completely misses the point, bigger is not always better

Rating: 6/10 (7 August 2016)

When i first heard that suicide squad was being made into a movie i was ecstatic, suicide squad is one of my favorite parts of the DC comic world and Harley Quinn has been my favorite comic book character ever since Batman TAS, and this was gonna be her first appearance on a live action movie, so safe to say i was really looking forward to this, and the trailers got me even more excited. What i didn't expect was how much different the movie would be.
Somehow everyone seems to think that comic book/superhero movies today have to be HUGE, that the entire world should be at peril, with enormous CGI monsters fighting around a huge sky beam and generic faceless CGI armies swarming our heroes. What writer/director David Ayer completely misses about the Suicide Squad is that the precise reason why they're so great is because they're not big, they're usually small time/mid-tier villains on a small time/mid-tier mission that might have some connection to something bigger but it's usually very contained and personal. They don't "save the world" they merely participate.
The movie starts off great, we have well paced comic book style character introductions, in a fun and enjoyable way, we understand them(mostly) we have dialogues crackling with quips and jokes and the movie's tone overall seems darkly comical, and it seems like DC has finally got it down, but then the story starts.
we have some huge powerful magical generic evil monsters with their generic evil plans sending generic faceless armies and trying to destroy the whole world, and it's up to a guy that has good aim, a psychotic girl with a baseball bat, a guy with boomerangs, a slightly stronger human crocodile hybrid, a guy that can shoot some fire but doesn't really want to, and a girl with a sword to stop them. Wait what? how the hell are they gonna do that?
That's not the suicide squad, suicide squad is about small covert missions to steal some plans or neutralize some smaller threats, they don't fight literal gods nor should they, that's their charm, that their stories are small and you can just focus on the characters and enjoy them.
I hate to bring up Marvel to compare cos i know they're different blablabla, but remember Ant-man? That whole movie was just a heist film, break into here, steal a weapon, get out and fight a guy around a house. It didn't have the need to have the whole world about to explode, it was a small contained story and that's what made it great, and that's exactly how suicide squad should be. You could've just had the joker as the villain or something.
Another big problem is that the movie has this tendency to shift tones so fast that you wonder if two separate guys were making the movie. One moment it's funny and enjoyable, the next everything is super serious and they just don't mash together. It feels like DC had a great, fun style but they just didn't wanna fully commit to it and it had to have those dour joyless elements of the previous two films, which dragged it down a lot.
What i will say is that all the casting and performances are fantastic, Will smith is the same Will Smith we all love, Jai Courtney is surprisingly hilarious when he finally gets to play an Aussie, Margo Robbie is a great Harley Quinn, shes got the voice, the attitude and the general feel of the character down. Jared Leto is solid as the Joker you can really tell he committed despite being criminally underused and Joel Kinnaman is great as the straight man in all the madness.
The actors and their characters basically salvage this wreckage of a story and make it mildly enjoyable, if all of them return in a movie where the story is much smaller and we can just enjoy their interactions without having to worry about the entire world exploding any second, i'm gonna be the happiest man alive and the first to pay for the ticket.