Another DC movie. Another instance for DC of scathing reviews not aligning with box office results. Did I drink the Haterade or did I enjoy the flick? Pretty sure you know how I'll lean on this one.....
I saw Suicide Squad when it came out and I'll freely admit that I enjoyed the hell out of it. It was a solid movie with a lot of fun moments and overall did justice to the Suicide Squad comics. This apparently goes against everything the critics are saying (currently 26% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing) but aligns pretty well with most others (68% via audience viewers). Surprise surprise, critics are a bunch of jackasses. Let's get through the actual movie part before I start ranting.
A brief intro for those unaware of the Squad and their new film, although it's hard to imagine there's many of those out there with all the hype this film got. SS (yes I'm abbreviating, I'm lazy) is a comic about some of DC's villains who are forced to work for the US Government to carry out dangerous tasks i.e. suicide missions where they're not expected to survive, hence the clever title. They're headed by Amanda Waller who forces their behavior via implanted explosives in their necks and they truly are bad guys forced to do good.
The movie captures this fairly well and while I can see why some folks thought this might've been better sold with an R-rating I certainly don't think the movie suffers for being PG-13. They've got most of the main characters from the comics which of course means almost no one most people are familiar with other than probably Harley Quinn. There were complaints about the plot and villain (see below) but the movie actually follows the comics fairly well and there's not a lot to complain about if you know what you're going into.
I think everyone did a great job with the roles and I'll echo most people that Margot Robbie stole the show as Harley. She totally nailed the character and I'm definitely eager to see her solo outing which is all but confirmed as far as I've read. All the other portrayals were solid enough although some folks definitely suffered from a lack of screen time or development, Croc and Katana coming to mind.
Leto's Joker. With the performances coming before he's got big shoes to fill and I think he did a great job. It's a different take on the Joker which I'm fine with and I think it'll be interesting to see where he goes with more screen time to play with. As far as his physical appearance I actually was fine with that because of the way Leto characterized him. Sure he was dressed as a gang banger with the plated teeth and tattoos but his mannerisms, his speech and everything about him transcended that. As my wife and I were discussing on the way home, it felt more like a costume he was wearing than who the Joker was which is exactly what he's done in the past. The Joker assumes guises as part of the joke but who he is never changes and I felt that Leto conveyed that. Like with the others I think it was just harder to see given his relative lack of screen time.
All in all I thought the movie was good and a solid entry into the DC cinematic universe. Some people complained about it following the Batman v Superman movie but it actually felt ok to me because while it was a smaller scale (sort of) movie it didn't feel out of place since the heroes we're used to have not stepped up yet to major prominence. It'll be interesting to see if they do a sequel how they wrangle these characters after the Justice League movies gives us heroes that are clearly more capable of handling the bigger threats. Do they make it a more gritty, covert style film or do they try to keep it like the first one with a big villain and come up with a reason why Superman isn't there to fix it.
Based on the above it sounds like I fall a little more into the 71% instead of the 26% right? Well that's because I still don't understand these overly pretentious critics who seem to love lambasting movies that don't fit their preconceived notions. First you have the people who simply don't grasp the nature of the source material evidenced by those who gripe about the movie's villain, the Enchantress. Of course she's not a major villain you're aware of you jackass, the comics don't really have one for the SS to fight. It's not like Superman with Lex or Batman with Joker, you're not going to make a SS movie and insert a villain anyone's ever heard of because most people aren't familiar with the SS to begin with. The fact that we got the Joker in this film was as best as you're gonna get and that was only cause Harley was there.
The other thing was that the reviews for this felt the exact same as for Batman v Superman. I'm not talking about some supposed DC bias amongst critics, which apparently is a conspiracy theory floating about. No what I mean is that in all the reviews I read for both movies, when watching the movie I could clearly identify the sections of the movie the reviewer was complaining about and in pretty much every instance it didn't somehow make the movie unwatchable garbage which you would've gathered from reading the review. Like you hear a complaint about the music cues in SS being too obvious and while there was certainly a large number of songs used pretty blatantly in the film, it certainly didn't ruin the movie. But you'd think the filmmakers had put the actual bands in the movie itself and had them say, "Hey look over there, it's Killer Croc!" with the way they complained about it. Reviews lately have seemed to be filled with hyperbole just calling out minor flaws and blowing them into these massive issues that they say derail the film. It's easy to see why people think reviewers are out to get movies but I'd say it's not because of any bias to one studio over the other. I think movie reviewers are actually biased against having fun.
At the end of the day, people are gonna see this movie. It's a big tent pole summer flick and a DC comic film so it's going to make money which is awesome because I think the DC films have a real chance of giving us some good material. I wish DC had become it's own studio like Marvel as that probably would've helped avoid this painful learning curve with their films but I feel like there's hope.
I certainly know this movie will end up in my collection but again I'm biased.
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