Review: Suicide Squad: all eye candy, no humor

In most surveys that ask men and women the most desirable trait they want from a partner, the usual answers run the gamut from a beautiful or handsome face, good health (a six-pack would be nice), honesty, faithfulness, and intelligence.

Advertisement

However, the single most frequent answer is the ability to make a person laugh. It’s nice to have a handsome or gorgeous partner to look at, but when that eye-candy person can’t make everyday conversation stimulating enough or worse, has absolutely no sense of humor, then that eye candy will get old. Fast.

And that’s probably the reason why there seems to be a DC movie bashing party after every new DC film. You can probably blame Marvel for that. Tony Stark one-liners are a staple of Marvel movies. Even dark or serious characters such as Wolverine, Vision, Captain America, Falcon, and the Winter Soldier have had their comic moments. Which is why people can’t get enough of Marvel. It makes them laugh.  

DC, on the other hand, seems to have placed all its cards on dark and angst-ridden themes. And for most people who want their superheroes to have that super ability to make them laugh, that can be a deal-breaker.

DC could have broken the mold from countless dark or campy Batman and Superman films with Suicide Squad. Here’s a ragtag bunch of A-list offenders and outright murderous criminals forced to work together to defeat a supervillain. It’s not exactly new territory in the superhero cinematic universe. A bunch of criminally inclined mutants banded together in X-Men Origins: Wolverine—to good effect. That was a relatively dark Marvel movie with comparatively less humor. But it was still fun to watch. More recently another badass F-word-spouting superhero made R-18 audiences laugh and have a grand time. His name was Deadpool.

All of which raises the bar for DC’s much-anticipated Suicide Squad—especially with dysfunctional characters like the Joker and Harley Quinn, among others. The movie’s storyline is quite faithful to the comics, which should satisfy most comic book loyalists. But as a popcorn movie, it may leave quite a lot to be desired. The characters and costumes are all eye-candy. And I’m not just talking about Margot Robbie in short shorts.

The cinematography, however, is too grainy and gritty and the backgrounds too dark and blurry; making the viewer feel that 99 percent of the film was shot in green screen. Having most of the settings raining and in nighttime doesn’t help. Audiences now want to watch every drop of sweat and blood from the characters and every crumple of metal in stunning high definition (a giant Ant-Man falling on a jumbo jet in Captain America: Civil War comes to mind; ditto the epic slugfest between Ironman, Captain America and Winter Soldier).    

Instead we have to watch what could have been a stupendous superhero brawl through a dark and rainy night. There’s really not much to see. (Imagine if that spectacular Ford Escort-versus-army tank bridge car chase scene in Fast & Furious 6 was shot on a dark and rainy night. You won’t appreciate it half as much.) Shooting too many dark scenes simply doesn’t do justice to IMAX and 3D.

But worst of all, the jokes and witticisms in Suicide Squad are mostly either lame or simply non-existent. I was watching the people coming out of SM Megamall’s IMAX Theater for their reaction. I was looking for that girl who walked into a party and ended up with a not-so-good-looking stranger who just happened to make her laugh. I couldn’t find her.