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Watching Suicide Squad (now streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now) is a chore. The film is loud, dark, schizophrenic, and tone-deaf. There are some good actors attempting to do good work in this maelstrom of nonsense, but ultimately, the film is a mess.
However, Suicide Squad has one fascinating, brilliant, and intriguing thing going for it that no one seems to be talking about. No, I’m not talking about Margot Robbie‘s plucky turn as Harley Quinn. Everyone has been talking about that for over a year now. She’s good. Will Smith also isn’t bad. I want to talk about something slighter. It’s the glimmer of a good thing, twinkling through the film’s steaming pile of muck, but it’s there. For a few brief moments, Suicide Squad flirts with exploring the darker side of love. It’s a bold move from a superhero film. The genre is typically about the morals of responsibility, the importance of teamwork, or the power of friendship. However, Suicide Squad actually works best when it ruminates on the destructive power of love. Unfortunately, these poetic flourishes are squashed down by the film’s truly abysmal plot.
So the plot is this: Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) hatches a plan to force the worst supervillains they have locked up to join forces to take down Enchantress, who is inhabiting the body of a nice archeologist named June (Cara Delevingne). But in the meantime, we get pushed through what feels like a million and one backstory montages.The cardinal storytelling sin of most superhero flicks is that they assume you’ve seen all the other films leading up to this specific chapter; Suicide Squad assumes we’ve seen films that have never been made. In fact, the exposition in this film is so relentless and so out of order, I have to wonder if the original script was sent through a shredder, and this is the order in which a really cute and facile monkey pasted the pages it back together. The plot literally makes no sense. So it’s all the more frustrating when you realize there are these little grace notes of depth sprinkled throughout the feature. Ultimately, the major players in Suicide Squad are compelled by the dueling forces of loss and love.
Don’t believe me? Will Smith’s Deadshot’s only weakness is his sweet young daughter. Harley Quinn is a woman who literally lets her love for the Joker drive her insane. El Diablo is haunted by accidentally killing his beloved wife. The scant amount of information we get about Kitana is that she was avenging her husband’s death before she joined the team. You also have Rick Flagg and the lengths he’ll go to save his girlfriend, June. Yes, Captain Boomerang and Killer Croc are also, uh, there. But basically, you have a group of characters who are undone by the people they love. In fact, they are willing to destroy themselves (or their core values) for these loves. That is interesting! Sure, Amanda Waller has fitted every member of the team with an explosive charge that will kill them if they rebel, but what’s actually compelling all these characters forward along on their bizarre quest is love.
And so, the most frustrating part of Suicide Squad isn’t that it’s sloppy or that the Joker sucked. It’s that there was a chance that this film could have dug into the pathos of love and loss. It could have been a kickass superhero film that wasn’t about accepting responsibilities or saving the world; it would have been about the awful, heroic, brutal, self-sabotaging, debased things we do for the people we love. Heck, the “suicide” in Suicide Squad could have been a metaphor for how we kill ourselves out of love.
But no. Instead we got Jared Leto‘s juggalo Joker.
