Somewhere about halfway through Suicide Squad, so far the nadir of Warner Bros. and DC’s increasingly bungled attempt to build an enduring Avengers-style superhero franchise, the movie’s ostensible villain does some mumbo jumbo and a great light goes shooting up into the sky over a city, swirling around in a death circle, just like we’ve seen in so very many movies in the last almost decade. What a tired image, a stale and meaningless stab at grandeur. It’s especially meaningless in the film writer-director David Ayer has made, which desperately scrambles for a sense of style—any style will do!—and confuses itself into a muddy and smothering soup of wasted possibility.
Suicide Squad is bad. Not fun bad. Not redeemable bad. Not the kind of bad that is the unfortunate result of artists honorably striving for something ambitious and falling short. Suicide Squad is just bad. It’s ugly and boring, a toxic combination that means the film’s highly fetishized violence doesn’t even have the exciting tingle of the wicked or the taboo. (Oh, how the movie wants to be both of those things.) It’s simply a dull chore steeped in flaccid machismo, a shapeless, poorly edited trudge that adds some mildly appalling sexism and even a soupçon of racism to its abundant, hideously timed gun worship. But, perhaps worst of all, Suicide Squad is ultimately too shoddy and forgettable to even register as revolting. At least revolting would have been something.
Ayer has made two truly repugnant films in the past, the gruesome action mess Sabotage and the outright annihilating W.W. II tank movie Fury. While I’m no fan of those movies, I can at least appreciate that Ayer’s individual, idiosyncratic stamp was on both of them. (He also made the competent, harrowing L.A. cops downer End of Watch.) With Suicide Squad, though, there’s a whole studio franchise to be considered, one that has to be more palatable to a wider audience. And so the invigoratingly nasty crunch Ayer has brought to his previous work is nowhere to be seen here—save for the the lovingly filmed money shots of guns firing. (Don’t worry, Ayer fans, those are still very much present.) What results is a superhero movie that’s pointlessly downbeat, and a David Ayer film that has lost all its bite. That doesn’t do anyone any good.
Perhaps worst served, beyond the audience of course, is a handful of talented, appealing actors who were promised a kicky movie about villains on the make and instead ended up in this. Will Smith, still pulsating with charisma 20-plus years into a storied career, plays Deadshot, an ace marksman and deadly hitman (the avidity of this character’s gun use comes at a really unfortunate time in the American moment) who is forcibly enlisted in a ragtag band of rogues by Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, a ruthless government operative with some dubious moral and ethical philosophies. Margot Robbie is another member of the team, Harley Quinn, the beloved Joker’s moll who became a cult favorite when she debuted in the marvelous 1990s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. Smith and Robbie had sparkling chemistry together in 2015’s little-seen con caper Focus, and of course Viola Davis is Viola freakin’ Davis, and these noble three do slog their way through the gunk of this material and occasionally find something worth playing, reflecting a tiny bit of light that dimly bathes those of us in the audience.
But even those stars eventually succumb to Suicide Squad’s grim undertow, Ayer’s script forcing such erratic shifts in character and tone that it would be impossible for even the most nimble and resourceful of actors to keep their footing. The rest of the squad, played by the likes of Jai Courtney, Cara Delevingne, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Joel Kinnaman, don’t register much at all. I suppose Akinnuoye-Agbaje, as Croc, does stand out, but only because there is some startling racial stereotyping going on with his character that is, at best, utterly baffling. Robbie and Delevingne are ogled to varying degrees, Robbie drawing the lion’s share of Ayer’s gaze as Harley Quinn puts on some short-shorts and, of course, gets wet in the rain. Objectification aside, Ayer makes such an inconsistent hash out of a great character that I’d have to imagine that most fans of Harley Quinn—male, female, gay, straight—will be disappointed.
Speaking of disappointed (or, at least, glumly surprised): Harley’s boyfriend, who’s been so prominently featured in the marketing for the film, hardly makes an impression at all. All that talk about Jared Leto going super-Method to play the Joker, tormenting his castmates and whatnot, has led only to a lukewarm display of villainy that, it turns out, teeters on the line between small supporting role and outright cameo. After all that, Leto’s Joker is barely in the damn movie, and when he is, he’s entirely underwhelming.
I’m not going to get into the film’s myriad plot problems, its skips in pacing (most of the movie takes place in one night, a cool idea that is executed terribly), its many failings in logic. Because I don’t want to spoil anything, but also because I can’t bring myself to relive it. I know it’s tedious to read some critic say that they’re tired of superhero movies, but good lord did Suicide Squad take it out of me. I never want to see that glowing wheel of light spinning over a city again. I never want to sit through another conversation about whether superheroes are good or bad (or, in this case, whether super-villains are). Suicide Squad is so uninspired, so dim and unthoughtful, that its one true arresting act of destruction is to deliver what could be a fatal blow to non-Marvel superhero movies. (Unless it does very well at the box office—which, what the hell, it probably will.) If you can believe it, Suicide Squad is even worse than Fantastic Four. At least that mess of a movie had some shimmer of an idea to it. Suicide Squad, trying so lamely to be clever and edgy with all its mortifying music cues and clunky jokes, was only good as a compelling two-and-a-half-minute trailer. As a movie, it really does itself in.
