Saw it. It sucked. Hard.
I'm just so angry right now. BvS I expected to suck but this I had hope in only to be slapped in the face by Warner Bros. and their incompetence.
I think a lot of the problems in this movie can be explained by the link I posted earlier.
Basically Warner Bros. got super nervous after BvS all but bombed for them and so they took this complete movie and hacked it to shit in a vain attempt to be light and fun. It reaaaalllly feels like the movie was trying to be Guardians of the Galaxy and it shows, it reaalllllyy shoowssss.
This movie defines trying too hard, it tries too hard to be stylish, it tries too hard to be emotional, it tries too hard in having a fun cast of lovable anti-heroes and it fails spectacularly at all of them.
And you know for the first 20-30 minutes, I was digging this movie, I kinda was into the 30 minute exposition dump of characters clunky and prolonged as it was because I thought it was kinda cool and stylish and was interested in where the movie will go from there. The answer is nowhere.
! One of the biggest gripes I have with this movie can be summarized in three words. Amanda fucking Waller. Now acting wise, Viola Davis is perfect for Waller. Maybe she could have gained a little more weight for the role but her attitude and screen presence perfectly captured my image for Waller. The problem is how her character is written because jesus christ, she acts like a badass but is one of the most stupid fucking characters I've ever seen, everything wrong that happens in this movie is due to her stupid ass decisions right down to the very idea of Suicide Squad. The movie never justifies why this team needed to be formed at all. Oh they try and make excuses about the potential dangers of another superman but nothing that would justify bringing together a group of unstable psychopaths. And what the fuck do you know, this whole conflict happens BECAUSE of the formation of the Suicide Squad because Amanda HAD to have the ancient Aztec God in her mishmash of human killers. And what happens? She immediately fucking loses her because she had the presence of mind to keep the Aztec God heart in a secure location but not the fucking soul of her brother who she just leaves on the bathroom sink. Great job, Waller! Then her first mission for her team isn't to do anything that would contribute to the safety of the country, nope, it's to save her ass from the middle of ground zero. Which they do but she immediately fucks up by being caught again. Also she murders her staff who she worked with because they weren't authorized to know the classified information they worked with WHICH makes me question why she worked with them in the first place! See, I know they're trying to make a story about the banality of evil and how the criminals are more noble than the supposed force of authoritative good but it's done so poorly and ham-fistedly, I can feel the writers trying to manipulate me with their puppet strings. Also there's a post credits scene where Amanda gives Bruce a file on Flash and Aquaman so he could form the Justice League which makes me question WHY SHE DIDN'T ASK THOSE GUYS TO FORM A SQUAD TO PROTECT THE EARTH OPPOSED TO THIS GROUP OF DERANGED KILLERS.
! And this is only half my problem with this movie.
! The movie really tries hard to have this Guardians of the Galaxy story of this group of misfits growing to like each other and work together to become this cohesive family unit. Yet opposed to Guardians, this writing and execution made it feel more like Fant4stic. see Guardians organically introduced these misfit characters, all who came with their own unique abilities and backstories and all had a fair share of character screentime to explore their backstories and develop them so by the time the big finale came where they had to work together, it felt believable. Almost none of these characters ever interacted with each other save for a couple of scenes with Harlequin and Deadshot and even there they never really bonded or learned anything from each other. To the point that when it came to a climactic story thread where Deadshot was forced to take a shot at Harley to kill her, I had no idea why he didn't just blow her brains out. The whole development of this family unit was staggeringly incompetent. The only reason they decided to work together at all was because of a very forced bar scene where Deadshot, in his attempt to be smart and philosophical makes the mind blowing statement of "Bad guys are bad", Diablo gives his backstory (something that should have been done at the BEGINNING of the movie not 20 minutes before the end!) and Harley gives a shitty friendship speech and boom they're friends, let's work together to save the world using the power of friendship!
! This is so tonally against what I expected from this movie. I expected this fun, dark, gritty criminal escapades movie akin to something like Ocean's Eleven. Instead we got the Power Rangers fighting Rita Repulsa. No really, it's what it is! I don't know why the first mission of this team is to deal with a sorceress with the power to destroy satellites in space, leave that shit to the Justice League. Just give them a grounded, gritty mission dealing with a crime lord or a warlord or something. This villain is just so terrible and boring. Even the cool design she had at the start was replaced with a Vegas stripper outfit in the middle of the movie which she uses to gyrate around a giant energy pillar of death. That whole final battle was reminiscent of fant4stic with an extra layer of cheesiness with her showing her visions of good futures she could give them if they submitted but the good guys resisted through the power of their friendship (which makes no goddamn sense, why didn't they take the fucking deal, Harley even said "What has the world ever done for us" only for her to then turn around to Enchantress and go "You messed with my friends!" and there's a super dramatic super slow mo shot of them sloooooooooowly throwing her heart in the air and Deadshot slooooowwwllllyy taking a shot at her heart and it's just soooo slowwww and trying sooooo hard to be deep and emotional in a movie that's supposed to be stylish and subversive.
! If I had to describe this movie in two words, it'd be tonal disaster. The movie just doesn't know what it wants to be so it tries to be a bit of everything and ends up being a huge mess. It tries to splice super generic cliche cheesy friendship is magic scenes with dark, gritty look at us we're so edgey scenes and it doesn't work at all. It's a movie punctuated with traditional, cinematic epic music and whatever fucking random popsong they found on some teenager's itunes player. Some of it worked but the majority didn't. Again, they were REALLY trying hard to be Guardians but whereas the music in Guardians was of a consistent genre and time period all of which served a story purpose to help us stay anchored in an outlandish story as well as generally fitting the scenes they were used, most of the songs in this movie overpowered the scenes they were in and had little to no context or meaning other than look how hip and cool this movie is! None of this is helped by the editing….oh god the editing. This editing is so bad it made BvS look competent. It was chopped to hell. Flashbacks thrown left and right at the most inappropriate moments, characters seeming like they're teleporting at places, entire chunks of scenes feel like they've been taken out to make it more pg friendly and the action scenes are just a big mess of quick cuts and blurs. I shit you not when I say I could barely follow the action of our team fighting weird cgi poop monsters that could not bleed, a battle they felt they had to repeat throughout the movie. Because that's the perfect foil for my group of dark gritty anti heroes, cartoon monsters with no faces!
! Also none of the characters do dick with the exception of a few! Boomerang? Useless. Croc? He threw a bomb, otherwise, useless. Katana? One fucking scene with her talking to her sword, that's it! Slipknot? Dies in the first five minutes of the mission in a super hilarious scene where he gets his head blown up while climbing a building. Generic soldier guy who is supposed to be in charge of them? Who gives a shit, the movie tries so hard to make us care about his romance with Enchantress but it doesn't help they only had like two scenes together. Look I get we have limited time to go through all these characters which makes me question why we needed all of them in the first place. If I were writing this movie, I'd halve the cast and focus on those few we had. Also I'd cut out the fucking Joker because he was extraneous in this movie. Don't get me started on Leto's Joker. I heard about the shit he did behind the scenes and all that for seven fucking minutes of screentime. I know it's seven minutes, I fucking counted on my watch. I heard most of his scenes were left on the editing room floor and trust me, it shows. All for the sake to make it light enough for China (AND IT STILL ISN'T GOING TO BE RELEASED IN CHINA). Leto's character himself is like the rest of this movie, trying too hard. He tries so hard to be menacing and scary but I never was really intimidated by him, again not helped by the fact that most of his scenes were removed, but still. Leto for me is the textbook definition of an actor who tries way too hard in a role without any real talent or insight in how to internalize the emotions of a character or how to really bring the character to life. All he can do is a lot of mugging and scenery chewing and he doesn't even do that well. Maybe for some generic pimp daddy character, his performance would have been fine but not for the fucking Joker.
! Any pros? I liked Will Smith and Margot Robbie's performances despite how badly written their characters were. However Will Smith really didn't inhabit the role of Deadshot, it jsut felt like Will Smith which isn't too bad cause I love Will Smith but I really wanted Deadshot. Margot Robbie was really cheesy and try too hard in her performance, I didn't buy the character but her energy and charm was contagious so I liked it. The acting is good for the most part which makes it more infuriating at the wasted cast. I liked some jokes here and there, there were a few scenes that worked out of context, there was a lot of potential in this movie, which just makes it all the more heartbreaking that Warner Bros had to ruin it with their bullshit.
Sigh, I'm tired, this movie has just made me depressed. I wish to God, I can see this movie the way it should have been made. I remember the JLU cartoon which had the Suicide Squad infiltrate the Watchtower to steal important information and it was so much better than this crap. And it only had 20 minutes to work with and it did a far better job setting up the team. Their dynamics and their individual abilities and how they each contributed to the mission, their personality clashes, their relationships with each other and the effect it had on the mission, it was a really fun episode with political intrigue and shady dealings and backstabbings and twists and turns that felt like a spy thriller!
This…was just a horrible, tepid mess. A cold, calculated marketing mess by pathetic old white men in suits who are desperately trying to steer a ship that has long since capsized because of their ineptitude.
Fuck this movie, just fuck it.