The beautiful thing about Suicide Squad is how, deep down at its core, it’s the realest comic book movies get: A movie about people who need people. Even the irredeemable degenerates, the villains of the world who’ve not only violated the rules of society but set them on fire—like Deadshot (Will Smith), a killer for hire who’s actually a loving deadbeat daddy at heart, or Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the deranged villainess locked in a torrid true romance with an unhinged psychopath (Oscar-winner Jared Leto).
That’s a relatively warm and fuzzy takeaway from DC and Warner Bros.’ first sidestep from the brawny chest-puffing bravado of Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, two self-serious superhero blockbusters that managed to turn the historic meeting of DC’s most iconic characters into a heroic pissing contest. And while it’s a bright, grimy, candy-colored mess, at least Suicide Squad is here to lighten up the place, break a few vases, take a few shots, and have some fun.
Suicide Squad is probably not a comic book blockbuster for the easily triggered. Cold-blooded murder, familicide, good old-fashioned assault, psychopathy caused by extreme domestic abuse, and various other ills have landed the country’s most violent criminals in Belle Reve Prison, locked away to rot forever for very good reason. And among the human cesspool of evildoers chomping at the bit to break out are a rough and tumble lineup of certain “metahumans” with superhuman abilities – the perfect recruiting pool for a shadowy government figure like Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). Post-BvS, the world is on high alert. Well, Batman did just almost beat in Superman’s head with a porcelain sink before a mutant zombie alien stabbed him to death with his giant rock finger. So Waller gets the green light to create a black ops team filled with supervillains to battle the new super-powered bad guys that have been popping up since Krypton’s finest met an early grave. She puts upstanding soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) in charge of the unit — secretly so that she can also control his girlfriend, the scientist-turned-body snatched June Moone (Cara Delevigne) who has an ancient, all-powerful, and scantily clad sorceress named The Enchantress living inside her. Post-BvS, the world is on high alert. Well, Batman did just almost beat in Superman’s head with a porcelain sink before a mutant zombie alien stabbed him to death with his giant rock finger. So Waller gets the green light to create a black ops team filled with supervillains to battle the new super-powered bad guys that have been popping up since Krypton’s finest met an early grave. She puts upstanding soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) in charge of the unit — secretly so that she can also control his girlfriend, the scientist-turned-body snatched June Moone (Cara Delevigne) who has an ancient, all-powerful, and scantily clad sorceress named The Enchantress living inside her.
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Suicide Squad is probably not a comic book blockbuster for the easily triggered. Cold-blooded murder, familicide, good old-fashioned assault, psychopathy caused by extreme domestic abuse, and various other ills have landed the country’s most violent criminals in Belle Reve Prison, locked away to rot forever for very good reason. And among the human cesspool of evildoers chomping at the bit to break out are a rough and tumble lineup of certain “metahumans” with superhuman abilities—the perfect recruiting pool for a shadowy government figure like Amanda Waller (Viola Davis).
Post-BvS, the world is on high alert. Well, Batman did just almost beat in Superman’s head with a porcelain sink before a mutant zombie alien stabbed him to death with his giant rock finger. So Waller gets the green light to create a black ops team filled with supervillains to battle the new super-powered bad guys that have been popping up since Krypton’s finest met an early grave. She puts upstanding soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) in charge of the unit—secretly so that she can also control his girlfriend, the scientist-turned-body snatched June Moone (Cara Delevigne) who has an ancient, all-powerful, and scantily clad sorceress named The Enchantress living inside her.
The plan: Implant these indentured supervillains with remote controlled neck bombs and force them to save the world, or else—boom.
We’re introduced to the antiheroes of Suicide Squad in order of importance, with all the subtlety of a punch in the face. There’s Smith as Deadshot, exchanging tough guy banter with Belle Reve’s sleazy head guard (Ike Barinholtz) and doing his damnedest to make the audience believe that beneath his eternally amiable exterior seethes the soul of a stone cold killer. His one weakness: the estranged daughter whose future he keeps taking contracts to finance. But when Will Smith is playing the worst of your worst, how bad can he possibly be?
Robbie’s lethal, lithe, and unpredictable Harley Quinn is next, perched like a caged bird on a rope fashioned from her own straightjacket. “I’m bored. Play with me,” she coos to prison guards. When one takes her interest for flirtation, Harley makes a fierce, deliberate declaration—sadly, the first and last boldly pseudo-feminist line she gets: “I sleep where I want, when I want, with who I want.”
Not subtle enough? Writer-director David Ayer (Harsh Times, End of Watch, Fury) goes full Scorsese pairing Harley’s introduction with Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” one of the film’s many exhaustive musical cues that mostly feel on the nose and quickly become tiresome—even if here, it kind of works. Later Ayer drops an Eminem classic into a montage and sets a fight scene in a moving elevator to K7’s even more classic classic, “Come Baby Come.” That deep ’90s cut, I admit, approaches some stroke of genius.
Everyone else is sadly, of minor importance, although they all get their (anti)hero moment as they begrudgingly learn to lean on their teammates. There’s Diablo (Jay Hernandez), an Angeleno wracked with guilt over misusing his “gift” for starting huge fires with his bare hands; Boomerang (Jai Courtney), the boorish Aussie criminal armed with—you guessed it—a boomerang; Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) a fearsome reptile-man who wears a velour suit; Slipknot (Adam Beach), the first guy to panic in battle; and Katana (Karen Fukuhara), Rick Flag’s samurai sword-wielding righthand woman.
Needless to say stylistic flourishes, like unstable villains, are bountiful in Suicide Squad. The fun is in letting yourself go along with every silly bit. Do you like montages and flashbacks? Ayer loves them. He cannot get enough of them. He leans on both far too heavily for far too long in a movie so stuffed to the rafters with colorful characters, there’s barely any room for a serviceable plot.
Instead, he moves his Squad inch by inch along a threadbare story just to have somewhere to go and things to blow up, trots them through a war-torn city and into random buildings to get to the Big Bad: Enchantress, who’s hatched her own sinister plot from within June Moone’s body to bring her own all-powerful brother back to life with magic and rule the world.
It hardly matters who the Suicide Squad is fighting or why: These supervillains just don’t feel like they belong in the same ZIP Code as DC’s gritty urban antiheroes, let alone the same movie. One is a dark and demonic witch with a ghoulish hunch and black magic, the other a gigantic demon with horns and extend-lava arms. There’s menace in Delevigne’s hungry evil eyes but not much else, making her a lame supervillain to set off the Squad.
On top of which, choppy edits call attention to themselves too often, suggesting that what we’re seeing is just one of several versions of the movie Ayer actually shot. A scene in which “pyrokinetic homeboy” and avowed pacifist Diablo finally unleashes the beast after coming to terms with his terrible gift feels shoehorned in. Events occur to drive the plot forward seemingly out of nowhere, like when the Squad’s helicopter is shot down as they’re flying into their mission just so they can look cool stomping out of the wreckage unharmed. Later, crucial information is divulged when someone discovers a binder marked “Top Secret.”
Clearly it’s not the less-than-memorable villains or the Dirty Dozen-esque origin story that gets Ayer’s juices flowing, but pet characters like Harley Quinn, the film’s true raison d'être. In a movie that feels disproportionately anemic and disjointed at times, Harley Quinn is the beating, bananas heart of the film. Beneath an assortment of face tattoos, caked-on clown makeup, and very sparse costuming, she’s always off-kilter and delightfully herself—a spunky supervillain who lacks impulse control and morals but keeps the makeshift squad together when self-interest and friction threaten to tear them apart.
In a flashback (You get a flashback! You get a flashback!) we learn how a prison psychiatrist named Dr. Harleen Quinzel had a few screws zapped loose by her patient-turned-lover the Joker and became Harley Quinn to prove her love. But the reveal is a disturbing one. Leto’s legendarily demented Joker is utterly captivating in his handful of scenes. But are he and Harley, everyone’s new favorite bad girl, just stuck in a cycle of domestic abuse? If Suicide Squad’s band of degenerate loners are here to learn the value of friendship and makeshift family, Harley’s triumphant streak of independence away from her supervillain boyfriend is almost satisfying, before it’s pre-empted just to propel the greater DCU forward.
Elsewhere, highly anticipated Justice League heroes Batman (Ben Affleck) and The Flash (Ezra Miller) stop by to turn in cameos. Affleck, for his part, dutifully makes a surprisingly lengthy appearance for no reason other than to connect the dots that lead to Justice League. Is Suicide Squad much of a movie on its own? Not so much. As a sideline stopover en route to Justice League and a welcome break from those mopier, more principled heroes in Gotham City and Metropolis, it’ll do.
