Suicide Squad Review

I don't know if there is anything more frustrating than watching a movie and knowing that there is potentially a great movie inside but overall the movie is complete garbage. Suicide Squad is a perfect example of this.

Suicide Squad is a comic book movie directed by David Ayer and stars Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto and a slew of other actors. In Suicide Squad, a US government agency puts together a task force made up of supervillains to take down any potential threats that the military cannot handle like Superman for example. This supervillain task force is made up of Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and Slipknot (Adam Beach). The crew is also joined by Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman) and Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro). And yes that is a lot of characters and they throw even more at you, but I'm not going to list them all. When disaster strikes in Midway City, the Suicide Squad must go in and try to save the day before the entire world gets taken out.

Lets start with what I liked about Suicide Squad. The main group of characters in the Suicide Squad are fantastic. Margot Robbie absolutely nails it as Harley Quinn. She does a great job of playing a completely crazy women as well as someone with great heart and love and can switch between the two at a drop of a hat. Will Smith is wonderful as Deadshot. He has great one liners and brings a lot of emotion to a character that is a hired assassin but just wants to be with his daughter. Jared Leto played the Joker and you was absolutely insane. He brought this crazy energy to the movie and you never knew what he would say or do next. Jai Courtney was actually tolerable in this movie and I think thats because he doesn't really have to do much, but when he is on screen, he is pretty funny and entertaining. Most of the other characters, though, could have been played by anyone else or completely left out of the movie.

Another thing I enjoyed was the action. Most of it was just shoot-outs, but when you get to see Harley Quinn fight it was usually in tighter corridors and a lot more physical than other characters. It was also fun to watch what each member of the team brought to the fights. I would have enjoyed seeing them play off of each other a little more though, but since this is the first time they have been together I will give it a slight pass. Another thing that bothered me about the action was the things they were fighting were pretty faceless (they actually were faceless zombie like creatures) and never really seemed to be a menacing threat.

Now let's get to the fun, this movie is a hot mess. The villain is completely pointless and appears to have just been thrown in so the Suicide Squad has someone to battle against. When you are first introduced to the villain you see them absolutely destroying the city and taking out people left and right. But then suddenly it stops and allows for the Suicide Squad to be brought together. One moment they show the skyline just being destroyed and the next you see a little smoke coming from some buildings but no further damage is being done. The villain also doesn't really appear to have any kind of motive. They casually say a line that is supposed to indicate what they are upset about, but there is no proof that that reason is actually true. And maybe this is a spoiler, but they show the location of the villain, you see the type of building they are in from the outside. Then they show where the Suicide Squad is supposed to go to stop the villain. These are two visibly different locations, there is no surprise when the Suicide Squad reaches there destination and the villain isn't there. It's not that hard to just show the inside of the villain's lair and make us think the Suicide Squad is going there and then surprise us. Let the audience go on the journey with the crew.

Another extremely annoying part of the movie is the usage of music. For the first half of the movie, they constantly play various hit songs from all sorts of bands which include, The White Stripes, Kanye West, Queen and the one that caused me to give up on this movie, Eminem. I enjoy Eminem, so it has nothing to do with that, it has to do with the way the song fit in with the scene. It was completely jarring and out of place. Another frustrating part about the music, was that they would play these hit songs during the fight scenes at the beginning. Then the movie reaches a certain point and they quit using the songs and just use the film score. Once they used the film score, the fight scenes were way more entertaining and fit in with the flow of the movie. For the first half the movie, it felt like you were watching a mini trailer while the songs played.

Suicide Squad is a movie that has a fantastic cast that plays wonderfully fun characters. Margot Robbie is fantastic as Harley Quinn, Will Smith is great as Deadshot and Jared Leto is a blast to watch as the Joker. Unfortunately they are thrown into a story that is pretty pointless. The plot was extremely messy and the villain served no purpose. Things would happen that would just cause me to shake my head and wonder why. I cannot recommend this movie at all. I wish I could say go see it for Margot, Will and Jared, but you would have to sit through a completely disappointing movie that isn't worth your time.

1 1/2 Stars out of 5