Movie Review: Suicide Squad (2016)

Suicide Squad was definitely the best DC film I've seen since the classic era. The film felt like the comic and I could see some scenes in panels. The Enchantress battle was one of the deepest and most rewarding battles I have seen in a film in quite some time. She actually felt like she wouldn't go down real easy, and she didn't. It was like battling a goddess. The fact that she was tricked into defeat was also very poetic. This is what I wanted from Apocalypse.

The characters had great back stories too. Aside from the romanticized Joker, and that weird helicopter scene where Leto tried his best Penguin impression, (WTF?) his performance was pretty great. Robbie was a good-enough Harley. Felt like the character. El Diablo had a great performance towards the end, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but - this is the best performance I've seen from Will Smith in ages. The movie showed me that he can still act.

We could have had a lot less of the zombie knockoffs that didn't really fight back and felt like fodder enemies, as the story suffered from what could have been more villains working under Enchantress. It was just her, her brother and a bunch of puppet enemies. Felt like they were fighting putties or brainless zombie things as they had no mouth or way to attack. Ayer must have just said, "fuck it" when he wrote those in. We have a whole thirty minutes of them killing fodder enemies. Enemies I could have killed. I'm not even sure they had any power or way to harm. Maybe strangling? I could keep one as a pet and wouldn't have to feed it. They were too dumb to fight and not able to shoot or use weapons. They just walked and died. Most useless enemies ever. If they made a beat em' up of the game, I'd be bored fighting enemies that didn't seem to attack. For powerful magic, that sucked. I guess she's been asleep too long to know how to use her powers.

All in all, I'd give the film a relatively high score and would recommend that any fan of comic book action and depth watch it. Forget what you know about the comics and you'll like how the actors made these characters their own. Even though some are pretty close to their comic counterparts - except for Captain Boomerang or whatever. He was absolutely useless and just wanted to run away. I was hoping he would.

(2hrs, 10m)

8/10