Thursday, August 11, 2016

This Bunch of Degenerates and Nutjobs is Too Uneven: Our Review of "Suicide Squad" (2016)

Directed by: David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury

Starring: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman, Cara Delevigne, Jay Hernandez, Jai Courtney

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language

Run Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes

Synopsis: Following the events of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the U.S. government builds a task force of incarcerated "metahumans" as a backup plan should Earth need protection from evil forces. When one of their members turns into an evil force, the rest of the squad is sent into action.

REVIEW

Sarah: Hello dear readers! It's true, we are back with a brand new movie review for you! It's been almost on year to the day since our last review and we wish we could say that something exciting had happened to cause the hiatus, but really life just got in the way. We can't promise that there's going to be a ton of new content or that we will begin posting regularly again, but for now we wanted to do a quick little review on a movie that we had been looking forward to for a long time: Suicide Squad, the newest entry in the DC Extended Universe.

Suicide Squad was a comic book film that we had been anticipating for while now. There's a new Joker (Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, The Wolf of Wall Street) making her feature film debut, and a whole host of new characters (at least to me). We were totally in. Now that we've seen it, and you've seen it twice now Andrew, what are your initial thoughts?

Andrew: This is a bit of a tough one for a couple reasons. First and foremost, we were REALLY looking forward to this movie. The trailers did such a phenomenal job of getting us pumped for it. Secondly, this is not a good movie. It just isn't. There are good things in it, but as a fully formed movie it isn't good. And I'd say you can argue whether or not it's even a "fully formed" movie.

What are your initial thoughts?

S: I will agree with you that this was not a fully formed film. With the abundance of "Huh?" and "That's not how that works" moments it was easy to walk away with a sour taste in my mouth. 

But there were things about this movie that I really enjoyed! The music, for starters, was reminiscent of Guardians of the Galaxy with fun (and sometimes funky) beats to go with different scenes. It got the audience pumped, albeit for a short amount of time, to see what was going to happen next. 

And the characters that writer/director David Ayer did flesh out were done so with an obvious love for those characters. Harley Quinn and Deadshot (Will Smith, Men in Black) were given lots of care and attention, making them endearing to an audience in the hope of masking the fact that other characters were given the shaft. Even the Joker (who was highly publicized in the making of this movie) was only given a handful of scenes to really show off the fact that, no, this is not the same Joker you remember.