Suicide Squad is the 3rd installment of the DCEU (DC Extended Universe) and by far one of the unlikely movies to succeed after the shaky performance of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Unlike its 2 predecessors, Suicide Squad from the beginning has just looked like a fun movie and even after seeing it, it held true to that hope! This was by far the best movie to come from the DCEU, but it is in no way perfect.
Lets talk about the plot of the movie first. For those of you who don’t know, the Suicide Squad is a group of villains from the DC Comic line who are controlled by the infamous Amanda Waller (played by Viola Davis). Amanda is the conductor of a secret department of the government that really keeps their secrecy from the public eye. She controllers the villains by means of planting bombs in their necks and then detonating them if they go against her will. Basically one of the team members go rouge and try to destroy humanity and its up to the rest of the group to try and stop them. Ignoring a few minor confusions here and there the story is pretty straight forward but in my opinion is kind of boring and lazy on the writers’ part. But I can forgive it for how much excitement and turns there are in the movie.
Getting more into the characters of the movie that’s more of a up and down road. Lets get the bad out of the way first. Lets talk about The Joker (played by Jared Leto) or lack thereof. The ads and promotional part of the movie would make you think that the Joker would have some huge role to play in this movie. To put it shortly, he could have not been in this movie and it would have been the exact same movie. He help kind of fleshed out Harley Quinn’s (played by Margot Robbie) character in some flashbacks, but other then that he didn’t really play a big role. In the small amount of screen time he was in the movie he performed it really great! Now don’t get it twisted, this is not the same type of performance you saw with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. He would definitely be more comparable to the Jack Nicholson Joker from 1989. He is more of a crime boss then a manic who just wants total chaos. This really makes the excessive amount of tattoos make sense considering no other Joker incarnation has had this before. It still could have not been there. Probably the last thing I’m gonna pick on him for is the costume’s he was in. Not once did we ever get that iconic purple tux that most people associate him with, closest we get is a big glittery purple trench coat were he is lacking in one shirt underneath. This isn’t something I blame Jared Leto for but I will put the blame on the wardrobe department.
Now that we talked about the Joker lets discuss his girlfriend, Harley Quinn. Like I said earlier she is played by the beautiful Margot Robbie and she plays this character perfectly!! I’m talking Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine perfectly!! There is a bit of an issue with her costume in choice but her performance makes it slide under the table. She really captured the quirky and psychotic tone of Harley. From her voice, fighting style and even common mannerism, everything about her was amazing and I really believe that she was the ray of light that made this movie so fun! The other person that did extremely well in this movie was Will Smith playing Deadshot/Floyd Lawton. Again this was another person who shined in the whole movie and gave me something emotion to attach to, with minor details being changed for the film (like Deadshot is a white guy in the comics and Will Smith is black) its very forgivable considering his great performance. Since he was played by the biggest star on this entire cast he really got a good amount of screen time. His character is so fleshed out along with Harely Quinn that by the end you find out there’s not too much information given to us about the other characters. That’s really one of the biggest things that bothered me at the end of the movie is that you didn’t learn to much about the other characters other then what you were told in the first 15 minuets of the movie, and one of the most interesting characters in the movie dies at the very end just as you start to really know more about his background.
At the time of writing this Suicide Squad has a whopping 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, do I think that it deserves such a low score? Absolutely not! If was gonna rate on their scale i would give it a solid 60%. Its definitely not great by any means but it does have something that every good movie need, rewatchability. I may even go see this again when I get paid. You know why? Because this movie is different in terms of who the “hero” is and its just loads of fun! I would probably give this a solid 6 even though it just riddled with problems, but the problems really only consist of people who know the characters from their comic book roots. To the average movie goer this is still gonna be a good time for you.
Side note: To any parents wanting to take their kids to this new “superhero movie” please use your best caution, for the most part this movie isn’t too bad for a PG-13 rating but there are some suggestive themes that seem a little strong for younger viewers. Remember these are bad guys saving the world, so they are still gonna do and say bad guy things.
