Suicide Squad (2016)

[Rorschach]

After reflecting over it a bit, I'm pretty sure this might be the most disappointing movie I've seen all year, more so than BvS was. At least with that film I had my expectations at a so-so level. While I don't think Suicide Squad was worse, I definitely was more let-down by it.

[BadAtGender]

This is so confusing.

 

I liked it. I liked it a lot. And what's weird is when I ask around my friends, they tend to like it, too. I was chatting with one last night, and she went in with really low expectations. (She was just watching it to get ready for her podcast.) But she found she really enjoyed it. And it's not like she's super invested in the DCEU. She hated BvS.

 

It's not a perfect movie, but it's a perfectly entertaining movie, which is what I mostly ask for. It's got Will Smith being big budget Will Smith again, which is something I didn't realize I really wanted, but it is. The rest of the Squad works in their own quirky ways, and the cast is really into it, which helps a lot.

 

There are some phenomenal visual moments. Enchantress' transformation gave me shivers with the fingers reaching through and then a sort of reality twist. Beautiful and creepy all at the same time. It reminded me of that shot in... The Grudge? Where Sarah Michelle Geller is in the shower and feels a hand coming out of the back of her head or something. (I haven't seen the film, but that shot from the trailer always stuck with me.)

 

The one thing I'd kinda hoped they would have gone harder in was with the music. The opening cut between three scenes and each had their own song as a soundtrack. I loved that. If the film had continued to do that, it would have pushed the American Graffiti sensibility even more. Perhaps that's something that could happen on the video release. It'd be rather cool if they gave two alternate cuts: a more music heavy one and a more stripped-down one that's closer to Ayer's crime/war movie roots.

 

Even with flaws, Suicide Squad works pretty well for me. It's not like BvS, where I saw plenty enough to intrigue me, but hiccups in the structure left me confused as to how I actually felt about the film. I know I like Suicide Squad.

 

4/5

[Thegun]

On August 6, 2016 at 0:37 AM, TMP said:

Makes Batman v Superman look good.

F

Jared Leto somehow managed to ruin one of the most interesting characters in all of modern fiction. That takes some serious skill.

 

Leto is fine.  He is let down by everything else.  It's seriously hard to tell if an actor did well if every scene you are in doesn't have a beginning or/ either an end.

[TMP]

1 hour ago, Thegun said:

 

Leto is fine.  He is let down by everything else.  It's seriously hard to tell if an actor did well if every scene you are in doesn't have a beginning or/ either an end.

Leto in Suicide Squad is this year's Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending.

[filmlover]

Jared Leto is barely in the film. The only kind of impression he's allowed to leave is that he sure looks creepy.

[4815162342]

26 minutes ago, TMP said:

Leto in Suicide Squad is this year's Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending.

 

No no no no no.

 

Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending was a campy hammy fun mess.

 

Leto in this was an uninteresting try-hard coming off as a teen goth punk reject.

[MrPink]

There wasn't remotely anything interesting that Leto did in his very brief 7 minutes of screen time.

 

There was a pretty smooth move that he did when he turned around and took off his jacket in one move before jumping into the chemical bath, but that was about it for me.

[TMP]

36 minutes ago, 4815162342 said:

 

No no no no no.

 

Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending was a campy hammy fun mess.

 

Leto in this was an uninteresting try-hard coming off as a teen goth punk reject.

I don't know how anyone can unironically call Redmayne's performance in JA any good. However, Leto in this was career-ending bad. When was the last time an actor was this ridiculed for their role? Arnold as Mr. Freeze?

[filmlover]

Leto had less screen time than Eisenberg did in Batman v Superman so he didn't have nearly as much of an opportunity to completely embarrass himself.

[Belakor]

That "Damaged" tattoo didn´t help tho. Worst costume/design choice ever.

No one will be afraid of, taking seriously a dude who looks like an old justin bieber with that stupid "Damaged" tattoo in the front of his face, is so stupid.

I was trying not to laught every time he showed up.

 

on the other side, Ledger´s Joker made me feel real fear first time I saw TDK.

Edited August 7, 2016 by Belakor

[BadAtGender]

LetoJoker was probably the weakest part of the film. The Joker as a character tends to have three fairly distinct interpretations: Gangster, Anarchist, or Psychopath. In most cases, you need to lean pretty hard on one over the other two in order for the Joker to work in the story. Nicholson's Joker was the first, while Ledger's was the second. I'd hoped that Leto's would be the third, so we could get distinct, live-action interpretations of each aspect, but it felt like a weird amalgamation of Gangster and Psychopath. Since it didn't go hard for one over the other, it leaves the character at a confusing place in the story.

 

But, since his presence was brief, it didn't really undermine the film as a whole. 

[Water Bottle]

4 minutes ago, DamienRoc said:

LetoJoker was probably the weakest part of the film. The Joker as a character tends to have three fairly distinct interpretations: Gangster, Anarchist, or Psychopath. In most cases, you need to lean pretty hard on one over the other two in order for the Joker to work in the story. Nicholson's Joker was the first, while Ledger's was the second. I'd hoped that Leto's would be the third, so we could get distinct, live-action interpretations of each aspect, but it felt like a weird amalgamation of Gangster and Psychopath. Since it didn't go hard for one over the other, it leaves the character at a confusing place in the story.

 

But, since his presence was brief, it didn't really undermine the film as a whole. 

 

I wanted Joker to really be dead after the helicopter crash. Dragged the whole movie down whenever he was in it. Which is like sad. He should have left me wanting MORE of the Joker rather than LESS.

[Kalo]

On 8/6/2016 at 6:27 PM, Belakor said:

Yeah, I definetly would pay to see the Flash movie if Boomerang is the main villain.

 

I second that. 

[Kalo]

7 hours ago, Rorschach said:

After reflecting over it a bit, I'm pretty sure this might be the most disappointing movie I've seen all year, more so than BvS was. At least with that film I had my expectations at a so-so level. While I don't think Suicide Squad was worse, I definitely was more let-down by it.

 

Me too, I pretty much knew BvS wouldn't be amazing. Suicide Squad was one of my most anticipated films of the year. and while I may have enjoyed it slightly more, I was hoping for and kind of expecting so much more.

[Rorschach]

6 minutes ago, Kalo said:

 

Me too, I pretty much knew BvS wouldn't be amazing. Suicide Squad was one of my most anticipated films of the year. and while I may have enjoyed it slightly more, I was hoping for and kind of expecting so much more.

If Wonder Woman sucks, then my faith for this cinematic universe will completely go down the drain. So far this is only strike two for me (I quite enjoyed Man of Steel).

[Kalo]

Just now, Rorschach said:

If Wonder Woman sucks, then my faith for this cinematic universe will completely go down the drain. So far this is only strike two for me (I quite enjoyed Man of Steel).

 

My Hope is pretty much all ready down the drain. strike three for me. however I pray to God Wonder Woman is the DCEU's saving grace. if it's not- there very well may not be a DCUE come 2018.

[Webslinger]

This is without a doubt the most uneven, scattershot movie of the year - even more so than its DCEU stablemate Batman v. Superman - so it's only fitting that I pen an equally scattershot review. 

 

- I really, really, really wanted to like this one, even on the level of an airheaded guilty pleasure, but it never really takes off. Many individual scenes have some sort of energy, but the film is edited so incoherently that it never gathers much momentum from scene-to-scene.

- The editing is a mess. For example: within the first twenty minutes, we get a prison-set prologue for Deadshot, then a prison-set prologue for Harley Quinn, then a meeting between Waller and People Whose Names Don't Matter in which full explanatory vignettes are given for most of the squad members... including Deadshot and Harley Quinn, who are revealed in their respective vignettes as if we're supposed to be seeing them for the first time despite the fact that we already saw them.

- There are a few performances that work on an individual level, but there's never any palpable sense of chemistry between the characters. I didn't buy a single relationship that the film tried to sell, which makes the third act motivations for Diablo ("I'm not going to lose another family!") and Harley ("You messed with my friends!") feel forced.

- I'd see an entire movie with Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. She commits to the role and owns every scene in which she appears. 

- I would also see an entire movie with Will Smith as Deadshot. In fact, had DC been developing this universe a decade ago when Smith could make almost anything a hit, I'm certain that it would have happened. His trademark charisma shines through on numerous occasions, and it's an unfortunate reminder of how much fun this film had the potential to be.

- Joel Kinnaman is more robotic here than he was in the Robocop remake - in which he was playing, y'know, an actual robot.

- Jai Courtney is to Hollywood as "fetch" is to Mean Girls: he's just never gonna happen. That being said, he's amusing and appears much more comfortable here than he did in any of his straight performances in past films.

- I get why the advertising focused so little on the villains. Enchantress, her brother, and their henchmen are just as unremarkable as Doomsday in BVS, but without the convenient excuses of having no dialogue and appearing only in the final half-hour.

- Jared Leto flops as The Joker. The character was always going to be a hard sell while standing in the late Heath Ledger's massive shadow, but he's neither intimidating nor compelling, and his relationship with Harley isn't even remotely convincing.

- For all the talk about doing reshoots to add more jokes, the finished film still takes itself too seriously and isn't all that funny. I chuckled a few times, but I much prefer Deadpool's gleeful approach to line-crossing humor.

- It's patently obvious that Warner really wanted this film to be their Guardians of the Galaxy, but like the other missteps in the DCEU thus far, they're trying to match the MCU without grasping what made the MCU counterpart work in the first place. Yes, Guardians is also a superhero film about a group of rogues coming together, but it tells a coherent story with meaningful stakes and spends a sufficient amount of time developing the main characters and their relationships with one another, and they feel like a cohesive unit. None of those traits apply to Suicide Squad, which just throws its characters together with sketchy development in the hope that they'll just click.

 

C

[RRA]

I will give SS this: If I gave BVS a mediocre grade, afterwards the more I thought about it the more I despised it conceptually. With SS, that isn't the case. A lot of elements in SS together could've made for a winner chicken dinner movie, it just a swing and a miss. BVS struck out, then charged the mound and got tossed from the game.

 

 

 

[DAJK]

 

Still not as bad as y'all are saying. 6.9/10

[Gopher]

19 hours ago, The Futurist said:

"I didn't like this part of the movie : It s all studio s fault !!! Studio Meddling is evil !!!"

 

 

 

To be honest the most engaging stuff in this movie is the studio-mandated character intros in the first act. They're empty, they're chopped to bits, they're covered in generic classic rock, but they're fun. They've got a tone. I'll take it over anything involving Enchantress which felt much more like a director's vision kind of thing.