Suicide Squad (2016)

 

In a world plagued by super-powered villains, it seems reckless to rely just rely on there always being a superhero on hand to stop them.  Maybe the heroes will be busy, or just not feel like it, or maybe they'll become villains.  Or maybe they'll get killed, like Superman just did.  (Spoiler: he gets better in a later movie)

That's the kind of scenario that keeps people awake at night, but Amanda Waller has a plan to help us all sleep safely: take some of those very same super-villains and use them to stop their fellow bad guys.  Her chosen agents will get time off their sentences in return, and they're completely expendable to her, since they are bad guys, after all.  Of course, these are not the most trustworthy folk, so as an insurance policy, she's also going to stick explosive devices in their skulls.  If they lose their heads and get out of line, they'll ... well, lose their heads.  Cant fail, right?

Well of course it can.  In a world with super-powers there are any number of ways this little plan can go sideways.  So it is perhaps not entirely a surprise that the very first mission Waller's "Suicide Squad" is going to have to take on is stopping the last supervillain she tried to blackmail into doing her bidding.

Which would be fine, if Waller seems to have learned anything at all from that experience - there's no evidence she has - or if the resulting mission was in any way interesting or exciting or engaging.  Alas, Suicide Squad is a movie without any tension about its outcome.  It's painfully obvious from the start which characters are there to make the team's name actually true, and which are going to survive and maybe even realise that 'doing good' is not a wholly unrewarding experience.

Now, that kind of obviousness to the ending could possibly be forgiven if the ride to get there is fun, and we often go into movies with just that expectation: no-one really believes Batman will buy it in a Batman movie, after all.  Alas, this film fails to make the journey particularly interesting.  The vast majority of it is spent fighting faceless minion monsters that the team pretty much just shoots a lot, and at the end of the day, the script can't even be bothered to establish what the villain is trying to do.  She's just a magic bad guy doing bad guy magic for magical bad guy magical reasons.

Frankly, given the somnambulistic scripting, this is more Sleepwalking Squad than Suicide Squad.  Very mediocre.