Review: Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad (15)

USA 2016 123 mins Dir: David Ayer Cast: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Jay Hernandez, Jai Courtney

It’s quite telling that possibly the most innovative and groundbreaking superhero movie of recent years, Christopher Nolan’s electrifying The Dark Knight, is barely a superhero movie at all, its central battle between a guy dressed in pointy ears and a demonic clown recontextualised as an epic crime saga a la Heat.

It’s the sort of radical reinvention that this summer’s fellow DC property Suicide Squad desperately strives for, and with good reason. Directed by gritty street specialist David Ayer, screenwriter of Training Day and director of End of Watch, and featuring a cast of classic DC supervillains as opposed to upstanding heroes, all the elements are in place for a punky, anarchic demolition of comic book conventions.

That it singularly fails at this aim is therefore all the more catastrophic, and attempting to identify why is complex. The set-up is initially promising: steely government agent Amanda Waller (a standout Viola Davis) is looking to assemble ‘Task Force X’, a team comprising the worst of the worst who can be called upon to protect the planet in the event that “the next Superman is a terrorist.”

Overseen by soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), these guys are expert hitman Deadshot (Will Smith), pigtailed sexpot Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), fiery former gangbanger Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Aussie Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and blade-wielding Katana (Karen Fukuhara). And this assortment of villainy comes in handy when the all-powerful witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), in control of scientist June Moon’s body and whose heart lies in Waller’s possession, threatens to plunge the murky world of Midway City into danger by doing… something supernatural. (Essentially it involves her cavorting in front of a beam of light in the manner of a woman in a James Bond title sequence).

Similar to last year’s Fox-owned Fantastic Four, the production travails on Suicide Squad have been well-documented, studio Warner Bros. reportedly sent into meltdown on account of the chilly reception afforded to its gloomy predecessor, Batman v Superman. The end result subsequently bears all the scars of a tentpole picture pulling in two directions between the needs of studio heads and director.

At once occupying the visually darker ouevre of the DC movie universe whilst also trying to steer in a more lighthearted direction akin to Marvel’s success stories, the movie has absolutely no idea how to treat its troubling central characters, relucant to fully amplify their evil and insted granting each of them empathetic backstories (surely defying the entire point of having baddies as the backbone of your movie). Smith’s Deadshot is a remorseless assassin capable of being redeemed by the love of his daughter whilst the enjoyably contradictory Quinn is revealed as the brainwashed lover of Jared Leto’s all-too-briefly glimpsed Joker (all method hair and teeth and no memorability), a history that’s rather cynically left unresolved for another instalment.

The incoherent storytelling itself also leaves a lot to be desired: the opening third features not one but two sprawling intros for Deadshot and Harley Quinn apiece, the end result being an episodic, choppy lack of dramatic impetus (the other Squad members, in whom Ayer is clearly not interested, get relatively short shrift). And when it bogs down in yet more murkily visualised DC action towards the end, our central team battling an onslaught of blackberry-headed entities whilst we strain to see what’s going on, it becomes clear that the fatal lessons of Batman v. Superman haven’t been learned.

In fact the most disappointing thing of all is how pedestrian and safe it all feels; for all the times our heroes proclaim themselves to be the ‘bad guys’, this all plays out on exactly the same sort of track that we’ve seen before. Guardians of the Galaxy took a far more family-friendly ensemble and still felt scrappier and more joyously eccentric than this. It’s telling that, outside of Robbie’s intriguing mixture of sexual deviancy and schoolgirl innocence, the character in whom Ayer is clearly most invested is the impressive Hernandez’ tragic Diablo, the sort of figure whose backstory could quite easily have been ripped from the gritty verisimilitude of the filmmaker’s End of Watch.

Sadly any semblance of Ayer’s characteristic vision ultimately disappears in a blizzard of shoddy effects and painfully on-the-nose soundtrack choices (Sympathy for the Devil cueing the duplicitous Waller’s first appearance is particularly irksome). It’s a movie that has everything going for it except the thing it needs most: unpredictability.