The Suicide Squad review

I know a Quentin Terintino Suicide Squad movie will never exist, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Brining in Guardians of the Galaxy headmaster James Gunn was probably the smart move for Warner Brothers, who very much are trying to make a Suicide Squad movie in line with the audience response to Suicide Squad‘s “Bohemian Rhapsody” trailer.

…I suppose Edgar Wright would have worked, but we’ll see what the next movie brings. If The Suicide Squad does poorly at the the theaters, it can easily be chalked up to COVID’s exciting new Delta+ program, and another go at the series will surely be greenlit. After all, for all its flaws, the first Suicide Squad is the 4th-highest grossing DCEU movie at over three-quarters of a billion dollars.

I will certainly give it credit for not having Jared Leto and also for the finished product representing the intent of its creation. But it really didn’t enthrall me. We might again be in the situation where the trailer was better than the movie itself; the relentless pace of the crazy there was one heck of a rollercoaster ride. But when viewing the movie as a whole, you have to experience waiting in line, too.

The entire movie pretty much follows a Prince of Persia: Sands of Time cadence. Scene that moves plot, scene that has a quiet character moment, scene of crazy, over the top violent madness. And despite hitting the same beats over and over, the tempo seems off. The slow bits are too slow and the fast bits are too fast. All the big crazy things seem like they all worked great on paper, but fail to have the impact they ought to.

The movie’s first bit of craziness is a fakeout initial action scene in which a squad is successfully and intentionally sent to their deaths under false pretenses. It’s 6 new characters and 3 returning ones (and you can easily guess who doesn’t actually die). The movie does its utmost to get to the chase by blasting through the plot-moving scene, really only spending the quiet character scene to try to convince us everything’s normal before loudly screaming “psyche!” and doing it all over again at a more measured pace with the REAL team. The movie actually spends time establishing the stakes the second time around, which was sorely missing from the fast-forward plot scene. Perhaps if that had been front-loaded, the near-TPK would have been a little more of a moment.

Contrast that to the near-TPK scene in Deadpool 2, which, while it happened similarly quickly after the introduction of the characters, actually did the work to build up and sell the expectation that it went on to intricately subvert while also being useful in establishing the credibility of the survivor. Deadpool had a goal known to the viewer. He had a plan, and roles for all the new characters involved. And then the whole thing went sideways in increasingly ridiculous and likely ways. The Suicide Squad just walked stright into a meat grinder with as little situational awareness as the viewers had. It was flashy, but it wasn’t engaging.

My viewing experience didn’t really recover from that. The funny dialog was too spaced out, as though the movie’s sense of humor kept dozing off and waking with a start. The action scenes couldn’t decide if they wanted to be beautiful spectacles or visceral shocks. Amanda Waller easily loses her cool and gets put in her place, which is like watching Batman struggle with a crossword puzzle.

Or perhaps I’m just in a funk lately and can’t give movies a proper enjoyment.

It’s not all bad. The Suicide Squad franchise does have use for being a dumping ground for characters and concepts that would never, ever, be included in a “proper” DCEU movie. And they did well to create opportunities to showcase Margot Robbie’s capability for doing her own stunts without putting her in a position to get maimed. And that’s something I probably couldn’t say about a theoretical Terintinto-helmed film.

Verdict: Rental. Lucky you if you have HBO Max.