This is one of those movies that conveniently lets you know in the first five minutes that it’s gonna suck. Seriously, I timed it.
Before you even see the title sequence, you get snippets of THREE oldies radio pop songs and some of the world’s most ugly fast-cutting as the film rushes through the introductions of its two main characters. It sets the tone for the graceless mess that follows. Big Hollywood movies often get accused of being condescending. Here’s a model of the form. The editing is frenetic, but not for any other point than that the Warner Bros. studio execs don’t trust the audience to stand for two seconds of stillness. The moment you start to think about that, another loud rock song blares over the soundtrack to throw you off. Meanwhile, every important plot point (I guess there are one or two), gets repeated at least nineteen times just in case you accidentally walked into the wrong theater and didn’t figure it out until a half-hour in.
The story: Viola Davis, as an ultra-hard-boiled US national security head, comes up with the worst plan ever to combat a strange new enemy. She springs a hand-picked selection of “gifted” criminals out of maximum security prison so they can fight it. Everyone here is THE BEST. Will Smith’s Deadshot is the world’s best marksman. Jay Hernandez’s Diablo is the world’s best face-tattooed guy who can throw fire out of his hands. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is the world’s best crazy woman who wields a baseball bat and wears little cocktail napkin hotpants. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Killer Croc is the world’s best half-man/half-crocodile. Also, everyone here is either completely loony tunes or a haunted brooder, and that’s it. As a result, the actors don’t so much create characters as they either try to out-crazy the other crazies or out-brood the other brooders. Margot Robbie and Will Smith have the edge in their respective categories because they get the most screen time (even if it makes zero sense for non-skilled, non-superpowered Harley Quinn to be here at all).
This is a terrible movie that thinks you’re an idiot. It gets even worse when it dawns on you that this film is little more than a tweaked version of Michael Bay’s Armageddon for the superhero-fixated present day. A ragtag group of fishes-out-of-water are recruited by the government to fight a cosmic menace, with laughs and pathos and grand special effects along the way. Yep. Same thing. A few mildly clever special effects moments (The Enchantress looks kinda cool, like a more polished take on the ghosts in low-budget Asian horror movies) are all that save this from total misery.
Word on the street is that the studio suits wrested final cut from writer/director David Ayer because his vision wasn’t completely brain-dead enough for them. If so, it shows. There are hacksaw marks all over this. Even at just over two hours, it feels rushed. And clumsy. And desperate.