the Suicide Squad review

I tend to get ranty sometimes… I’ve a habit of saying things are either the greatest of all time or worse than rusty nails being shoved in my eyeballs. I’m just warning you that this review will probably end up sounding like I vehemently detested Suicide Squad. In reality, it just bored me. I didn’t like it. But that would make a boring review… So here comes the hatred.

First major problem, the trailers. I love a good trailer and I’ll happily rewatch them multiple times in my pre-film hype. Pretty sure there were four trailers for SS. For comparison I think Civil War had two. Four was too fricking many. Half the film, and probably every good bit is in the trailers. The trailers also set expectations way too high. It looked really good, and well I can’t blame them for that. Trailers are ads and they got my money in the end up. The trailers made it look fun and funny. The soundtrack choices, Harley Quinn’s craziness and Cap Boomerang drinking that tin of beer. Trailers should be previews but that tin of beer joke was probably that characters only funny bit in the film. He did f all else. I also can’t help but feel that the soundtrack was chosen or changed after the trailers went down so well. It seemed off, at times annoying and largely a giant rip off of Guardians of the Galaxy…

I bloody love Guardians. Can I just talk about it instead? One of its biggest strengths is something Suicide Squad fails at and it’s a fair comparison. Both are team movies. In GotG you get introduced to five characters who get equal screen time, who all get good lines, backstories and have interactions that feel natural and believable. In Suicide Squad you get Will Smith and Margot Robbie. Everyone else is filler. Spoiler ahoy!!!!   ….. One character literally gets introduced just so they can kill him off 2 mins later. It’s so unbelievably lazy. 

Smith and Robbie are good. They’re the strong points here but I can’t say I really liked their characters. Harley Quinn isn’t half as amusing as I thought she’d be and this might sound odd... but too much focus was put on her being sexy. Her character, her role in the film had less layers than her clothing. Hey she’s an attractive lady and it’s not the first film to make a woman a sex object but I did find it dull that we were constantly being reminded of how short her shorts were, or how pretty she was. Lazy writing again.

Smith’s character Deadshot is a dullard too. Another spoiler, if you can really call it that... He’s actually a good guy really and he has a daughter he loves but can’t see because he’s in jail and blah bla bla. I swear I feel I’ve seen 1000 films with that exact same storyline. Yaaaawn!

He shoots stuff too!! And the rest of the squad beat up stuff. Faceless drones who are there to be mowed down. Kind of like the aliens in Avengers but at least during that you had characters bantering and Hulks ‘puny god,’ scene. In SS you had slow-mo and baddies being destroyed easier than I managed to demolish my popcorn. Hey look, there’s bullet casings dropping to the ground in slow-mo!! I’ve only seen that in that every blooming action film since The Matrix started it in 1999. 

The Joker. What in the great fudgery was that? Hated him. A Joker who’s so crazy he drew a mouth on his hand. Scary stuff. A joker who’s top boss in organised crime, who loves Harley and would risk his life for her… Where’s the chaos? The self-obsessed maniac who cares for no one? Apart from Batman, the Joker crushes on Batman obviously. 

There’s also a villain who doesn’t really do much except make a shiny light beam in the sky and doesn’t like people. Why does she want all humans dead though? The film doesn’t really say. I just assumed someone bullied her about her eyebrows. Amanda Waller was the real bad ass though and Viola Davis impressed in that role. Everything else was meh.

So there you go, my review. After all that I probably should remind you that I didn’t even hate it, just wasn’t impressed. DC, Warner Bros… Sort yourselves out. Wonder Woman better be good damn it.