I've seen it today.
It's not a bad film, but quite uninspired. The scenario is a bit of a mess. Some people are not so much characters as plot devices.
Davis, Robbie and Hernandez have the best parts, they are solid. As much as I like Will Smith, he stands out like a sore thumb. He plays Will Smith, the cool, charismatic guy only with a very thin veneer of "being bad" He does a great job and steals the movie, but he's completely miscast. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje feels wasted, he couldn't be more of a Chekov Gun if they tried, except they don't do anything with him.
And then there is the Joker, he's crazy, he's violent, he's homicidal and he looks like a drug lord with a shtick, he's not the focus of the film, but all he does is, like just about everyone does these days when asked to play a villain is be "unhinged" And the relationship feels wrong, in other media Harley Quinn is often the punching bag in an abusive relationship, here she's more Joker than the Joker ...
The whole story is paint-by-numbers, it has action scenes, jokes, big things being blown up and a few twists that never seem to pay off, it's the kind of movie that is almost custom made for "hell yeah" moments, except that for some reason, the audience has been naughty and we're not getting them ...
I was mostly entertained, I was bored a few times, including right in the middle of a major action scene. As much as it glosses over the cool moments it completely grinds to a halt and focus on some part of the action for far too long.
Right now the whole WB/DC universe feels, for lack of a better word, "Autistic" as in unable to connect with the source matter, unable to transcribe it to film, unable to translate it to something "good". Please don't consider this is a denigration of autism, but Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad have these weird moments where you realize they are trying very hard to please us as an audience and they consistently get it wrong as if there is a fundamental disconnect they cannot mentally hurdle.
Man of Steel got flak for its destruction-porn, the whole story was written in such a way that Superman came off as a complete idiot. They took up this criticism in an almost sarcastic way in BvS and sort of hammered it in that the areas they were fighting were uninhabited in a "are you ****ing happy now ?" Whereas in Suicide Squad a whole city is once again in jeopardy, we see a few people being killed, but the next scene shows a whole city being evacuated in an orderly fashion and by the time the team goes into action, the city is completely empty in a "hold on, that doesn't feel right either." This is the kind of nuance they seem to go completely over their heads. There is a huge difference between a large chunk of the population being killed without the hero as much as giving them a sideways glance and some strange aversion the public may have for people getting killed. No, we the public accept that when superheroes fight people will get hurt or killed, we just don't like our "heroes" to not give a **** about the little people and only save those that happen to be called Lois Lane ...
This also touches on what I think is the biggest problem of the film, the actual plot. They go through two sets of exposition to tell us that Meta-Humans are a huge threat and they need Meta-Humans to fight this threat. The best they can come up with is a mix of mostly humans, a big guy who is supposed to be the muscle, and the only real meta-human on the team, a guy who can control fire. If you paid any attention, this team, if available at the time of the Smallville incident, would have been perfectly useless. Most would have been killed with a single blow while being utterly unable to even make the participants pause for a second.
Which brings us to an obvious question, in the wake of the Gotham incident, where are Batman and Wonder Woman ? I assume that Batman is far too busy jumping up on and down on the face of a pickpocket while crying about mommy and daddy, but wouldn't Wonder Woman even so much as take a peek to check on things ? Or is this some "I only do the even-numbered threats" thing ?
Oh and one last thing, there is a post-credits scene and for me it sums up everything that's wrong about DC/WB universe. If it's supposed to be the equivalent of Nick Fury and the Avengers initiative, they really haven't got a clue ...
