MOVIE REVIEW – Suicide Squad is the proof, that even Hollywood can surprise us sometimes. Is it because of the supervillain story turned upside down in a smart way? Or the avant-garde way Joker is performed by Jared Leto? Or the edgy directing and the editing? No. None of those, unfortunately. It’s rather a bitter surprise because even though I actually expected a terrific movie, it turned out to be an utter disappointment.

On paper the idea was brilliant. A Dirty Dozen-style action movie, with supervillain underdogs, forced to work together as a team to protect humanity against the danger of meta-human attacks, led by an unscrupulous government agent: Amanda Waller.

This basic premise is reinforced by a set of pretty good actors (the gorgeous and talented Margot Robbie among them) and a snazzy and exciting visual world, accompanied by a cool soundtrack. What could go wrong? Well, almost everything did, unfortunately…

Awful story

The main problem with Suicide Squad is that even though the basic premise was excellent, David Ayer couldn’t do anything with it as far as storytelling goes. I don’t want to spoil the story, but the main idea is flawed as the U.S. wouldn’t be facing a meta-human threat if overzealous federal agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) hadn’t unlocked these bad guys to form Task Force X, to begin with. One of them will cause havoc, and the other members of the team will need to stop this threat, which wouldn’t appear, if not for Amanda Waller’s idea.

Ayer also spends too much time on presenting the villain themselves, with incoherent scenes put together, which somewhat reminded me the presentations of heroes of beat-em-up games like Mortal Kombat or Tekken. It’s okay in a video game, but it felt cheap and unnecessary here.

The second half of the movie doesn’t get any better either. Self-righteous Amanda Waller gets more and more annoying while causing the very havoc which she was supposed to protect the humanity from. Indeed, one of the supervillains “goes rogue” and using terrific superpowers threatens the whole humanity, so the others must do everything so stop this, so generic action sequences ensue.

It doesn’t help either, that one of the two main villains is incredibly boring and plain – compared to him, the much criticized Apocalypse from X-Men: Apocalypse was a brilliant main baddie.

Acting with mixed results

The actor choice for supervillains is a mixed bag. Some of them are pretty good as the sexy Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn or Jai Courtney as Boomerang. Jared Leto has a very limited screen presence, but I wasn’t that impressed by his Joker presentation: he felt too much as a crazy, over-tattooed drug lord from some Miami Vice movie instead of the Joker DC character.

While Joker was always different from every actors (including Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill as the voice for the cartoons and the Arkham video games, and the late Heath Ledger), Leto’s Joker is just missing some panache, while he’s too busy to overact his own Joker.

But the worst offender here is Will Smith, who ever since The Wild Wild West in 1999 only plays one character: Will Smith. Besides the fact, that he doesn’t even look like Deadshot at all, he’s incredibly annoying, and for some unknown reason, he has an enormous screen time too.

Deadpool’s challenged brother

Warner’s top dogs wanted too much copy Deadpool, and it was a grave mistake. Deadpool also had some chaotic, poorly written script, but it wasn’t that much of a problem, since the Marvel movie was essentially funny, while the good sense of humor is missing from Suicide Squad altogether.

A badly written script, some poor actor choices, cheesy dialogues, a boring main baddie, and horrible editing makes this much anticipated DC movie one of the biggest disappointments of this year. Instead of a surprise hit, it’s rather a pretty bad surprise.

-BadSector-