Part of my DCEU Rewatch. First Watch? No.
I don’t have a lot more to say about “Suicide Squad” (the 2016 edition) that I haven’t previously said on previous watches. It keeps dragging me back though, out of love for the concept and for at least some of the characters — and then leaves me to wake up the next morning, in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney.
I will confess that it gets a bit better with rewatching, turning into a sort of popcorn movie you can enjoy / groan at with friends. Once you expect the erratic editing of two or three “creative” visions blerged together, and the subsequent oddities of character development and herky-jerky plotline, it stops being quite as bothersome.
Acting-wise, this thing is all over the map. There are some good points — Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller is properly sociopathic, even if the denouement with her feels way out of character. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is delightful even if the story sexualizes her to a ridonculous degree. Jay Hernandez’ Diablo is lovely, if underserved.
On the other hand Jai Courtney’s Boomerang, Adam Beech’s Slipknot, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, and Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress are evidence of something profoundly wrong in the casting, acting, writing, and/or directing.
Will Smith plays Will Smith, as always. He does a decent job of it here, even with the tonal chaos.
I actually don’t mind Jared Leto’s Joker (method acting shenanigans aside). I don’t think it’s my favorite Joker of all time, but it’s a legit interpretation. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of it got left on the cutting room floor, rendering a good third of the movie’s narrative interest kaput. They either needed to make this a Joker/Harley movie, or cut the Joker/Harley stuff way back; they instead made decisions with a machete (very Joker-like) and duct tape, ending up with the worst of both worlds.
The other actors are simply reading from Tropes for Dummies, and we’ll leave it there.
Muddied stakes, plot threads that come up then disappear, dizzying tonal shifts, FX that range from fairly cool to conventional to just plain bad … it just all ranges from somewhat interesting (the introductory backstories, while they last) to teeth-grindingly frustrating.
As a reminder, this is what we were promised in the trailer:
I really wish we’d gotten to see that movie. Instead, we got the (supposedly grimdark) movie WB already had in the can from Ayer, lots of panicky meetings by WB execs about the critical drubbing that BvSDoJ got, reshoots and re-edits and fun adverts like this, all to give us something that shows the coherency of mood and tempo and narrative dependability of … well, of the Joker.
Ah, well. Nothing that more bourbon can’t fix.
UPDATE: With that perverse sense of timing that the universe sometimes has, rumors are once again a-swirl that we might get the “Ayer Cut” of SS16 released by WB, the version Ayer had put together before all the studio interference made it into the dog’s breakfast it ended up as. Will that actually happen? Will it produce a more coherent (if more relentlessly gritty) film? Who knows?
Would you like to know more?
- Here’s the first draft of this post, on LetterBoxd.
- Yeah, I reviewed the movie before, after going to see it in the theaters. I was more forgiving than I am now.
- And I watched it since then at least once before.
- Suicide Squad (2016) – IMDb
- Suicide Squad (2016 film) – Wikipedia
- ‘Suicide Squad’ (2016) Review – The Hollywood Reporter