Revisits – Suicide Squad (2016) Harsh but Honest Review!

Duration – 2h 17m

Director – Davis Ayer

Cast – Margot Robbie, Will Smith, Jai Courtney, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Cara Delevingne and Jared Leto

Rating – 1.5 / 5

While there are some who actually like this film, the world is mostly filled with its haters. Well I am one of the latter ones, so from this point on it is your personal choice if you want to move further with this review.

Suicide Squad was DC Extended Universe’s desperate attempt to solidify their footing in a world dominated by Marvel. Why I say desperate, is because their previous two outings namely Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman (2016) were just mediocre and disappointments of sorts. So WB and DC came up with a ridiculous strategy – “When your heroes can’t do it, let out the villains!”. Well it didn’t quite work out because the only villain people actually cared about while planning to see this film was Joker and what they did to the iconic super-villain was just outrageous. For starters he had a total screen-time of 10 minutes and whatever Jared Leto did in those 10 minutes was top of the line bullsh*t! I am so glad Joaquin Phoenix took over the role and finally restored the pride of the amazing DC character in Joker (2019).

The film also suffered from a horrendous script which was penned down in just six weeks! I mean what did they even expect? The most insane thing is that the film is bad right from the beginning and the audience never once feels interested or having fun. It is such a forgettable mess of a film that there is actually no point in watching it except that you are a sucker for comic book stuff (Which I am, by the way). None, I repeat, none of the the characters receive any significant character development and most of the viewers don’t actually care about any of the characters except for Harley Quinn and maybe, Deadshot. Talking about which, I’d really like to say that Will Smith and Margot Robbie actually did everything they could to save this film but some things are so doomed that you just can’t help.

Apart from Smith’s and Robbie’s performances, there was one other thing which was actually amazing about this film and that was the makeup and hair-styling for which it also deservedly won the Oscar. Yeah, you heard that right, Suicide Squad won an Oscar but I fully support it. The costumes of the film were brilliant as well and turned Harley Quinn styled make up and costume into a pop culture phenomenon. I bet you saw loads of Harley Quinn cosplay in Comic Cons and other events ever since suicide squad came out.

See what I am talking about? (Image: © Pickati)

 

A good film requires a good villain. Well, this film contains many villains who are good but none of them is a good villain (Get what I am saying?). The main antagonist of the film Enchantress is the worst villain CBM fans have seen ever since Parallax in Green Lantern. Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Javier Hernandez’s El Diablo and Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang are the only characters even worth mentioning and it would have had no impact, whatsoever, even if there were no other characters in this film.

This film is also not that technically sound with bad CGI, forgettable soundtrack and average cinematography but has unique and innovative style of editing as well as fine color grading which definitely adds to its visual appeal. Apart from that I literally don’t remember anything about this film which released 4 years ago and I so glad that I could jot this revisit down without re-watching this dreadful film and wasting another 2 hours of my life.

So to sum up, you don’t have to watch this film ever in life unless you are a big DC fanatic and trust me, much like its title, this squad of misfits will definitely make you wanna commit suicide. Margot Robbie and DCEU return this week in the form of Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey with yet another attempt to band villains and though my expectations lie somewhere around zero, let’s see how it turns out to be!