Margot Robbie, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Karen Fukuhara, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney and Will Smith (Clay Enos/ TM & (c) DC Comics/Warner Bros Entertainment)
The U.S. government recruits criminals to fight crime in the all-star blockbuster Suicide Squad. Things don’t work out as planned for the characters and for critics who have thrown up their hands at a movie that even defenders are calling a mess.
I kind of liked it.
Devastated by the death of Superman, the government worries that while the Man of Steel shared America’s values, the next Superman might not. Intelligence official Amanda Waller (a no-nonsense Viola Davis) thus recruits super-antiheroes from a variety of high-security prisons. These include characters like the assassin Deadshot (an effective Will Smith) and the baseball-bat wielding Harley Quinn (a gleefully evil Margot Robbie), who understandably inspired cosplay at the press screening. Less inspiring is Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, who looks a little less nondescript than usual thanks to copious facial hair).
This motley crew is charged with what they consider a suicide mission. Good guy Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) leads the squad to rescue a high-profile target from battle-torn Midway City and take on a climactic fight with The Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), a 6,000-year old witch who has taken over the body of mild-mannered archaeologist Dr. June Moone.
There’s a lot not to like: the film spends a long time introducing its players, who each get their own signature pop song, from “House of the Rising Sun” to “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” There are plot holes: even though the Enchantress is kept in check because Waller has taken control of her heart, the witch just kind of gets away anyway. Oscar winner Jared Leto is a hammy but thoroughly unmenacing Joker.
The movie suggests the central conflict of the almost universally panned Criminal, in which the brain of career prisoner Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) is implanted with the memory of dead agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds); if the emotions that Bill brought to Jericho’s brain made the hardened felon a better person, Jericho’s unhinged brutality made him a more effective law enforcer.
A similar conflict plays out for El Diablo (Jay Hernandez, whose acting chops are lost to prosthetic facial tattoos), afraid of losing control of his fiery powers even though it’s that very loss of control that his fellow squad members are counting on to help them defeat a powerful evil.
As fans of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films—and Frank Miller’s graphic novels—know, the DC metropolis is a dark and cynical place, and Suicide Squad spray-paints a world where everybody gets their hands dirty, from the evil superheroes to the vicious government that hires them. While these characters don’t get much of a chance to develop, inherent in their struggle is the noble concept of rehabilitation; even these psychotic criminals are given a chance to prove themselves worthy, and maybe one of them will.
Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov gives the movie an unpleasantly grimy, muddy look that suits its moral quagmire, and the special effects for Enchantress are especially cheesy, her green eyes glaring through a haze of evil smoke. Yet it’s that visual murk, and the film’s trafficking with demons, that suggests a second-tier Hong Kong fantasy film from the ’90s. Like one of those movies, it doesn’t much matter if it doesn’t make sense.
Readers of these pages know I have little patience for most blockbusters, but the flawed artistry here has a strange resonance for me that the air-tight Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t have. That may be as close to a good review as Suicide Squad will get.
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Suicide Squad
Written and directed by David Ayer
With Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto
Rated PG – 13 for sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language
123 minutes
Opens today everywhere
