'Suicide Squad' Is A Great Way To Spend Two Hours Wishing You Were Anywhere Else

Suicide Squad

If you thought Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice was bad, then wait ’til you see Suicide Squad. Actually, don’t. Don’t see it. Millions of marketing dollars may be shovelling the film down your gullet, and the DC Snyderverse now may be a multi-movie monstrosity that can’t be stopped, but you don’t have to get on this ride.

Suicide Squad is awful. It’s less a movie than one long nü-metal music video, fetishising a host of things director David Ayer considers ‘cool’: facial tattoos, capped teeth, guns. So many fucking guns! At a time in which real-world fire-arm violence has, in America, reached epidemic levels, here comes a piece of popcorn entertainment in which bullet cases fall to the ground in slow motion, sprays of semi-automatic weaponfire fill the screen, and Will Smith’s proficiency with shootin’ is a symbol of his masculine prowess.

When we meet Smith —the first “loveable” rogue of the titular ‘Squad’ to be introduced— his villainous handle, Deadshot, is titled on screen with an endless list of all the guns he owns, as if the film is some NRA fantasy piece. And when we meet Smith, we also get served up a shameless piece of emotional manipulation: despite the fact that he’s a ruthless hitman, he loves his little girl, and the only reason he ends up locked up is because darling daughter doesn’t want Big Willie Style to kill the Affleck Batman! (Dark Knight fanboys may not share her stance.)

This, instantly, lets you know that all the things Suicide Squad is sold as being —anarchic, mocking, comical, unconcerned with the regular morals of super-hero movies— are bunk. A rousing success at pre-release timeline-filling and smart trailer-cutting, the resulting movie can’t live up to its own hype. It’s not a black-hearted portrait of amoral renegades, but just another blockbuster filled with rote moralising. Any time Suicide Squad starts heading towards a place too at-home with murderous sociopathy, here’s Will Smith’s delightful kid (an honour-roll student with a heart of gold!), and here comes the swelling string music that lets you know that you need to start feeling something. Who could deny a dad who’d do anything for his kid?

Anything, here, includes joining an IP-gathering task-force presided over by villainous Viola Davis (here female empowerment = also shooting people) and Joel Kinnaman’s military-advertisement-in-human-form soldier. Anything also includes, of course, shooting thousands of swarming monsters, minions of Cara Delevingne’s mystical-witch; a villain who is a confluence of lame writing, bad acting, and worse CGI.

There are plenty more attempts to drum up cheap emotion with a host of other characters. Kinnaman is in love with the woman beneath Delevingne’s mystical-witch, which is supposed to make us care. Jay Hernandez, a cholo cliché who blows fireballs when enraged, killed his wife and kids in a moment of pyrokinetic domestic violence, and now, y’know, feels bad about such an act of familial manslaughter (what a guy!). The very-minor character Kitana (Karen Fukuhara), swings her murderous blade because of a dead husband, or something; I don’t know, there’s about 30 seconds of screentime devoted to it. And then there’s Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, whose terrible wisecracks are just as bad as her punning name, but whose love for The Joker is true, sincere, her Achilles heel; the very heart of the picture!

As DC’s greatest villain, Jared Leto —the film’s most facial-tattooed, teeth-capped, gun-loving stooge— claws at the walls and chews the scenery, but never conveys a sense of real danger, real menace. Leto is acting forever in the shadows of Heath Ledger’s iconic turn in 2008’s The Dark Knight, and comes off as pale iteration, even imitation; his best moments only playing like Ledger karaoke. Leto’s performance defines the film: it tries desperately to be cool, edgy, and out-there, but is unconvincing, ultimately a little embarrassing. In his much-chronicled misunderstanding of method acting, Leto stayed in character, conducting acts of backstage schoolboy sedition. Suicide Squad feels like the filmmaking equivalent, as dangerous and provocative as being mailed a used condom.

Leto’s muggin’ is also a perfect symbol of a film that seems like the nadir of the ‘dark’, ‘gritty’ super-hero movie. Suicide Squad doesn’t just cannibalise past triumphs of the form, but shits them back out in a host of scenes where it’s always raining, with only gunfire lighting up the glowering darkness. Obviously there’s none of the fantastic moral quandaries (or expert pacing, or plotting, or etc) of the Nolan Batman movies, but, God, there’s nothing in Ayer’s screenplay that even lives up to the cod-Jesus motif of the Snyder Superman ones.

Ayer throws together shootouts and backstories, desperate attempts at emotional-manipulation with scenes where uniformed men in the Pentagon watch the world being razed in a storm of pixel-wooshing. It’s a total mess, chaotic and calamitous. Suicide Squad could’ve been fashioned like a getting-the-gang-together caper-movie, instead it’s a hot, headache-inducing mess; a film essentially about nothing but branding.

Most disappointingly, it never has fun with tropes, instead just embracing the stock clichés of the Snyderverse without any kind of critical or satirical take. Suicide Squad is, with its roll-call of anti-heroes, theoretically a film about rebels. But the film itself is no rebellion, only wholly conservative, craven, displaying not an ounce of storytelling daring. Anyone expecting this to be the DC equivalent of Guardians Of The Galaxy or Deadpool is sure to be disappointed, if only because there’s literally one decent joke (“clear my browser history”) in the whole thing.

This is a two-hour chore, an utter bore, a slog to sit through. Cinemagoers everywhere were hoping Suicide Squad would help wash away the bitter after-taste of Batman v Superman, but instead it’s just another flavour of disappointment: a film so bad it makes you yearn for that Dawn Of Justice. When a movie’s most exciting moments come in the fleeting appearances of the Affleck Batman, you know you’re in a bad place.