Suicide Squad (2016) movie - Post your thoughts! *SPOILERS*

[Drz]

This thread is a dedicated forum discussion for David Ayer's Suicide Squad movie and we will be discussing everything from production, to set design, to costuming, to spoilers and etc. You have been warned!

Suicide squad sucked! 1,5/5, i'll round it down to 1/5 because I don't feel defensive about the movie. I'm so so disappointed. The movie feels like a 3 hour movie that had 1 hour entirely removed, characters like Katana, Captain Boomerang and Killer Croc could easily be removed from the movie and nothing from the plot would have had been changed. Amanda Waller on the other hand, is true to her character and rocks my socks off. She's easily the best character of the whole bunch and very true to her comic roots.

The biggest problem the movie has, its that its a soulless action movie with tons and tons of characters, you don't and won't care for. Two characters die at the end climax and no one gives a darn.

its just a mess, but Jared Leto's take on the character was interesting and I was genuinely interested in a Joker that actually cares for Harley Quinn.

Again: 1,5/5 so down to 1/5 is my final vote. So disappointed .



I'm sad. =(

[Ohnooze]

This thread is a dedicated forum discussion for David Ayer's Suicide Squad movie and we will be discussing everything from production, to set design, to costuming, to spoilers and etc. You have been warned!

Suicide squad sucked! 1,5/5, i'll round it down to 1/5 because I don't feel defensive about the movie. I'm so so disappointed. The movie feels like a 3 hour movie that had 1 hour entirely removed, characters like Katana, Captain Boomerang and Killer Croc could easily be removed from the movie and nothing from the plot would have had been changed. Amanda Waller on the other hand, is true to her character and rocks my socks off. She's easily the best character of the whole bunch and very true to her comic roots.

The biggest problem the movie has, its that its a soulless action movie with tons and tons of characters, you don't and won't care for. Two characters die at the end climax and no one gives a darn.

its just a mess, but Jared Leto's take on the character was interesting and I was genuinely interested in a Joker that actually cares for Harley Quinn.

Again: 1,5/5 so down to 1/5 is my final vote. So disappointed .

EDIT: Mods, I messed up my own poll. Can you add 5 options for the poll?

Well that's just great....

BUT...people didn't care for BvS too much and I loved it so I'm still going to see it. Who knows, maybe I'll like it.

[Drz]

BvS theatrical cut for me was 2.5/5 and the Ultimate Cut is a genuine 4/5 at best or 3.5/5 at worst.

[GreenLanternRanger]

Why start a thread to rate ths film before its even out for general audiences to see?

Also sorry to hear you didnt enjoy the film. Still looking forward to seeing it myself. As someone who enjoyed MOS & BVS I have no doubt that I will enjoy Suicide Squad as well.

[Drz]

Why start a thread to rate ths film before its even out for general audiences to see?

Because its out in Europe?

Why did you vote in the poll without seeing the movie??

[Panfoot]

What would you consider some other 1/5 movies? (I'm just curious for comparison, a 1/5 to me is stuff like Birdemic or Jack and Jill)

[Cowtools]

Suicide Squad has opened here in Australia, so I thought I’d start a thread for people to post their thoughts. I created the same thread in the DC Comics subform, because I don't know where the finial conversation will wind up. Feel free to merge the threads.

Before I start, let me just say that I sincerely wanted this movie to be good. I love DC comics and thought this looked like a unique and daring film for them to try so early in their fledgling cinematic universe.

Here’s my thoughts (SPOILERS, obviously):

Man this movie is lame. There’s an overwhelming sense of sweaty desperation about the whole endeavour. I’m not just talking about how it desperately wants to be another Guardians Of The Galaxy (because it so does). It also wants to be a war film about badass bros bonding under pressure, and it fails at that too.

I have to say that whoever cut the second trailer - the one with Bohemian Rhapsody - deserves an Oscar. That trailer took unrelated action shots - which in the movie itself are boring or pointless - and random jokes - which in the movie fall completely flat - and made the movie seem like a dynamic, idiosyncratic rave-up. Instead it’s a drab, monotonous cliche-fest.
For one thing - and this is the last time I'll compare this to GOTG - the music choices are relentlessly obvious - House Of The Rising Sun, Sympathy For The Devil, Fortunate Son. We're talking a gas station classic rock budget CD compilation here; no imagination or flair. And the jukebox doesn't let up for like the first 10 minutes of the film.

This is sad because, unlike Batman V Superman - which was poisoned at the root, there are signs of the great film that Suicide Squad could have been.

I’ll talk about the good points, and then I’ll talk about why they didn’t save the film.
David Ayer made some interesting directorial flourishes. There are moments in the film that a really cool and beautifully composed. However, most of these you’ve already seen in the trailer.

It was pretty cool, at the start, to have a few flashbacks showing Batman and The Flash catching the various bad guys. It makes the DCEU feel a bit more like a shared universe.

Most of the main cast was spot on in their characterisation. Some of these were the best versions of DC characters I could hope to see. However, only a handful of characters get much screen time, and those the movie focuses on are the least interesting. Katana gets some great action scenes, but is a blank slate. Jai Courtney’s Boomerang is fun, but barely gets to interact with anybody. Jai Hernandez’s Diablo has an interesting character arc, which is thrown away after one scene.

Ayer gives most of the film’s meaningful plot to Will Smith’s Deadshot, who’s just a cliched character like you’ve seen in dozens of crime/police/war films. A hitman with a hidden heart of gold who just wants his daughter back. Smith is fine, but he brings nothing unique to a character you’ve seen a dozen times before.

Viola Davis seems on paper like an ideal Amanda Waller. But in this story, Waller is pure evil, not just a hardcore soldier. Furthermore, her misjudgement is what causes the whole mess the Squad is sent in to fix. Not only that, she spend the final act as a damsel in distress! There’s no sense of the heroes uniting to serve a higher purpose or anything like that; the plot is all about cleaning up Waller’s mess.

Anything that isn’t Waller’s fault is Rick Flagg’s fault. The actor was so uncharismatic that I can’t even recall his name. Flagg is just an ******* in this. Even dealing with the ‘worst of the worst’, his behaviour is totally counter-productive to the plot - and to us caring about him.

Now for the really bad news: The villains.

Enchantress is the main villain, and she is just the worst. Lame, unthreatening, a generic final boss with opaque motivations. Her sub-boss of a brother is a stock standard CGI monster, and at the climax, Cara Delavigne looks like she’s stuck in a 1980s Whitesnake video, dancing around in a sci-fi bikini with a ludicrously deep villain voice.

Then there’s Harley Quinn. Margot Robbie does her best, but it’s futile. For one, her voice goes in and out of a Brooklyn accent at random. For another, she’s sexualised to an insane degree. Now, before you get all up in my face, there’s nothing wrong with a character being sexy, but in this film, 'sexy' is her only defining characteristic, other than that she says inappropriate things. There’s no sense of hidden depths or pathos to her, like there is in her best comics. It also doesn’t help that her entire subplot is tied to the Joker.

Dear lord, the Joker… The worst thing about Leto’s Joker is that he’s completely forgettable. He looks the part with with his scary eyes. Plus he has the laugh down, I’ll give him that. His character is vaguely menacing, but only in the way that any shouty bad guy with a gun is. There’s nothing dynamic, charismatic or fun about him. Most of the time he seems to be doing a bad Heath Ledger impression - switching from a whisper to a growl at random, biting off words and sucking in air. But nothing he says or does is particularly clever or interesting. He’s also in the film for about four major scenes and has no effect on the plot. His character could have been replaced by, say, KGBeast and it wouldn’t have subtracted from the film.

Now, as to the filmmaking.
This really does feel - as per reports - that it was edited together without a clear goal for the tone or structure in mind. The editing is so sloppy that most of the jokes are poorly timed and fail to land (my theatre was mostly silent throughout). Captain Boomerang popping a beer in the middle of a battle? Thrown away at random. Harley Quinn’s joke about the voices in her head? Lands like a thud in the middle of a musical montage.

The opening of the film is just Amanda Waller narrating the characters’ backstories, with no set up or reason for us to care. It’s so clumsily done; they have things like the words ’TOTAL WILD CARD’ pop up over Harley Quinn as she’s introduced, for no reason, to tell us that she’s, like, a total wild card. They show us, on the screen in words, what the characters stats are - like a video game - and inform us in text about quirks like Boomerang’s pink unicorn fetish(!) which are supposed to be cute but have no payoff whatsoever.

Many of the character beats are poorly set up and don’t pay off. Waller narrates Diablo’s backstory, but we don’t see it for ourselves until near the very end of the movie, where it matters not at all. There a scene where someone dramatically tosses Deadshot a gun in super slo-mo, but it was never established that Deadshot is out of bullets or needs a gun. And so on and so on.

An extended cut of the film might fix some of these problems, but that won’t fix cliche-ridden dialogue that you’ve heard before:
“You’re playing with fire.” “I’m using fire to fight fire!”
“We’ll throw them under the bus”
“He’s 20 pounds of sh*t in a 10 pound bag.”
If these snippets strike you as clever, then congratulations on seeing your first action movie!!

Finally, if there’s one problem that sums up this film, it’s that there’s no clear protagonist. Is Will Smith the protagonist because he’s the big star? But he’s a boring and cliched character. Is Harley Quinn the protagonist because she gets the most screen time? But she’s impossible to relate to. Is Rick Flagg the protagonist because he’s a normal guy? But he’s an aggravating a-hole. I would have made Diablo the protagonist, as he is the only one with both a sympathetic backstory and cool power and some morals we can identify with.

Now, before anybody jumps on me for being a Marvel shill or having an anti-DC bias, I really did want this movie to be good. I thought the trailer were fantastic - that’s why I went to see the film despite the reviews. Unfortunately, it really is just a failure, plain and simple; not of comic adaptation, but of basic filmmaking.
2/5

[Drz]

What would you consider some other 1/5 movies? (I'm just curious for comparison, a 1/5 to me is stuff like Birdemic or Jack and Jill)

The last time I was this disappointed in a movie was with the Hobbit trilogy.

[adkal]

The opening of the film is just Amanda Waller narrating the characters’ backstories, with no set up or reason for us to care.

The set up was established right at the beginning:

Superman died and the US forces wanted to find a way of plugging the gap his passing would create. Waller has a proposal and brings it to the table.

It’s so clumsily done; they have things like the words ’TOTAL WILD CARD’ pop up over Harley Quinn as she’s introduced, for no reason, to tell us that she’s, like, a total wild card. They show us, on the screen in words, what the characters stats are - like a video game - and inform us in text about quirks like Boomerang’s pink unicorn fetish(!) which are supposed to be cute but have no payoff whatsoever.

The pink unicorn was revisited a couple of times - but, yeah, not quite a payoff, I agree.

Many of the character beats are poorly set up and don’t pay off. Waller narrates Diablo’s backstory, but we don’t see it for ourselves until near the very end of the movie, where it matters not at all.

Only it does matter, because he was the one to see through Enchantress' dream-lie. He's the one who pulls the others out of it and gets them back into the right state of mind to confront her.

There a scene where someone dramatically tosses Deadshot a gun in super slo-mo, but it was never established that Deadshot is out of bullets or needs a gun.

Enchantress disarmed everyone. We saw all their guns and weapons (including a key one) get pulled from their hands and land away from them. Ergo, Deadshot needed a gun.

[adkal]

The last time I was this disappointed in a movie was with the Hobbit trilogy.

All three of them?

[Drz]

All three of them?

1st one was okay, 2nd one is the worst and 3rd one is just laughably bad.

[adkal]

Watched it in Dubai (as part of the European Premiere (not sure how the geography of that one worked out, but still...).

It was enjoyable.

Action movies, such as Independence Day, Die Hard, Rambo, Armageddon etc are basically superhero movies without any named superheroes saving the day, so it's amusing to see what would otherwise be a 'blockbuster formula' get blasted because 'named' characters are used.

There were certainly cliches throughout the movie, no nuance to Enchantress or her brother, Amanda's cockiness stabbed her in the bum, and Flagg looked like he was going to cry at any moment, but the movie was still fun (and the audience I was with laughed, bopped their heads, and seemed to enjoy it, too).

In my opinion, it doesn't try to 'do a GotG', but there were too many characters for a two and a bit hour movie (and I think, rather than an origin movie it should have had an established history between the characters, and a clash of siblings would have worked better).

[adkal]

1st one was okay, 2nd one is the worst and 3rd one is just laughably bad.

There was really no need for a third, methinks.

[Cowtools]

The set up was established right at the beginning:

Superman died and the US forces wanted to find a way of plugging the gap his passing would create. Waller has a proposal and brings it to the table.

That's not what I meant by 'set up'. I mean the film never establishes why we should care about Waller, or the prisoners, or indeed the fate of the world. Waller just sits down in the restaurant and starts feeding the audience info on these bad guys and we're supposed to care, why?

Only it does matter, because he was the one to see through Enchantress' dream-lie. He's the one who pulls the others out of it and gets them back into the right state of mind to confront her.

That's true, I forgot about. But that sequence came and went so fast that it had no real emotional impact on me.

[Ohnooze]

I'm about 98% sure that people are voting before seeing it....

I also think that maybe DC movies are being reviewed from a different eye than other movies....possibly. I mean there are a lot of eyes on dc now after BvS.