Movie Review--Suicide Squad (Extended Cut)

"What if Superman had decided to fly down, rip off the roof of the White House and grab the President of the United States right out of the Oval Office?  Who would've stopped him?"

--Dexter Tolliver, Suicide Squad

Warner Bros. has repeatedly shown it is incompetent at consistently managing almost anything from the tone of its various DCEU projects to telling a unified story across films to even capitalizing on genuine triumphs like Wonder Woman.  There is no better example of reshoots and asinine corporate directives butchering a DCEU film than Suicide Squad, as even the theatrical cut of Justice League is at least more coherent than the version of Suicide Squad that came to theaters years ago.  Very shallow characterization for almost everyone but Harley Quinn and Deadshot, cheap comedic dialogue, poor villain CGI, and a story that is both rushed and full of pointless additions all at once all come together to make this not just the worst DCEU film that Warner Bros. ruined, but one of the worst mainstream movies of the past two decades.  The fact that the entire reason the Suicide Squad is founded is to stop a potential "evil Superman" is pathetic given that there are almost no superpowered individuals in the group, which weakens the entire project from the start.  Not even the extended cut treatment that genuinely elevates Batman v Superman salvages Suicide Squad.  In actuality, it adds a mere handful of new or slightly extended scenes that fix none of the numerous, glaring issues with the movie.

Photo credit: AntMan3001
 on Visualhunt.com

Production Values

First of all, director David Ayer is likely not to blame for the more severe faults, at least as far as Warner Bros.'s recent record with reshoots and absolutely destroying the superior original visions of their directors suggests.  Second, not everything about the movie is terrible.  There are some great performances, albeit very restricted performances, inside an overcrowded and shallow story.  Viola Davis is excellent in her very limited and probably truncated role as Amanda Waller, exhibiting a truly manipulative sharpness as the overseer of the titular Suicide Squad.  Margot Robbie and Will Smith benefit the most from the structure of the movie because they get more screen time and lines than the other members of the group.  The difference in character development is drastic: Killer Croc has almost no reason to be in the movie other than a single small scene near the end, to give just one contrasting example, Katana has almost nothing to do or say, and Cara Delevingne's Enchantress has almost no time to elaborate on what could have been a very thematically helpful motivation.

The characters besides Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Amanda Waller are clearly afterthoughts.  Killer Croc's live action debut could have been so much more.  However, Warner Bros. settled for an undeveloped villain in Enchantress and a group of mostly undeveloped villains to stop her.  This is just one part of the broader flaws.  The action is filmed so up close that little of the fights can actually be seen, for starters.  The CGI for El Diablo's flame form at the end and that of Incubus is very poor, with Doomsday's animation looking far more realistic than the CGI figures of Suicide Squad.  More importantly, there is almost nothing but random, sometimes repetitive events (how many times do people survive a helicopter crash in this movie?) that move the plot from one scene to the next.  The opening along is so disjointed in its introductions that it is fortunate the rest of the movie is not more incoherent plot and tone-wise than it is.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Concerned by the possibility of a Superman-like alien or metahuman threatening the United States, a government worker named Amanda Waller assembles a group of specialized criminals as a contingency plan--even though Superman or someone like him could eliminate everyone in the group almost effortlessly, might I add.  One of the members named Enchantress goes rogue, motivating Waller to use the other members of her new team to resolve the situation.  Enchantress, as the manifestation of an ancient pseudo-goddess in the body of a contemporary woman, hijacks the body of a man to allow her brother Incubus to also manifest himself.  The Suicide Squad, called Task Force X, is threatened with the detonation of bomb implants in their necks if they do not comply with Waller's orders.

Intellectual Content

Even in the studio-butchered theatrical or extended cuts of Suicide Squad, there are hints of what could have been deeper themes in the story.  It is just that nothing comes from them.  Nothing comes from the conversation between Enchantress and her brother Incubus about how she thinks humans worship technology instead of them.  Nothing comes from the Joker's ironically rational idea that living for something or someone can be a far greater expression of commitment than dying for it, which he posits when Harley Quinn says she would die for him in order to show her love.  Similarly, nothing comes from the dehumanizing attitudes shown toward Task Force X as people who will be killed or even falsely blamed for the failure of their mission if Amanda Waller wishes.  The reshoot version of the movie undermines whatever depth it was supposed to have, as well as Warner Bros.'s right to blame anyone but its executives for the collapse of its DCEU.

Conclusion

From the practically wasted appearances of Ben Affleck's Batman and Ezra Miller's Flash to the asinine way that non-metahumans defeat a telepathic witch, there are quite a few underdeveloped or outright stupid choices made.  When the original plan for Suicide Squad tied into to then-director Zack Snyder's Justice League, there is no valid excuse for exchanging a story more consistent with the start of the DCEU and with deeper themes for this shitshow of a movie.  There are simply so many genuine problems on display that even viewers who do not normally assess a movie artistically can easily see.  Task Force X is not even comprised of people who are anywhere near as selfish and cruel as Amanda Waller describes them, undermining her hype about their villainy at the beginning, and Captain Boomerang's boomerang camera does not even spin with the boomerang despite no other evidence it is a gyroscopic camera, to list two more idiotic aspects!  Things like how the sexism in Deadshot only killing men, as opposed to women and children, is presented as less evil than El Diablo's accidental manslaughter of his wife and kids only add to the stupidity of how Suicide Squad is structured.  Almost nothing but the release of Ayer's original cut would vindicate this disaster.  

Content:

 1.  Violence:  

 2.  Profanity:  "Shit," "bitch," and "bastard" are examples of the profanity used.