Review: Despite its problems, ‘Suicide Sqaud’ delivers fun adventure

Posted on August 12, 2016

By MARK VIOLA

While DC Comics’ attempts to catch up to Marvel Comics in the filmmaking business has made the company quite a bit of money, I doubt anyone would argue their work to date has been resounding creative successes, with “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman” dividing both critics and fans.

Enter “Suicide Squad,” essentially the superhero world’s version of “The Dirty Dozen” in which a group of villains, ranging from the iconic to the downright obscure, are coerced into working for the government with the idea that they can be sent on missions and if they die, nobody will care, and if they fail, they can be disavowed and swept under the rug.

There has been building anticipation for this movie ever since the first footage was released at last year’s Comic Con, and a smart marketing campaign has kept that flame lit all the way to the film’s release last weekend.

And the result? Well, I can’t call “Suicide Squad” a great movie, and from a storytelling perspective, I wouldn’t even call it a good movie. But I will say it is an entertaining one, as long as you check your brain at the door.

The story definitely has problems, and the pacing isn’t great either, but the film had a mighty task in introducing audiences to a wide range of characters, many of which are making their first appearance outside of the comics or DC’s various animated offerings. And I have to say, for the most part, I actually found myself caring about the characters by the end, which, to me, was one of the three primary missions this film had, along with telling a coherent story and providing an entertaining time at the movies.

Well, two out of three isn’t bad, right? Because I wouldn’t call the film’s story coherent in any sense of the word.

But what is the story? Well, we have a government agent named Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, “How to Get Away With Murder”), who in the wake of the events of “Batman v Superman” decides to collect some of the worst villains around, many of which have special powers, to form a covert team in case the next Superman who shows up on Earth isn’t as nice. And this team, as she proposes it, includes Deadshot (Will Smith, “Concussion”), a deadly assassin who never misses; Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, “The Legend of Tarzan”), the Joker’s equally insane girlfriend; Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, “Divergent”), a master thief good with knives; Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, “Lost”), a man with a very serious skin condition who also likes to eat people; Diablo (Jay Hernandez, “Bad Moms”), a pyrokinetic with a troubled past; and June Moone (Cara Delevingne, “Paper Towns”), an archeologist possessed by an ancient witch spirit called the Enchantress. Leading this team is Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, “The Killing”), a soldier beholden to Waller and in love with June Moone.

It’s hard to talk too much about what eventually happens to prompt the team’s first mission without spoilers, but after a first act introducing us to this menagerie of criminal psychopaths, something happens that forces Waller to activate the team to rescue an asset from a city under siege by a supernatural threat.

Once the mission begins, any semblance of the story making sense pretty much goes out the window. But where I took such films as “Independence Day: Resurgence” and “Jason Bourne” to task for their script problems, the saving grace here is the characters. Writer/director David Ayer (“End of Watch,” “Fury”) is able to give some, but definitely not all, of these villains strong backstories that draw us in as the story goes, so by the end, we actually care about what happens to them.

One character I haven’t even mentioned yet is the Joker (Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club”). He is an iconic character and much of the press leading up to the movie was about him and Leto’s performance, but he really isn’t in this movie much at all. In fact, while I enjoyed Leto’s work, I would say that outside of the flashback scenes setting up Harley’s character, the movie itself would have been improved if his other moments were cut out and time was used instead to better develop some of the other team members.

On the positive side, however, I do want to mention how “Suicide Squad,” more so than any other modern comic book adaptation–with the possible exception of “Deadpool”–feels like a comic book in film form. Unlike those other films, which have gone out of their way to present more grounded and realistic stories, here we have super assassins, people with powers, a guy who looks like a crocodile and honest to goodness magic. Over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s taken them 13 movies to finally embrace magic with this November’s release of “Doctor Strange.” In “Suicide Squad” we have an ancient witch spirit. The moment I knew I was seeing something different is when Flagg introduces the team to Katana (newcomer Karen Fukuhara), a sword-wielding agent. He warns the criminals not to give her a reason to kill them, because her sword traps the souls of all those it kills. This is straight from the comic, but not something we would normally hear nonchalantly spoken in a major comic book adaptation. It was actually a nice change of pace.

So, “Suicide Squad” does provide quality entertainment, even though it is not actually a quality movie. A more polished script, a more compelling villain and better character development for some of the team members would have gone a long way to make this a good movie. Still, the characters who do get the proper level of development, along with the actors playing them, allowed me to have fun.

The movie is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language.

(This is a abbreviated version of the full review available in our printed or e-edition papers.)

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