After all the hype, after all the terrible reviews that I avoided reading because I was scared of having plot twists revealed, my wife and I finally got to see Suicide Squad. I was taken aback that I wasn’t more disappointed.
Most recently, I’d read that Suicide Squad was as bad a movie as Con Air. That confused me, because I don’t remember Con Air being a bad movie. It certainly wasn’t high art, but it had John Malkovich and Nicolas Cage on a plane being ridiculous. A film doesn’t have to be black and white, three hours long and constantly dour in order to have some value.
One problem with Suicide Squad is that most of the good dialogue and all of the music have been in the trailers, so some of the time you’re just waiting to see something you’ve already been told about. One exception: in the trailer, Diablo asks for a glass of water in a bar; that wasn’t in the finished product (although perhaps that was just one of the strange decisions of Singaporean censors).
The other problem is the lecherous treatment that Margot Robbie’s character, well, Margot Robbie’s body, gets. Everyone else in the film has a costume that is designed to protect them from harm, except Harley Quinn, who has not pants that barely reach below her navel. Any longer and the camera might get distracted. Cara Levigne’s character, Enchantress, also gets a bikini to wear, but she is at least wreathed in Supernatural Powers to protect her. Meanwhile Harley Quinn gets alternately punched unconscious and snogged by Batman (no worrisome overtones there) or jumps into a vat of chemicals to be pulled out by Jared Leto’s Joker, or doing sexy ladydancing to demonstrate how mad mad mad the Joker is.
Come to think of it, those are two fairly major problems. If you can overlook them, the film proceeds at a good clip. There are some twists in the plot and (unlike Spectre) it doesn’t feel like there’s a missing reel of exposition somewhere. Unlike Captain America: Civil War it doesn’t resemble watching an eight year old boy smashing his toys together for two hours, and unlike Batman vs Superman: Superfluous Colons it includes fun and colour and not just grumpy men shouting at one another.
Other things have annoyed other people. June Moon is played by a 25 year old, which is apparently too young to convince as a PhD in archaeology. Somebody is tilting at windmills here, because (for example) my brother had his PhD before he was 25, and he didn’t spend his time irresponsibly abseiling into ancient temples on his own. Should all people with doctorates be middle-aged and not do anything that furthers the plot?
There’s no gore (a function of the PG rating, I suspect) but I like that. Rather than the screen being awash with blood, the fighting is cartoonish (this is a comic book after all). There’s a (now generic) Tower of Threatening Light, but that’s de rigeur in films these days and it’s possibly the first film based on comic books where you might have enjoyed more back story on the screen, and Killer Croc, the lumpen crocodile man, doesn’t get much screen time (beyond Harley Quinn, the rest of the team are pretty unmemorable) but this isn’t the disastrous, career-limiting, Jared Leto-betraying monstrosity we were expecting. I suppose that makes it the best superhero movie of the year, which is a little worrying for such a lightweight frippery, but for a distraction on Friday night, no big deal.