Suicide Squad

Bottom line: I actually enjoyed it.

Maybe it’s because, as Mike accuses me of, my standards are too low. Maybe it’s because early reviews of these movies are lowering my expectations to the point that any redeeming qualities make the movie seem good. Then again, I didn’t have high expectations in the first place, but I digress.

The plot is pretty much what you’d expect. The main antagonist has a little–but just a little–more motivation than Doomsday did in BvS, or even than Apocalypse did in the latest X-Men movie. Note that I have to word that oddly: this movie is all about “bad guys”, from the threat that motivates the plot, through the team that’s assembled to confront her, to–perhaps most ominously–the person who creates the plan in the first place. Yes, Amanda Waller is in this movie, and she’s way more of a bad guy than in many of her incarnations in the DC universe, where she’s frequently just someone barely going over the line to bad guy.

Still, this movie is more about the journey than the end goal, and it takes plenty of time to introduce the main characters, especially the obvious headliners of Harley Quinn and Deadshot. It spends more time than most recent superhero movies on some of the characters’ backstories as well as their motivations and personalities.

I’d like to spend a quick moment to wish out loud that it didn’t focus so much on the T&A aspects of Harley, which I find unnecessary. But hot pants and wet T-shirt are the order of the day…whatever.

I found Jared Leto as the Joker to be completely one-note and not very interesting at all. Then again, he isn’t really the star here, so maybe that’s OK.

Overall, I’d give this one a B. It’s better than most action movies I’ve seen this summer, including Batman Vs. Superman and X-Men: Apocalypse. I don’t think it’s as good as Captain America: Civil War.


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