more than a missed opportunity

Rating: 4/10 (10 March 2018)

I'm astounded by how much wasted money was poured into this movie. if the studio and the producers saw the script, why did they fund this movie? there are an incredible number of flaws, so much so that I'd call the movie a flaw in and of itself and it'd be quicker to name what's good about the movie. but there's no fun in that, so let's run through what makes this flick horrible.
the base plot. you can't have the suicide squad going on a mission to fight a supernatural and/or magical entity. in almost every iteration of the suicide squad, at least half of the team has no superhuman ability, or at least a power that's not very, well, powerful. this adaptation is one of those, with the entire squad being basically powerless except for diablo. so most of the squad is essentially useless during the most important parts of the movie, seeing that the main villain is a magical witch and her brother.
a lot of the plot details.
-what was the point of keeping the full details of the mission secret for so long? the squad can't do anything anyway. they have bombs in their necks.
-the beef between flag and deadshot that headed off most of the first half of the movie just didn't make sense. it was inorganic, and we all knew how it would end.
-thrusting bits and pieces of the harley quinn/joker backstory into the movie here and there was both annoying and confusing
-the camaraderie between the group felt very fake and shoehorned by the end.
-and others i can't remember off of the top of my head.
the script. deadshots lines were absolutely horrible most of the time. diablo's were a little clichÃ© as well. flag's weren't great. harley quinn's were fine, but i'll expand on her below. but i have to say, killer croc had the worst dialogue of any superhero movie this century, hands down. it's hard to put it into a review without going through the movie scene by scene, but if you watch you'll probably know what i mean when i say that the script could've been better written by an average liberal arts sophomore.
the acting i guess was alright. i would attack will smith, but i know that he was given awful lines to work with, and when he had decent dialogue, he delivered pretty well. jai courtney's horrible acting was at least slightly hidden. joel kinnaman, though, had some very rough moments, even though for about 65% of the movie he was somewhere between passable and good. viola davis disappointed me, not because she was bad, but because she was only okay. jared leto, though, was a disgrace. his joker voice sounded like his mouth was full of spit, his laugh was just plain bad, and the way his scenes were shot and edited didn't do him any favors.
margot robbie is a special case. i think she did well, but the problem was that everything around her was so bad, it just made her lines, acting, and character be judged sort of unfairly. i think that if the other aspects of the movie were good, then she'd shine a little more, but the overall low quality of the rest of the movie clouds our judgement of her performance and the character of harley quinn.
the pacing of a lot of the scenes is also disjointed. i wouldn't say the movie is too fast paced, but it rushes through a lot of things it could slow down on.
don't watch this movie. i thought i would, saying to myself that it couldn't be that bad. well, it really can. i don't understand people who say this is better that BvS. that movie is more boring and dreary with a few bright spots rather than just wholly a failure like this one is.