PRE MOVIE THOUGHTS: Right from the first trailer, I wasn’t sure about Suicide Squad. It wasn’t really showing any real plot and just seemed to be keen on showing off the vast amount of characters they’d managed to cram into the movie, with nothing really interesting going on at all. Margot Robbie looked amazing, Jared Leto looked ridiculous, everyone else just looked a bit… well, a bit meh…

DC’s track record for movies has been slipping since The Dark Knight trilogy concluded. With Captain America Civil War setting the bar very high earlier this year, an ensemble movie like this had to be pretty amazing to try and come close to that. Further trailers and TV spots for Suicide Squad were showing improvement, but still weren’t hitting the right notes. As I was preparing to go on holiday, Suicide Squad hit the cinema so I missed out on seeing it. Reviews came in while I was away and seemed to be very mixed, but then they were for Batman V Superman too and I enjoyed that, so who knows…

POST MOVIE REVIEW: The setup of the characters and the ‘plot’ of the movie is just a complete nonsensical mess. Despite showing us early on that Batman and The Flash are around (and presumably Wonder Woman considering this movie appears to be set after the events Batman V Superman?), it’s decided that a bunch of unstable criminals are somehow our best bet for fighting future threats! And the whole thing with The Enchantress and the whirling bits of debris floating above her for most of the film while she builds some kind of weapon just didn’t do it for me at all.

The characters that looked dull in the trailer, still are in the movie. Killer Croc just seems to grunt occasionally and then swims under water a bit in the final battle. Other characters just seemed boring and pointless.

The best thing in this movie is Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. She is perfect in this role and I really hope we get to see more of her in future movies (just not another Suicide Squad movie!).

The next best thing, and I’ve got to admit my first impression was completely wrong on this one, is Jared Leto as The Joker. My preference for The Joker lies somewhere between Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson and the version in the animated Batman series. Heath Ledger was great, but I didn’t rate him as much as the other versions. Jared Leto brings something different yet familiar to the role and I’d really love to see more of him too, preferably squaring up against Ben Afflecks Batman. Batman does appear a couple of times in this movie, and it’s a welcome break to see him. I want to see more of him now in his traditional Batman outfit (and not the armoured version!), but this wasn’t his movie so it’s fair enough that he’s not in it so much.

There were some great moments in Suicide Squad, but overall I found it a real disappointment. I think the Wonder Woman movie looks to be very promising, and Justice League has good potential too. If DC fail to get those right though then maybe they should just stick to making great TV shows and leave the movies to Marvel.

Lee Boardman

Web developer by day, with a movie and TV watchlist that continues to grow as much as my spare time reduces! My favourite movie is Inception and, despite what everyone says, I do not have a man-crush on Tom Cruise.