Suicide Squad Review – A Likeable Mess Worthy of Harley
Suicide Squad is a mess. It is also, for long stretches, a likeable one, which is more than we can say for a lot of tidy films that leave your head the moment the lights come up.
David Ayer’s movie wants to be a dirty dozen of DC villains and a neon music video at the same time, and the edit never quite picks a side. Scenes start like jokes and end like trailers. The soundtrack keeps tapping you on the shoulder to check you are having fun. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you want it to sit down.
Will Smith’s Deadshot is the closest thing to a spine. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is the reason the film will be remembered at all. Viola Davis plays Amanda Waller as the scariest person in a room full of metahumans, which is the correct reading. The Enchantress plot is a video-game finale stapled on because someone decided the third act needed a beam of light in the sky. It did not.
Jared Leto’s Joker is a cameo that thinks it is a co-star. The film is better whenever it forgets he is hovering and lets the squad bicker in a lift. That bickering is the movie we paid for. The ancient-witch apocalypse is the movie somebody was afraid to cut.
Call it a likeable mess and leave it there. It is not a sermon, and it is not the cartoon some fans were defending before they had seen it. It is a noisy, badly assembled night out, saved whenever Harley understands the assignment and almost nobody else does.
Worth seeing once, ideally with friends who will talk through the skybeam. Not worth the costume arguments that followed it into the car park.