Suicide Squad - Review Thread

You must have me confused with MovieBuff801.

I wish everyone would stop paying attention to Kevin Smith and that he would live out his days working in a comic book store and stay out of movies and public life.

Jared Leto is bitching that most of his scenes were cut.

Can't wait for the Ultimate Edition blu-ray.

Quit livin' in the past, Michael Keaton's Batman...

I... kind of liked it.  

Look it has problems.  The villain was poorly chosen, the action scenes are good but not great, the exposition dump at the beginning is a bit much, but Will Smith is fun, Margot Robbie is fun, Viola Davis is well chosen, the basic "Dirty Dozen with Superheroes" idea is a good one, and David Ayer's moronic notion of what's "street" work better when he's making what is more or less an actual cartoon.  Ultimately it's a movie made for 14 year olds, but it doesn't really pretend it isn't and I mostly enjoyed my time with it.

Dracula and I are on the same page, it seems.  My Letterboxd review:

I kinda, sorta liked it...I think?

To be sure, this movie is a hot mess; you can tell there are two different cuts of the film vying for dominance. Where the editing is concerned, it IS all over the place...but part of me wonders if that was the intention? Don't take this as me saying it's a bad movie, because it isn't, it's just kinda schizo. The film also relies too heavily on pop songs to aid in some scene transitions, or just to be there in the background in general. Again, I'm wondering if that was intentional, given the fact that that this is a movie about a group of psychopathic bad guys, so maybe their thinking was, 'Let's make the editing in some of this as aggressive as possible.'?

There was plenty of stuff that I enjoyed/liked about it, but almost nearly as much that just struck me as weird decision-making. The biggest offense of the movie in that regard is not just the choice of the villain for the film, but the way they are established as the main villain, meaning it just...happens. Said character is introduced and a few scenes later, boom, there's our villain. Then there's a secondary villain that kind of puts Marvel to shame in how little you can develop your antagonists.  Also, the First Act of this movie in general is, like I said, schizo.  But the movie better finds its footing as it goes along.

Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Jared Leto (whose screentime was criminally cut down on) are the standouts and I also liked Viola Davis. The action is really good and there are scenes of real personality throughout (the bar scene we glimpsed in the trailers is easily one of the best). Building off that, the chemistry between a lot of the Squad members is really strong and overall, I might be leaning more toward the positive side, but WB/DC needs to get a better grip on the steering wheel for this whole cinematic universe.

To borrow a sentiment from Richard Roeper when he reviewed The Brothers Grimm in 2005: it's a mess, but a glorious mess.

To an extent, at least.

Dude, you're one of those Hot Topic people. You're gonna LOVE this movie. You'll probably find your next girlfriend while watching it.

I had always assumed that the Hot Topic kids had all sort of disappeared sometime around 2004, but I was apparently wrong. In fact this movie gave me the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that more of what I used to think was cool is still "in" than I thought.

The point of that wasn't me comparing Suicide Squad to Brothers Grimm at all.  I was just borrowing the general statement because it seemed applicable.  Suicide Squad has more going for it than The Brothers Grimm.

Ha, understandable.