DEAD ON ARRIVAL
Confused ‘Suicide Squad’ earns distinction as one of the lamest superhero flicks ever
‘S UICIDE Squad” isn’t a movie — it’s a two-hour trailer, a demolition derby of barely explained action and droll quips. If it has a genius for anything, it’s disorganization: What promised to be a Super Bowl of villainy turned out more like toddler playtime.
The question isn’t whether “Suicide Squad” is as good as “The Avengers,” but whether it’s as bad as “Green Lantern.”
The world’s worst bad guys team up, a la “The Dirty Dozen,” for a mission so dangerous that it’s ideal for the ruthless yet expendable: Government agent Waller (Viola Davis) figures the supervillains — with remote-controlled explosives planted in their necks to prevent them from disobeying orders — are the ideal weapon.
So we spend 20 minutes learning about: Deadshot (Will Smith), the shooter who never misses; Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the psychotic girlfriend of the Joker (Jared Leto); Diablo (Jay Hernandez), who can hurl fireballs; plus a crocodile man (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) with a working-class British accent; and a guy (Jai Courtney) who throws a boomerang.
These last three would be among the lamest villains you’ve ever met even if they didn’t have names like Killer Croc and Captain Boomerang, which they do. They don’t belong in a superhero-villain movie so much as in a spoof like “The Tick.”
Their boss, soldier Rick Flag, is played so blandly by Joel Kinnaman it seems the former RoboCop forgot that this time we can see his face.
Writer-director David AAyer whooshes the villains (really, misunderstood heroes) into one mumbo-jumbo battle spectacle after another with Flag’s girlfriend (Cara Delevingne), a slutty sorceress whose sheer dress with black undies suggests Evil Cher. Her brother, a sort of electro-Hulk, was born by slamming together random citizens and lighting them up with 100,000 volts via the third rail.
The pair send an army of what look like snowmen made out of charcoal ash to attack Team Suicide, but their troops are weak — they go poof if they so much as get a smack from the baseball bat wielded by Harley, who promises to do something bonkers but never does.
Then things get silly. Like, worst“Mummy”-sequel-ever silly.
The special effects are extravagantly numbing as Delavingne’s Enchantress blasts away at the world. Then Ayer, two-thirds of the way through the movie, suddenly remembers it’s time to make us care about his protagonists. He gets only as far as a couple of lines about Deadshot having a daughter.
Which scene is most ridiculous? Maybe the one in which Diablo talks about his woes while an animated flame that looks like a Bond girl in an opening-credits sequence go-go dances on his palm. Or when Waller wants Harley shot but forgets to assign the task to someone she can actually trust.
But I’d have to go with the sequence when the King Kong-size electricity monster says something in his ancient mummy-ish tongue that sounds like, “Una-seppa-noh.” A screen graphic explains he’s saying, “It’s on, bitch.” These supervillains really are special: Apparently they can read subtitles.