DC Comics needs a hit after the critically reviled Batman v Superman. Unfortunately, this supervillain extravaganza isn’t it, writes critic Caryn James.
“What happens if the next Superman is a terrorist?” That’s the rhetorical question intelligence agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) poses to persuade her bosses that she needs a band of supervillains to battle the planet’s potential new enemies.
She finds an assassin and a psychotic former psychiatrist, among others, and releases them from prison to fight evil with evil.
If only the rest of Suicide Squad were as intriguing as Waller’s politically loaded premise.
You could say her plan sets the story in motion, but motion is the wrong word for a film with such flat-footed action and such an overload of forgettable characters.
Suicide Squad looked bright and promising in its run-up, but lands on the screen with a big-budget thud of missed opportunities.
Suicide Squad’s DC Comics characters, lesser known than Batman or Superman, are introduced in quick flashbacks.
Will Smith, toned and with a shaved head, is Deadshot.
He is paid millions of dollars to murder someone, but lands in prison because he won’t do it in front of his beloved daughter.
A familiar Smith type, he’s the bad guy who’s not all bad, wisecracking easily although not often enough here.
We see Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn as she used to be: Dr Harleen Quinzel, of the oversized black glasses and three-inch heels that all prison psychiatrists wear.
She falls for her green-haired, silver-toothed patient, the Joker and soon goes rogue, with bright-white makeup and red lips that match her lover’s.
Robbie wiggles her spangled mini-shorts, occasionally possesses a mad gleam in her eye and, just as sporadically, a broad Brooklyn accent.
The “meta-humans” Waller rounds up are nonentities despite their particular quirks.
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