Suicide Squad Review

One of the most anticipated movies of the year has been out for a little over a week and it delivers on a silly action film note. 'Suicide Squad' is a film where a select few villains are chosen by government agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to fight evil seeing how they're expendable. However, these lowlifes are thrown into action much quicker than anticipated. Can these 'Heroes' save the world?

It's hard to address this movie properly without regarding the alleged 'Controversy' that arose a few days before the film came out. This film got panned by critics and some of the film's die hard fans went as far as trying to shut down review website 'Rotten Tomatoes' in protest. Having seen the film this past weekend, I don't see why the film got bad reviews, especially 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. I won't try to make the argument that this film is a masterpiece, but it certainly earned itself the distinction of being a fun dumb summer film.

The strength of this film as with most superhero/comic book films the past decade is the richness of the characters and the fun involved. For example we've got a few one liners from Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Deadshot (Will Smith) that are pretty good. Out of all the characters in this film they're the ones with the most material to work with. The backstories of these two are dealt with in a quick minute of exposition and the others are kind tossed to the wayside. I guess that's where some critics are thrown, because the setup is a little rushed. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there were several solo superhero movies that fleshed out the characters before 'The Avengers' came out. Here it's only 5-10 minutes of introducing characters that the average movie goer or critic may be unfamiliar with. But the writing for these people and the performances the actors give make it easy for me to forgive them for that.

One of the few problems that I have with the movie is that there's not a TON of room for character development. Even for a shoot'em up action film, there's not that many scenes where we see the characters have quiet moments together to talk it out. There's one scene in a bar where everybody gives up on stopping the 'Villain' and they commiserate. That's one of the FEW scenes where we see these characters be human, I think it would've been interesting to see these people discuss their flaws etc.

Also the villain is intimidating but they could've dove deeper into the torment this villain (Enchantress) is causing. You see, this witch can possess one's body and tear that person apart, it would've been nicer to see that person's struggle to maintain her humanity as this demon continues to play psychological games with her. On top of that the scheme is clichéd and the CGI effects around her in the climax aren't convincing at all and that subtracts the awesome factor for the ending.

All in all this film is fun, it moves at a VERY fast pace, which I guess was the idea going in so it does deliver on that. The fact that the movie is fun makes it a little easier for me to ignore the problems I just mentioned in this review. So if you're unsure about seeing this movie, give it a chance you'll probably enjoy it.