Suicide Squad (2016) - SPOILER-FREE Review

Editor’s Note: this is an old, unformatted, unedited review. The author’s opinion might not match the original thoughts written in this article.

Directed by: David Ayer

Starring: Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Jai Courtney, Cara Delevingne, Viola Davis, David Harbour

Runtime: 123 min

The most anticipated movie of the summer is here and DC Comics really needed this film to step up so they could catch up with Marvel. Everyone knows the story, but still: the world lost (supposedly) Superman and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), who works for the government, thinks it's a good idea to put together a team of ... Bad guys, the worst of the worst, so that they can help humanity in case of an "evil Superman" comes by. Funny enough, there's a beacon shooting up the sky in the middle of the city and they have to stop it ... Basically, the plot of every comic book's movie adaptation.

I know I keep saying to not watch trailers because they often spoil the best scenes or tell some things fans didn't know about, but with the enormous advertising for this movie, it was impossible to avoid it ... And what a mistake that was. I'll save the trailer for later, let me discuss the pros of this movie first (which are basically the cast and their characters).

Will Smith as Deadshot is great, it's his best performance in the last few years and his character has the most interesting and heartfelt backstory. There's even a scene with another character from the DCEU (DC Extended Universe) where he shows the first signs of humanity present in him and that is really cool to watch. He is also the main source of entertainment and fun in the film, he basically throws his Will Smith's charisma in there and it works really well. Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn portrays perfectly this known character from the comics, she's exactly like I wanted her to be. She gets that crazy insanity just right, she's super funny and also has some moments of humanity throughout the movie. Viola Davis as Amanda Waller is really great as well, I can't say too much about her (no spoilers in here), but I honestly can't wait to see her again in future installments. She's bad-ass!

Batman (Ben Affleck) appears in the movie for a couple of scenes and he's awesome, Boomerang (Jai Courtney) is a pleasant surprise, he actually has a personality in this film and The Joker (Jared Leto) ... Is fine. I'm really not sure of how I feel about this interpretation of one of the most famous villains ever. Jared Leto tried to mix the vibe of the previous actors that portrayed this character (Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson) and I guess I'll have to wait until another movie is released because The Joker barely has a scene in this one ... With this in mind, I move on to my list of cons, which are more than I expected.

The Joker isn't relevant, at all, in this movie. He's barely in it, he doesn't have a remember-able or awesome scene, he does nothing. The trailer and all of the advertising for this movie is a complete fraud! They tried to make him the villain until the release because they weren't sure that Deadshot and Harley Quinn were enough to sell this movie. He has some good scenes and that's it ... Disappointing. Also, there are some other characters that are in the film without a purpose: Katana (Karen Fukuhara), Slipknot (Adam Beach) or even Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) ... They're just there because the film needed them to form the squad, I guess.

The first act is good, but it's so choppy and has a lot of flashbacks. In fact, the whole movie has flashbacks thrown into it with no structure whatsoever, either 10 minutes into the movie or 10 minutes before the end of it. Not that they're bad, actually they're pretty interesting and the best part of the movie (some actually would give a good story for a solo movie), but so badly edited. The beginning is total exposition, they have some people dining at a restaurant, Amanda literally places a bunch of documents on the table and we have this whole set of flashbacks and cuts to set up these characters. I understand they need to introduce them, but they do it in such a lazy way, literally like, "Hey, this is Deadshot. He shoots people and has a daughter. Care about him.". It's definitely not the best way to do it. It's a shame that a film with so many great characters under-utilizes them so much.

The other two acts are literally a mix of different scenes that turn into one big mess. I know for a fact that after Batman V Superman received some negative reviews about the darker tone present in the movie, the producers re-shot a lot of scenes just to add a little more of a lighter vibe to Suicide Squad. That just made things worse, they try to put together a darker and lighter tone at the same time and it doesn't work out. Even the soundtrack, which I thought would be amazing (and it was in some scenes), comes out completely wrong in some moments. It's a complete mishmash.

Another problem with this movie is the main villain, who kind of remained omitted since in the trailers it was almost all The Joker. I don't consider it a spoiler, you probably know already who this character is, but still, I'm warning you ... Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) is a witch that can control people's minds and apparently dance ... Yes, that's all she does in 90% of the movie, dance. She stands in the middle of the city for the whole time just moving her arms around and pretending she has a hula hoop in her hips. She couldn't be less of a plot device for the squad to have a purpose and do something, I don't even blame the actress because she had to spend most of her time looking at a green screen and speaking some strange language. I actually liked the introduction to this character, the first time she turns into Enchantress is amazing, but after a subway scene, she becomes CGI awful.

The ending is terrible, it remembered me of Fantastic Four's ending of last year ... It's that bad. Literally, there's a character who is definitely dead, it has "tentacles" going through its body and after 5 minutes ... It's fine, nothing happened, clothes are clean, everything's perfect. The plot given for the squad doesn't make a lot of sense when you have superheroes like Batman, Wonder Woman, or The Flash in this universe ... Why would a girl with a bat or a guy that shoots really well fight a super-powerful being that can destroy them in seconds if he wishes to? Just wait until you know how they kill them and stop the beacon ...

This review is already longer than I wanted to, so I'll stop here, I guess I got all the main points in. I really expected more of this movie, it has really great characters, some amazing performances from the cast, some funny scenes, but the story is unstructured, the action isn't that good (the "monsters" that they have to defeat along the way are at the level of a Stormtrooper) and the plot doesn't really make sense.

In four words: not bad, but disappointing.

PS1: No spoiler of course. There's a mid-credits scene where the characters involved basically tell the viewer to forget about the Suicide Squad ... Really? They made a movie so that in the end they could tell us to forget it? Oh, DC ...