I don't get the ratings here. This is a cut and dry poorly made movie and fans of the DC universe deserve better. I don't normally post my reviews here. But I have to share my take on this movie because it just wasn't good. I didn't even have to go into spoilers to show how terrible it is. Movie goers shouldn't mindlessly consume these films. Christopher Nolan set a high bar, but producers and studios need to step messing with auteurs and maybe we can get a quality DC movie:
There is nothing in Suicide Squad that shows any hope that an auteur filmmaker can do anything distinctive with the current cash cow of the Hollywood machine: the super hero movie. What Christopher Nolan once made his own has devolved into a predictable pastiche whose charms should be wearing thin on audiences. It doesn't help that the movie is also an example of how bad one of these films can be when it becomes watered down and designed to refrain from shaking up anything in the so-called DC Universe. Suicide Squad, a PG-13 film, was supposed to be DC's entry to rival Marvel's R-rated Deadpool. Even though Deadpool had its own problems as a self-aware action movie, it still had focus and a bravado that is nowhere to be found in Suicide Squad.
Suicide Squad follows a group of villains with super powers released from prison as part of a government plan to protect the world from terrorists or whatever sign-of-the-times fear currently plaguing society (Zika?). Starring Will Smith as the hit man Deadshot and Margot Robbie as the Joker's manic girlfriend Harley Quinn, alongside several other less familiar DC baddies, these guys are supposed to be complex people who have long fallen from grace and are supposed to rise above to find their humanity and gain the audience's sympathy. But writer-director David Ayer tries so hard to take a safe route, you can see the gears trying to manipulate audience emotion, revealing the inherit problems of these comic book adaptations straining to catch up with decades of printed storytelling.
You can't totally blame Ayer, who last gave moviegoers Fury, an incredibly strong and startling war movie featuring a better fleshed out motley crew of characters. The preciousness Hollywood has for its ongoing world building of interconnected comic book films creates such tight restrictions on storytelling that anything that might upset that world has no room to prosper. At one point, toward the end of Suicide Squad, one character asks another, "Shouldn't you be dead?" Of course not, this is the DC universe, and it's gotta be milked. That means no major players should be written off in one movie.
The result of these storytelling restraints is a soulless kind of filmmaking hampered by pussyfooting. It's like a syrupy glaze that drowns out any possibility to shine above what has become a predictable pattern of storytelling. Characters dole out uninspired lines that play superficially to feelings, like, "Dad, I know you do bad things, but I still love you." Then there are the clichés, like "fight fire with fire." Sometimes the script inadvertently deflates the tension by spelling things out. Someone over a radio says, "Use extreme caution," and someone in the action responds, "I don't like this." But in case you miss that, someone else says, "I don't like it either." A kid playing with his action figures can come up with better chatter to establish tension....
There is nothing in Suicide Squad that shows any hope that an auteur filmmaker can do anything distinctive with the current cash cow of the Hollywood machine: the super hero movie. What Christopher Nolan once made his own has devolved into a predictable pastiche whose charms should be wearing thin on audiences. It doesn't help that the movie is also an example of how bad one of these films can be when it becomes watered down and designed to refrain from shaking up anything in the so-called DC Universe. Suicide Squad, a PG-13 film, was supposed to be DC's entry to rival Marvel's R-rated Deadpool. Even though Deadpool had its own problems as a self-aware action movie, it still had focus and a bravado that is nowhere to be found in Suicide Squad.
Suicide Squad follows a group of villains with super powers released from prison as part of a government plan to protect the world from terrorists or whatever sign-of-the-times fear currently plaguing society (Zika?). Starring Will Smith as the hit man Deadshot and Margot Robbie as the Joker's manic girlfriend Harley Quinn, alongside several other less familiar DC baddies, these guys are supposed to be complex people who have long fallen from grace and are supposed to rise above to find their humanity and gain the audience's sympathy. But writer-director David Ayer tries so hard to take a safe route, you can see the gears trying to manipulate audience emotion, revealing the inherit problems of these comic book adaptations straining to catch up with decades of printed storytelling.
You can't totally blame Ayer, who last gave moviegoers Fury, an incredibly strong and startling war movie featuring a better fleshed out motley crew of characters. The preciousness Hollywood has for its ongoing world building of interconnected comic book films creates such tight restrictions on storytelling that anything that might upset that world has no room to prosper. At one point, toward the end of Suicide Squad, one character asks another, "Shouldn't you be dead?" Of course not, this is the DC universe, and it's gotta be milked. That means no major players should be written off in one movie.
The result of these storytelling restraints is a soulless kind of filmmaking hampered by pussyfooting. It's like a syrupy glaze that drowns out any possibility to shine above what has become a predictable pattern of storytelling. Characters dole out uninspired lines that play superficially to feelings, like, "Dad, I know you do bad things, but I still love you." Then there are the clichés, like "fight fire with fire." Sometimes the script inadvertently deflates the tension by spelling things out. Someone over a radio says, "Use extreme caution," and someone in the action responds, "I don't like this." But in case you miss that, someone else says, "I don't like it either." A kid playing with his action figures can come up with better chatter to establish tension....