Suicide Squad- Film Review
The characterization of actors and actresses in Suicide Squad feels as though the cast were hand picked individually from a panoptican-like mental asylum. Hysteria reigns as the movie’s plot revolves around ex-inmate meta human villains recruited to terminate an even more sinister force.
The movie starts with a very charming plot, introducing colourful characters such as Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) an inmate who has an intriguing background. Harley is a psychiatrist turned psychopath suffering from schizophrenia. She wears her hair in high pink pony tails and giggles at the prospect of destruction. With self-centered dialogue and quirky comebacks, she makes for a hilarious character.
Amanda Waller played by Emmy award-winning actress Viola Davis, is the senior government official who hires the eccentric Suicide Squad. The idea behind this move is that, with the advent of meta humans (mutants with extraordinary powers) you need a team of meta humans of your own to combat this new threat. This leads senior agent Waller to open the gates to wonderland or rather madness as the Suicide Squad is released from prison and recruited.
The troops include Deadshot (Will Smith), a top firearm assassin with limited interpersonal skills (“I’m not a hugger”); Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum who became the brain-damaged right-hand girl of the lunatic Joker whose hair looks like freshly mowed grass and a boomerang thrower called Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney); a guy with reptilian skin called Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje); a flame-summoning L.A. gang banger gone pacifist nicknamed El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) and others.
The biggest disappointment for me is the Amanda Waller character, “The Help” and the “How to get away with murder” personification. She is a truly great actress but in this film she is saddled with a murderous, ruthless, grim, one-dimensional character who exhibits almost no humanity. The movie has many pitfalls in its narrative, or rather lack of it. The scenes orbit around the floral characters and comical wordplay of Deadpool-type humour. It is often not clear what this contributes to the story as a whole.
Nonetheless, Will Smith does find the opportunity to display his grand acting skills in one brief conversation between Deadshot and Waller, in which he lists the conditions on which he will agree to join her club. For the rest, he displays a level of intimidation similar to the mafia characters in the Godfather.
Suicide Squad dishes out a great concoction of suspense, fantasy-like adventure, humorous characters and lots of action combined with great cinematography and stunt work,. Its target audience is defined by both its storyline and its characters. It is only for young adults, not for children or mature viewers.
