Review of The Suicide Squad (2021) by Mike451 — 09 Aug 2021

Just about watchable if you have a high threshold for campy 80s Chuck Norris/A Team series served up a heavy side order of flaccid dick jokes and daytime drama dialogue made up entirely of word cloud sourced cliches. Every now and again someone says the F word in a way that only serves to elevate their grown ass embarrassment at using expletives while dressed in costumes any self-respecting WWE wrestler should have serious misgivings about John Cena.

To be fair, Margot Robbie's Quinn is the highlight. This is the first time her character is shown not to be solely an attention seekingly psycho-babe, perhaps because she's got more to do and less to say she shines all the brighter for it. David Dastmalchian's Polka Dot Man is another highlight, his superhero 'powers' are more an affliction that he comes to terms with before eventually accepting them and himself for what he is.

Everything else is crud.

Idris Elba is not Will Smith. As lovely as Elba seems, on the big screen he comes across as stiff, charmless, and never feels as though he's entirely comfortable in his own skin. How someone who can be so charming and such a commanding presence in roles made for the smaller screen can feel so out of place on the big screen I've no idea. Ditto Joel Kinnaman, fantastically watchable as Holder in The Killing before buffing up to become a flex of muscle on which to hang quippy dialogue in a way that makes you question whether the character is actually smart enough to come up with it in the first place.

Viola Davis does her best as the angry boss every cop movie cop had to report to in the 80s. She nails it, which only goes to prove how many leagues above this awfulness she belongs to and should never ever stray from again. Plotwise: the bad guy is a big alien starfish which, when all is said and done, is dispatched with pointed unfussiness. So there's that. But first, endless redcoat deaths that matter not a jot to anyone must be trudged through with the same kind of relentless lack of imagination that believes everything tastes better with ketchup.

If you were hoping for something special in the visual effects you'll be left hugely disappointed. The whole thing looks like some undergrad found ALL THE BUTTONS and decided that because they were there that was enough of a good reason to dictate that they all had to be used. When you can literally see where the layers are stacked you know someone's head isn't in the game because they've got the horn for it and can't hold themselves back. The options for the scenes seem to have been: A/ CGI TF out of everything until it looks like its been shot with an instagram filter set to 150%; B/ Use whatever set is available anywhere in the 1970s for interiors as long as it's cheap and doesn't wobble too much.

Seriously makes me wonder what promise of star/studio access and/or advertising bump was given to reviewers who scored this anything above mediocre.