Movie Love: Suicide Squad

Source

Venue: Carib 5

Date: August 23, 2016

This is my third round with the spanking new DCEU that DC is spinning out and Suicide Squad was quite a ride. While I enjoyed the characters, some great scenes and dialogue. Sadly the rest of the movie was very hodge-podge to me. I had fun but not enough to get past the scattered story, horrible editing and pacing, along with other issues. Still Suicide Squad is a movie a lot of people are going to see and I can see why. Like I said the characters are enjoyable (though I had zero love for the villain chosen for Suicide Squad to fight. I can't take some reverberating sore throat spastic belly dancer seriously. Sorry but not no. However the brother was done much better. He looked dangerous and intimidating). The best in my opinion being Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Amanda Waller and El Diablo. The actors playing these characters took them to the next level. El Diablo especially with his limited speaking parts and marginalized role shone like the stars. His metahuman story was well explained and the tragedy in his life came through the screen. Which is why I don't understand how with that those well done scenes, how so many others were just shot like parts were left on the editing floor. 

A character could be doing something and literally in the middle it jumps to something else. Seriously it was like a decent movie was made and someone decided it needed intervention via editing by a garbage disposal. There's no question in my mind that there's a much better movie in this. Studio intervention of this magnitude of sloppiness seriously needs to stop. Hearing all the stories like David Ayer being given only six weeks to write a script or that the movie was re-edited by a company that makes movie trailers...are you for real here? While there can be conjecture, the two issues with the script and movie trailer editors have been reported repeatedly across the board as potentially true. If so it explains quite a bit of the plot issues as well as the choppy editing. If not then something else happened to screw the pacing and flow of this movie. Inception was an amazing movie involving dream sequences and non-linear story telling. It can be done by any standard and I just wish this movie did a better job of it.

Personally I think if this movie had a better plot and no crazy edits, it would have gotten better critic reception. Hell I'm not a Man of Steel fan but critics thought that movie was at least okay to straight up brilliant. However I have to agree with the critics on the fact that this film had too many hands in the pot and ended up a hot mess. One that can be thoroughly enjoyed but a hot mess all the same. Now I'm a lover of both Marvel and DC, the latter I have known extremely intimately from a child. 

Still I do get very annoyed when I hear people saying you'd like this movie more if you read the comics. Let me be clear, a movie should be able to stand on it's own. Also mainstream movie goers are not avid comic book readers and make up the majority of audiences. I review books on this blog and have profound respect for those who are willing to take a piece of art apart no matter the consequences from fans and the like. However that does not mean I agree with everything critics say. There are movies I love that a lot of top critics would find to be horrible. Yet sadly I have to say Suicide Squad is yet another film by the DC that falls short for me. Wishing them all the best though. There's still success in the DCEU and I hope that it expands along with the quality of the work. Of course this is my opinion and those paying full price or multiple purchases for this movie would likely want DC to continue on this path.

At the end of the day I'd recommend Suicide Squad to either those who want to see it or movie goers that just want a popcorn movie to watch that has more depth than the Transformers movies. Other than that it's a roll of the dice. 

P.S. : DC, you did a great job displaying Deadshot as a black character without going into black stereotypes. Why did you do the opposite with Killer Croc? Maybe I could have forgiven some of the stuff as characterization but then you have him demanding for BET when everyone else is asking for time with their child to an espresso machine. Just stop it Hollywood. It's not funny and I know of a number of reviewers who were pissed off about it. One to the point of cursing. Just cut it out.The scene where he stated he was beautiful and fight scenes were good. Just not the over hood-ization of the character. Show not tell was definitely not followed here.