It's wrong but in the wrong ways

Rating: 5/10 (22 August 2016)

I didn't expect to particularly like this film given the current status of the reviews coming out and the fact that I'm not in general a big DC or even comic book fan otherwise - but I have enjoyed super hero stuff perfectly well in the past. And... I didn't particularly enjoy it, but weirdly it was for things that I would have thought this film , whatever its flaws, would've been immune from. Foremost amongst these was the fact that, for a lot of the time, it was just plain dull.
The hour in the middle is most to blame for this - essentially the 'squad' are making their way through city ruins toward the big bad boss and... that's literally it. They introduce these quite cool looking characters and build them up (I guess much like the pre-release hype via the trailers) and yet for this main part of the movie they just kind of walk next to a bunch of soldiers who slowly crawl their way through buildings, occasionally whacking a few bad guys themselves. It seems like a slow motion Call of Duty level and is criminal underuse of what otherwise seem like very promising characters.
One aspect that has been praised is the casting, which on paper, does look good, but I just don't think Will Smith is suited to sharing the screen with an ensemble. Cara Delevingne's baddie is bizarrely funny but I kind of felt I was laughing at the pretty meh CGI superimposed over her than the character herself, and Margot Robie's cringe level is off the charts. I hear that, in fairness, the dialogue and action written for her is pretty loyal to the Harley Quinn source material, and that's great, but someone needs to tell the makers that film adaptations are exactly that - adaptations - and need editing and compromising; they can't just be a scene-for- scene copy and paste of the original.
That said it's not the worst superhero film I've ever seen, and, if these characters are in future utilised properly there's definitely hope for the DC-verse, but this is sadly lacking in transferring much loved characters onto the big screen. Watch Guardians of the Galaxy instead.