Suicide Squad (2016)
* (out of 4)
Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Killer Croc and El Diablo are among some of the most ruthless criminals out there but thankfully they're all locked up. That is until Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) decides to get them out and form a gang to protect the world from certain dangers.
You know, a couple weeks before I watched this Martin Scorsese came out and said that cinema was dead. Even though he's my favorite director I didn't agree with him but after watching SUICIDE SQUAD I started to see where he was coming from. What's so amazing about this movie is that it's not only much worse than the unfairly bashed BATMAN VS SUPERMAN but it's also one of the worst action films that you're going to see and especially one with such a large budget.
I will freely admit that I'm not a comic book reader so I have no idea how close the film came to capturing the characters or anything like that. For my money this here was one of the worst summer blockbusters ever made for a number of reasons but the biggest is the fact that I found every second of it to be downright lifeless. There was no energy to be found anywhere. Instead of this we're just given a bunch of loud and obnoxious action scenes. Another problem is that the film just wasn't any fun. I don't mind a superhero movie being dark but there's gotta be some sort of entertainment value and there's not much here.
There was a lot of rumbles about the casting in the film. There's no question that Robbie was a good choice for the role of Harley Quinn but it also seems that the producers knew they had a limp movie. Just like the great sexploitation filmmakers of the 70s, they seemed to realize that they didn't have much of a movie so they amped up the sexual flavor. There was a bunch of heat about Jared Leto's role of The Joker being cut short and if that's true it's easy to see why. I thought the character was downright horrible here and it was just a really awful stain on the film. The rest of the Suicide Squad members weren't any more entertaining and that includes the lifeless Smith.
What was so bad (or funny) about the story is that it's basically a reworked version of John Carpenter's classic ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. The plot as well as how they control the characters that are placed inside the location to do a job. SUICIDE SQUAD is said to have had re-shoots done in order to try and make it better. I think the only thing that would have worked was to burn the negative and film an entirely new movie.
