Suicide Squad: A DCEU Retrospective (Part 3)

Rating – 3/10

**SPOILERS**

Welcome back to the DCEU Retrospective, a series exploring the ill fated first attempt at a cinematic universe based off of DC Comics. Previously we looked at Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the over ambitious, messy attempt to kick the franchise into high gear a bit too early. After reactions to that film were seriously divided, the new franchise’s reputation was already tarnished, and a movie about Batman fighting Superman failed to make a billion dollars, Warner Bros would start to panic a little, and anxiously look towards their next release. 

Suicide Squad was released in August 2016, about 5 months after BvS. Directed by David Ayer, it follows a group of supervillains recruited for secret government operations likely to result in their deaths in return for shorter prison sentences. Starring several big names such as Will Smith and Margot Robbie and featuring the introduction of the DCEU’s Joker, as well as a unique and interesting concept with the promise of a film focused on villains for a change, hopes were high for this to be the film that changed the DCEU’s fortunes. 

There’s no real sense in ignoring it. The film did not do that. 

Suicide Squad has one of the worst reputations in a franchise full of bad reputations, with many accusing it of poorly written characters, dialogue, and story, as well as falling victim to a certain fatal flaw I’ve mentioned previously in this series. Obviously this came at a terrible time for Warner Bros, and the film has since gone down as one of the worst superhero films since the genre’s revival in the 2000s. 

Honestly though. It’s not that bad. I mean it’s not great, or even that good, but it’s not even the worst in the DCEU (might make a tier list at the end of the series. BvS will be below this one).

A lot of this is down to actors actually seeming like they’re having fun making this film. Instead of being overly serious and dour, Will Smith, Margot Robbie, and Jai Courtney in particular bring humor and charisma that actually makes the film entertaining. Ayer’s direction is also pretty solid. He shoots a lot of the film like a gritty, realistic, almost militaristic action movie, but not the self serious, depressed, “I’m Superman and I don’t know if people are worth saving” kind of gritty and realistic. Just watching characters move through a ruined city as a cameraman follows them on the ground gives this film a sense of existing in a real, grounded world, and it works here. 

So obviously, something had to go wrong. Who would’ve guessed it was one of the things that would go wrong last time?

Warner Bros’ infamous studio interference strikes again, making Suicide Squad’s post production process legendary in how much of a nightmare it was. Shaken by BvS not breaking box office records and being critically rejected, the studio went from trying to be Marvel’s opposite with Man of Steel and desperately playing catch up with them in BvS, to establishing DC Films and new leadership in order to try and copy the MCU style for audience support, hijacking Ayer’s film in the process (this was the first, and not last executive personnel shakeup in the franchise history). After Ayer’s initial cut of the film didn’t resonate as well with test audiences as the studio would’ve liked, Warner Bros called for extensive reshoots and a new edit in order to turn Ayer’s more somber film into something a bit more crowd pleasing and lighthearted. The result is bits of Ayer’s vision mixed with flashes of garish neon colors, cheaper emotional beats, and a frustratingly generic soundtrack. 

This can be most clearly seen during the third act, which was subject to the most reshoots. This is the absolute worst part of the film by far. Ayer’s grounded shooting style is replaced by constant slow motion, terrible editing (a downgrade from the already somewhat choppy editing earlier in the film), and boring, generic bits of dialogue and story beats. Worst of all, everyone just feels so checked out during the reshoots. The actor’s line deliveries make the already bland dialogue feel lifeless, and the style feels completely removed from any of the artistic voice Ayer had in the rest of the film. The lack of enthusiasm is especially noticeable as it follows what is probably the film’s best scene, as the team goes into a bar and discusses their motives, histories, and status as expendable criminals and scapegoats. While the scene isn’t perfect, at least everyone involved feels invested and committed to the characters. 

While the third act tells me that reshoots made the film undoubtedly worse, truthfully I’m not sure it was an excellent film to begin with. While David Ayer can do a good job directing, and the actors are (usually) committed, the script is very poorly written. Dialogue can often fall into either constant streams of lazy exposition or generic lines void of personality that would sound more at home on a made-for-tv movie, costing a fraction of this movie’s budget. When faced with the unenviable task of introducing audiences to every character in this movie (aside from a couple of cameos), the film opts for what feels like a powerpoint presentation and a brief flashback for every character. It’s a bland and hilariously lazy way to introduce characters (not to mention the infamous “this is Katana” scene). A cardinal rule of good screenwriting is show, don’t tell, and Suicide Squad is a movie that loves to tell. Show us who these guys are and what their abilities are through conversations and actions, not through forced and unnatural dialogue describing them. To mention another common criticism of this movie, it also feels the need to constantly tell us that these are bad guys we’re watching, but they do very little to show us how bad they are. None of them do anything particularly villainous (I mean Harley Quinn steals a purse at one point. She’s a bad guy, it's what she does), so the script constantly tries to remind us they’re bad people. Lots of telling, no showing. It’s just lazy writing. 

Also they really try to force the idea that there’s a deeper connection between the Squad members with the same method (“I’ve already lost one family, I’m not going to lose another”), and it might be the most awkward part of the movie. It’s impossible to feel that any of these people have any strong feelings for each other. They met each other like a day ago and mostly ridiculed each other in that time. These are coworkers at best.

In terms of other flaws, a lot of characters fall flat. Several Squad members are woefully underwritten, most egregiously their handler, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, who’s just a boring “military type” character. Enchantress is also one of the blandest, personality free villains in the superhero genre, who just wants to take over the world for power I guess (with lots of laughably non threatening hip shaking, like an angry magic Shakira). 

The editing is choppy a lot of the time (even before the third act), and the CGI is in fact abysmal. Bad enough to make the effects in BvS look practical by comparison. But these flaws have been pulled apart a lot since this movie came out, and I want to use my time to share a potentially more controversial opinion: I really don’t like Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. 

Don’t get me wrong, she’s having fun in the role, and it’s more entertaining than Henry Cavill’s “men aren’t good anymore” Superman. But she doesn’t feel like she fully gets the role, often like she’s going too far in trying to act crazy and coming off like a caricature, as well as adding some lazy “crazy person” jokes, like hearing voices. Robbie also goes a little too over the top with the accent (“I ain’t much of a joy-nah” in the third act), and is seriously over sexualized. David Ayer has argued against this notion, implying in a 2020 Twitter conversation that Margot Robbie wanted more revealing outfits and “[wanted] to be depicted as a sexual being”. However, making your character a sexual being doesn’t mean putting Margot Robbie in the shortest shorts known to man and having shots like this:

At the end of the day, the shots aren’t needed, and it just makes Ayer look perverted (meanwhile, Margot Robbie has stated that her outfit made her feel self conscious, but defended it as a choice her character wouldn’t make for male attention. Ayer has since seemed to have recognized the criticism and says he  is “growing and learning in a changing world”). Now to be fair to Robbie’s performance, I don’t think she was given very good material to work with here, and if memory serves correctly she seems much more comfortable in future appearances (I’ll verify that statement later). But I just don’t think it works here, especially when Harley Quinn is often labelled as a highlight of this movie.

Speaking of poorly done characters, I should probably throw the Joker into this review, kind of like how he was just kinda thrown into the movie. Jared Leto was another controversial casting choice that fans rejected from the start, but unlike Ben Affleck or Gal Gadot, he didn’t really manage to prove anyone wrong. It’s a weird performance full of weird laughter and weird growling (cause he’s the Joker! It’s supposed to not feel normal!). He doesn’t feel like one of the most iconic supervillains of all time, just an odd gremlin who is, again, acting crazy for the sake of craziness. It doesn’t help that most of Leto’s scenes were cut, reducing him to an unnecessary edition to the film, and that he was covered in weird tattoos. Writing “damaged” on his forehead is still unbearably stupid all these years later.

In spite of all this, I really don’t think Suicide Squad is the worst movie I’m going to talk about in this series. There are some solid characters. Will Smith’s Deadshot at least brings charisma and solid action, Jai Courtney is genuinely funny, Jay Hernandez’s fire wielding pacifist El Diablo is an actual interesting and at times moving character, and Viola Davis is imposing as the shady and ruthless government official who recruits the Squad. David Ayer has a grounded and interesting vision that can come through at times, and I do think there was a lot of enthusiasm for this project that hasn’t been able to come through in previous movies. If it was left as it was, Suicide Squad wouldn’t be beloved, but would be considered fine if not great. Warner Bros’ reshoots are what turned this into a confused, at times passionless mess.  Somewhere in here, there’s an entertaining, if flawed, grounded action movie featuring comic book characters. Maybe we were asking for the wrong director’s cut all along. More on that later though. 

For now, the third movie in the DCEU would leave it in depressingly bad shape. The franchise was in desperate need of critical success, before everyone really gave up on it.