in.
Jared Leto's Joker was very good, but has the same problem as all super villains who kill off their henchmen with abandon: who would work for this guy? Only El Diablo had even rudimentary character development, everyone else was forgettable, and there were too damn many of them!
The movie starts off on the wrong foot, with painfully inept exposition. There are no likable characters. The plot is completely inbred and circular--the problem the Squad is trying to solve would not exist if not for the Squad, and when they achieve their target and find out who they have rescued, their disappointment is equal to the viewers'. The super villains want to rule or destroy the world, whatever. It's all clichés from start to finish. Then at the end they try to pass the Squad off as some kind of zany family that just needed a chance to prove themselves, as if they weren't mostly homicidal maniacs. The GGI overwhelms what story there is, and it's the dirty gray CGI of ten years ago. There is nothing original about the character design or sets, and all the action is in a depopulated city at night. Worst of all, the movie doesn't address its own premise. The Avengers did a masterful job of showing how different levels of beings, from skilled human to enhanced human to super being, might interact. Suicide Squad attempts the same thing, but blows it. Every character seems capable of surviving things like fiery helicopter crashes, although the pilots invariably die. It's not even clear what powers some of these guys have--the movie has to go out of its way to give Killer Croc a job to do--swimming--to help the team. "What if Superman became a terrorist?" asks one character. "Who would stop him?" Apparently, the answer is a guy with a lot of guns, a crazy chick in F--- Me hot pants, and a chubby guy who throws boomerangs.