Suicide Squad far from painless

Rating: Null/10 (17 August 2016)

I don't normally walk out of movies but I did walk out of Suicide Squad. It was when I realized that I had missed a plot point and that instead of being enlisted to fight the supernatural villains of this movie, The Suicide Squad were actually rescuing a VIP. The prospect of another 40 minutes watching the Squad go through more fighting of blobby head transformed human soldiers was more than I was prepared to tolerate.
This really is a mess of a movie. True, it begins with the formula proscribed by William Goldman - use the opening twenty minutes to introduce your characters back story because no one will care when you are rushing to your stories conclusion - although this doesn't stop Suicide Squad continuously flashing back to intimate moments of love and death between the Joker and Harley Quinn. The trouble is, the Squad are filled with characters that are unlikable, and unlikable in pretty much identical ways.
The film has polarized audiences. Even fan critics hated it yet it has proved a box office hit. I think part of this is related to what kind of storytelling gives people pleasure. Conventions of storytelling in cinema change over time. As I have noted elsewhere, some Seventies mainstream movies are almost incomprehensible today. Television drama has changed even more dramatically. The careful spelling out of action, plot and motivation is becoming passe. For me Suicide Squad has the feel of Mad Max IV Fury Road in its breakneck story telling on the move. The two films are also market by a bleak emotional tone that I find hard to sit with in the cinema theater.
There's an anger in Suicide Squad that says more about a section of America than the film's fictional world. The film has been praised for its ethnically diverse cast but I felt most of the characters aspired to be gangstas. I longed for Caesar Romero's Joker because Jared Leto's take (a soulless meth head gang boss) seemed to create a vacuum on screen where a character should be.
The music score follows in the wake of Guardian's of the Galaxy. Like the latter, Suicide Squad relies heavily on rock music. At times I though that I was watching a 'best of' album in search of a plot. And the choppy editing gives the film an MTV feel. there's a loving recreation of the 'Mad Love' comic book cover by Alex Ross featuring Harley Quinn and the Joker dancing. It is just a throw away scene for those in the know but scenes like this, and the repetition of Diablo flaming down his enemies don't cohere in any conventional way. Montage is reborn as life style.
I like the music, I like comics, i like cinema but this wasn't the combination for me. And perhaps that's for the best. I am in my fifties after all. Youth deserve their youth. I'm just not sure they deserve Suicide Squad.