Suicide Squad Is a Mall-Punk Mess

I have never seen as many people at a 10:30 Thursday night 3-D screening as I did at Thursday night's Suicide Squad. It’s going to have ridiculous opening weekend box office, and by gawd, there will be think pieces about it. But here’s the thing: Even with that many people, there was never a moment when the film really achieved a critical mass and the audience began to react as a communal organism. There were laughs here and there, and some woos and such, but on the whole it was a very sedate response from a group of people who'd turned out in such big numbers.

The concept — a ragtag gang of supervillains who are brought together to help fix problems too big for respectable persons and agencies to resolve — is a sound one. But for such a concept to work, we as an audience have to believe that these villains are truly the worst of the worst. They must seem dangerous.

This film, being PG-13, is therefore obliged to use vast numbers of an undifferentiated enemy that doesn’t bleed red. As long as you do that, you can have a body count in the billions and still get that PG-13 rating. But that kind of CG army approach to violence does no good at raising any sort of emotional stakes.

We’ve got a sister and brother of extradimensional origin, and they’re generating a giant whirling CGI construct that is somehow endangering all life on earth by way of biomech laser blasts. The sister, Enchantress, is played by the model-turned-actress Cara Delevigne, and it’s very difficult to evaluate her performance because it seems like at some point she was replaced by a Playstation 1 animation. There is simply no excuse for a performance this bad making it to actual movie screens — writer-director David Ayer, the film’s myriad producers and executives, the DC Comics folk and Delevigne all need to be sat in a corner and made to think about what they’ve done. The Enchantress’ M.O. is to lay an eldritch kiss on assorted prisoners and passersby, turning them into pulsating tar-headed beings who can easily be killed by the dozens at any given time without causing troubling moral questions for the audience.

This film wants so badly to be edgy and raw and strange, but is hamstrung by the economic necessities of its own being. These villains are again and again put into situations where they do heroic things, where the audience is confronted by scenes that might as well include superimposed text that says, “Gee, it’s hard to know who the real villains are, isn’t it?” It’s the film’s one trick, and it relies on it. Often. With a near-ceaseless fusillade of rawk hits as underscore, aping Guardians of the Galaxy but without understanding diegesis.

The best thing in the film is Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. A psychiatrist warped by an abusive affair with The Joker (Jared Leto, who is just noxiously awful), Quinn is a thrill-seeking killer dressed like a sex doll set to "ironic murder." She has moments of genuine gravitas, including one scene in which she claims her new identity while making out with The Joker in a disfiguring chemical bath, their assorted makeup swirling in the vat around them like a sensual Spirograph of dimestore maquillage. It is by far Leto’s best scene, because he doesn’t speak. Robbie as Quinn takes a tragically underwritten role and makes it into something special, finding genuine emotion in what was written as an abstract caricature of damaged hotness.

Oh, and one thing this film is good for is that it can save you a lot of time. If, for example, you meet someone who says that Harley is an example of a character written with agency, you can safely run away, because that person’s idea of agency is unsound. She wields weapons, but submits at the drop of a hat to Leto’s manipulative and pimplike “Mr. J.”

There are other characters in the mix, including the world’s most accurate assassin (Will Smith, who has an unparalleled gift for taking shitty dialogue and making you believe it as a matter of absolute truth) and an array of ethnic stereotypes that certainly presents the illusion of diversity (Latino gangbanger pyrokinetic, Asian sword-mistress widow, scruffy Australian boomeranger, First Nation master of climbing) while peddling tropes that were tired in the ‘80s.

Besides Quinn, the only one who really makes an impression is Viola Davis as government liaison Amanda Waller. Waller is periodically the villain of the piece, prone to shooting her own operatives in the face and waging the most confrontational meetings this side of Glengarry Glenn Ross with assorted flunkies (including Sheriff Daddybear from Stranger Things). She’s such a relentless badass that you can’t help but like her horrifying assaults on all that is decent.

There are a lot of hands in this particular pie, with Ayer and the DC-Warner execs apparently going so far as to craft two different cuts of the film. Plots stop and start for no reason, characters disappear, and supposedly dramatic revelations could almost pass as parodies of themselves. The look of the film, as well as its philosophy, is dingy with neon accents. The 3-D is actually pretty good, with several shots seeming to have been composed with the Z-axis in mind (a step up from most international blockbusters where the 3-D is an obligatory afterthought). 

But the plot is just ridiculous, a self-justifying piece of If/Then work that should definitely have been addressed in the many desperate meetings and reshoots that went down following the big opening and subsequent collapse of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I could totally dig seeing Quinn and Waller again in future DC Universe films — let’s just hope that the material offered is better than this empty mess of a movie. 

When I was texting the friend I was going to see the film with to try and figure out who should drive, my phone autocorrected the title to Suicide Squid. You just don't know how I wish we had seen Suicide Squid 3-D instead.