Film Review: Suicide Squad
** ½ out of Four
I wish the special effects action sequences in Suicide Squad weren't so gargantuan, because it overpowers the good performances and character moments. Besides, I am willing to bet that scaling down the action would have made it more coherent and more exciting.
Suicide Squad plays like a superhero version of The Dirty Dozen (1967): a group of supervillains are forcefully recruited by a hush-hush government agency for black ops missions. Good thinking, since an ancient witch (Cara Delevingne) is bent on world destruction.
Will Smith delivers a solid performance as the skilled sniper Deadshot. Margot Robbie is funny and sexy as hell as Harley Quinn-- a therapist gone insane and the main squeeze to The Joker (Jared Leto). But my favorite performance is by Viola Davis as the ruthless Amanda Waller, who put the team of villains together. She is a total bad ass here.
This being a DC Comics property, Ben Affleck's Batman shows up in a few scenes, and while Leto's Joker is good, he's not a main character. And speaking of characters, the screenplay by director David Ayer is a little sloppy in some of the character introductions – certain characters appear for the first time half way into the story, as if they were forgotten about in previous drafts of the script and then wedged into the new draft at random.
Suicide Squad is a mess, but there is enough interplay between the characters for some fun to be had.