Suicide Squad
1.5 Waffles!

This is how you end the summer blockbuster season with a yawn.

Viola Davis stars as Amanda Waller – a leader in America’s battle with terrorism. With all of the experts concerned with what would happen if another Superman showed up and wanted to destroy the planet, Waller has come up with a unique idea.

She wants to coerce a collection of criminals with special abilities and powers to fight for the government whether or not they choose to comply or want to salute the flag.

When an evil entity known as Enchantress decides to rebel and join forces with her brother to destroy all of humanity, it’s time for The Suicide Squad to be forced into action.

Writer/director David Ayer is trying very hard to make this a deeper, more meaningful and cerebral movie, but that didn’t work for Batman v. Superman, and it doesn’t work for Suicide Squad.

The original premise is an interesting and promising one. How do you take the worst criminals of all time and use them as weapons of good and justice? Yet, Ayer doesn’t make the complications, entanglements and conflicting motivations as interesting and harrowing as they should be.

Suicide Squad is a slow moving slog when it needs to be screaming at the pace of a Ferrari.

While the movie is full of characters, Ayer smartly focuses on a few, but what you see when he focuses might not be enough to keep you awake.

Will Smith excels as Deadshot, but his inner-conflict is one we have seen time and time again. Oh, he’s an assassin who never misses a shot, but, underneath it all, maybe he’s just a good guy who loves his daughter and lost his way. BLEECH!

Then, we get the misplaced, forgettable, pathetic love story of Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and Dr. June Moone (Cara Delevingne). He’s the military guy sent in to control and lead the Suicide Squad, and she’s the love of his life, who has become possessed by the evil Enchantress, which complicates things when his orders are to kill her.

Delevingne is a bit out of place. She does well enough as June Moone with her suffering and tortured soul, but the special effects and attempts to have her lip sync an evil voice for the Enchantress are atrocious. At one point, she is standing there making herky jerky movements that remind you of a drunk girl at a bar waiting to use the little girl’s room.

However, Margot Robbie does everything possible to save Suicide Squad as the sassy, sexy and certifiably insane Harley Quinn. She gets all of the best lines, and makes her character the most energetic and captivating on the screen. Robbie perfectly captures all facets of Quinn’s personality from sexpot to scared little girl to psychotic killer.

I thought the Summer of 2016 would forever be known as the Summer of Margot Robbie. If Suicide Squad was better, it would have been.

Suicide Squad is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language.

130 Minutes