disappointing, shabby mess

Rating: 3/10 (18 June 2017)

I'll state up front I'm not a huge superhero movie fan. I will watch em if I think they are going to be good and entertaining. Having said that, there are a few superhero movies that pass the sniff test and qualify as great movies. I enjoyed the earlier "Spiderman" movies before they spun too deeply into the realm of fanboy absurdity. I thought "Guardians of the Galaxy" was an extremely well done and entertaining movie, loved it. "Deadpool" was a lot of fun, as was "Hellboy". Tim Burton's Batman is the crown jewel of superhero movies as far as I'm concerned, and it's the benchmark by which I judge the others by. "The Dark Knight" was pretty good (in spite of Bale's laughably pathetic portrayal of Batman) due mainly to a very strong supporting cast, including an amazing performance of The Joker by the late Heath Ledger.
I really wanted to like Suicide Squad. Initially, it sounded to me like it might be a fresh take on a tired, worn down and clichéd genre. And really, it did have the potential to be a very good, if not great, superhero movie. Wrong. This film suffered from so many different things I really don't know where to start.
Casting....this movie is a casting nightmare, period. The only, and I mean only character that was cast well was Harley Quinn. Margot Robbie delivered a solid, believable performance and she did do a good job with the garbage she was given to work with. She carries every scene she's in, and her performance was the only reason I didn't simply stop watching the movie. Will Smith delivered a weak performance in a role he wasn't well suited at all to play. He came across as a blend between Hancock and his character from "I am Legend". They couldn't have picked a worse person to play this role.
Which brings me to Jared Leto. There aren't many actors that can pull off the complex role of The Joker convincingly. Nope, Leto isn't on that list. He came across as nothing more than a creepy, disgusting thug...The Joker is so much more than that. He brought absolutely none of the intangibles, depth or complexity it takes to pull off that particular role. And the makeup...wow...it looked like little more than a rushed Halloween costume. Thankfully his role in the movie was mercifully small and his scenes were short. In spite of this he still managed to ruin the character of The Joker for all practical purposes. The rest of the characters I won't even mention, there were far too many of them to even try to pay attention to or care about....which leads us to...
The storyline/plot. Bad. period. Its essentially a cheap ripoff of the basic plot line of "The Dirty Dozen", except the Suicide Squad version doesn't work at all. Way too much going on with way too many shallow characters. It appeared that as they were writing it and ran into blocks or couldn't come up with a good idea, they simply threw a new minor superhero character in there as a distraction. More is better, right? In this case, no....this would have been a far better movie if they had picked three or four characters to focus on and gone from there. Maybe they felt like none of the major characters were solid enough to carry the movie so they made up for that by adding every minor and uninteresting comic character they could come up with. Aside from cliché flashback scenes, character development of the major players is virtually non existent. And they have so many of them you simply stop caring about any of them. By the end of the movie, I didn't care if they won or lost, who lived or died, I just wanted it to be over.
Overall, aside from a few decent Harley Quinn scenes, there is little of watchable or entertaining quality here, unlikely to appeal to any but the most hardcore superhero fanboys. It's a shame really, it did have the potential to be a really good movie,but it's just way too flawed on on way too many levels. Skip this one.