Suicide Squad Review

The production story is the review. Ayer wrote and shot a grim film about disposable criminals; the studio panicked after the reception to the previous entry, hired the company that cut the popular trailer, and had them recut the movie to match. What survives is a picture with no rhythm of its own, in which a new song starts every ninety seconds during the first act to introduce characters whose introductions are then repeated. Margot Robbie is instantly and permanently Harley Quinn, finding a register that is funny and genuinely unwell, and Viola Davis makes Amanda Waller frightening in the flat, administrative way the character should be.

Will Smith is doing solid work in a film that will not slow down for him. Everything else fails. Jared Leto's Joker is a collection of tattoos and press stories about mailing people dead animals, cut down to almost nothing. Cara Delevingne's Enchantress spends the finale gyrating in front of a garbage tornado firing a beam into the sky. Half of the squad has no power worth filming.