Suicide Squad

I saw this movie once before and had forgotten almost the entire thing. I had it confused with the remake, and maybe with the Tom Cruise version of The Mummy? Either way, this was a pretty fresh viewing for me.

The good news – Margot Robbie is an excellent Harley Quinn. They do a pretty crap job of explaining why she fell for the Joker, particularly since Jared Leto is horrendous in that role. Will Smith brings standard action Will Smith energy, which doesn’t work quite as well in a superhero movie as it does in, say, Bad Boys. Yelling catchphrases while shooting bullets at monsters from another dimension is just ridiculous. The saddest part is that Will Smith might be the second best part of the film.

The rest of the Suicide Squad gang gets either no backstory or way too much backstory, and regardless it is hard to care about any of those characters. The directors are aiming for some big emotional drama, which is a stretch when you have a crocodile and a dude with a boomerang punching supernatural forces. The basic plot could have been ok, but choosing a witch that shoots lightning bolts as the villain is just bonkers given that the Suicide Squad uses guns, a bat, a boomerang etc. There’s a reason Marvel doesn’t have Hawkeye go toe-to-toe with Thanos and pretend it’s an even fight.

All in all, Margot Robbie almost makes this a watchable film, and then Jared Leto snatches defeat from the jaws of tolerable. I give this movie the standard DC movie rating of mediocre – it gets a 4.