Suicide Squad (100% Certified Spoiler-Free)

T-Mobile hooked us up, yet again, with free tickets to a movie (woo!) and while I’d been looking forward to this movie all year, I was a bit disappointed to see that critics weren’t so enthused about it. Its Rotten Tomatoes score was a very rotten 26% (Though I’m really starting to lose faith in the whole system. Sausage Party is opening at 100% apparently? A movie whose trailer literally looks like a bad high school locker room movie idea? What the hell is going on?)

Anyway, I went into it a lot more apprehensively than I would have, several months prior. I wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about it, after all, Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn’t really stellar for me either (and watching that a second time didn’t do it any favors either… felt even worse the second go-round). So this was going to make or break the DC film-verse for me.

My overall opinion? Definitely not rotten. What the hell, Rotten Tomatoes? Critics? Did you watch this movie with your eyes closed? Did you come in expecting a cinematic thriller with tons of grit and seriousness? It’s the SUICIDE SQUAD. It’s a team of rag-tag villains who literally do not give a f*ck about each other at the beginning of this movie. It’s a story about a bunch of self-serving ego-maniacs (and in the case of Harley Quinn, completely mentally unstable). And I guess that description about the plot kind of accurately describes the movie in a totally meta way.

So you have Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Diablo, Boomerang, Killer Croc, and Enchantress, plus Rick Flag and Katana leading this group of reckless and powerful anti-heroes. (Joker is thrown in there somewhere, you’ll find out.) I won’t reveal too much about plot, but some crazy, supernatural threat starts seriously stirring sh*t up (say that three times fast) and Amanda Waller puts this team together, against their will, to essentially send them to their deaths in an attempt to suppress said impossible-to-stop threat. They are exploited for their abilities/tenacity, and otherwise considered expendable by some higher-ups, given their unfortunate choices in life. (Wow, sounds like how our government treats our military… *sips tea* *moves on* ANYWAY…) Overall, I have to say the two stars of this movie were definitely Will Smith as Deadshot and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. Viola Davis as Amanda Waller gets an honorable mention, because her character is very consistent with her conflicting personality in many of the comics.

There are some excellent head-nods to the original comics/cartoons, and, as a pretty big Harley Quinn fan, I love the way they did her origin story. As a whole, most of the characters got solid origin-story montages, and in a way that definitely served fans. This was, no doubt, a fan’s movie, and not a movie for critics (as evidenced by their harsh and unforgiving ratings).

I’m not saying this movie is perfect. There are definitely times when the movie could have stepped up a bit with plot and suspense and made it a bit more serious or intense. I wasn’t really on the edge of my seat THAT much. This is not an intense movie. This is a highly predictable movie. Good or bad as that may be.

That said.. I still felt that this movie didn’t deserve to get reamed by the critics as much as it should have. It’s a movie about the least-enthusiastic, worst possible candidates for superheroes you can possibly pick, and each character had their one-liners/charming traits down pat. The plot moved logically, and every loose end felt revisited and settled. I felt closure. It was well-cast, well-put-together, and… most importantly, far better than Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

My overall verdict? B+

Featured Image from Screenrant.com