When a group of supervillains including Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Deadshot (Will Smith), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courney), and Katana (Karen Fukuhara) amongst others are forced to work together for a secret government taskforce you would be forgiven if you imagined David Ayer’s latest addition to the DC cinematic franchise Suicide Squad to be exciting or to have something interesting to say about humanity. Oh, and Jared Leto plays the Joker. He’s in there too.
Lacking in any real purpose or focus, Suicide Squad is the culmination of various exposition scenes, poorly shot action sequences, and forced dialogue as the film works its way to the climatic end fight that works only to attempt to justify the film’s existence. There is no sense of focus whatsoever. Suicide Squad is the exemplification of cinematic insanity. It jumps from psychedelic and headache inducing flashbacks of Harley Quinn and Joker to laughably over-the-top and unnecessary performances by Leto as the psychotic clown to then return to our antiheros for more forced exposition and pointless action sequences.
Watching Suicide Squad gives the impression that the film is too scared to let the audience figure out anything for themselves. It grasps your hand tightly throughout never letting go by literary narrating events that only happened moments ago. The worst offender involves a scene where Katana talks to her soul-consuming sword where it becomes obvious that she is talking to the soul of her husband. Anybody would be able to conclude that, since the husband’s soul is trapped in the sword and those killed by the sword have their souls trapped within it, the husband must have been killed by the sword. Suicide Squad does not want to take the chance that people with intelligence will be watching, so immediately after Katana’s lines we are spoon-fed what we already figured out less than a second beforehand. Suicide Squad constantly insults the intelligence of its audience by underlining what it considers to be revolutionary moral epiphanies to what should be obvious to anybody about to sit down and watch a film where the bad guys are the heroes.
If the majority of Suicide Squad were to be edited out, then the end result would remain the same. With all of its cuts, unneeded characters (one is killed off almost instantaneously), and throw-away action sequences, Suicide Squad is a film without focus. There is too much of a reliance for the action sequences to carry the film and when the characters involved have no real characterisation (albeit for Will Smith and Margot Robbie) and ultimately no purpose for existing in this film other than to expand the DC cinematic universe, we simply cannot care for what are essentially a random group of villains walking through empty streets and occasionally fighting groups of enemies. Suicide Squad is a cinematic mess that is an insult to the audience’s intelligence. Nothing at all is valuable and to see it would be suicide.
By Andrew Murray
ThatFilmAndGameBlog 
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