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I'll probably give it a watch soon.

Saw it earlier tonight. Some quick thoughts...
Will Smith was partly Will Smith, but he carries the movie well, and Deadshot gets a lot of texture. A more stable, Secret Six-era Deadshot here, but the character is sympathetic and interesting.

El Diablo gets a nice arc that works well.

Katana is rad as hell, and does more in one scene talking to her husband's spirit than we get from the entire Rick Flag/Enchantress relationship.

Boomer and Croc are fun but underused.

Viola Davis is a great Waller - killer presence - but this version is definitely more sociopathic than the comic version.

Harley had the Brooklyn accent! Aside from some lame, trailer-ready lines, Margot Robbie was pretty decent. It was really more of a sketch of Harley. Weirdly, I think we get most into her character during her interactions with Deadshot. Their friendship is actually pretty compelling. We also get a great Little Shop of Horrors "Somewhere That's Green" shout-out with her (you'll know it when you see it).

Joker's...okay. He's not too far off from Heath Ledger, but there's definitely a sense of him trying too hard to be Joker. Good chemistry between Leto and Robbie, though.

Cara Delevingne is barely present in her own character. Her voice is pitch-corrected, she's speaking an ancient language, and she's drowning in CGI. Impossible to judge, really. Character-wise, there's not much given to Enchantress, although they obviously combined Enchantress and Nightshade from the comic for plot purposes here.

Joel Kinnaman's American accent is impressive (I didn't even know he was Swedish), but he's just terrible. A black hole of charisma, surrounded by people who are actually interesting. The film seems to contort itself to get away from everything with him and Delevingne - if you want to know what those reshoots were about, look no further. I guarantee the film with Tom Hardy in the role as originally cast would've focused much more on Flag, but they basically had to let Smith carry this thing. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Flag/Enchantress relationship was added post-Hardy to give them an angle to work with, and then cut down once they realized what actors they were stuck with in the two roles.

The film feels ragged. Sometimes that works, but there's so much here that just isn't built well. The main plot is Escape from New York, and culminates in the end of Ghostbusters. The film's at its best in the beginning when they're putting the team together and giving us each member in his or her element, and later when the characters are bouncing off each other. I could watch a movie of them hanging out in the bar.

Stylistically, Ayer does some interesting, weird stuff during the team-building act, but reverts to his usual realism once the mission starts. Which is weird, considering what the mission ends up being. There's an interesting Aliens-like subway wreckage set later, but it's brief. The action sequences are pretty standard, and the camera cuts are too quick to really build good fights. We do get a great Deadshot vs. an army moment halfway through, and Katana does some great stuff, but I don't think Ayer really knows how to build an extended, complex fight sequence. Hard-Boiled this ain't. Luckily he seems aware of his limitations here, because the end showdown functions heavily on character stuff, and that's what he's best at.

secondwhiteline wrote:Saw it earlier tonight. Some quick thoughts...
The film feels ragged. Sometimes that works, but there's so much here that just isn't built well. The main plot is Escape from New York, and culminates in the end of Ghostbusters. The film's at its best in the beginning when they're putting the team together and giving us each member in his or her element, and later when the characters are bouncing off each other. I could watch a movie of them hanging out in the bar.

Yeah, I think that's all pretty apt and why I say I really liked the characters while the movie itself was sort third-rate video game storyline wise. Just an innocuous summertime movie.

I wish the villains were better. I mean, you could've had something like Kobra corrupting Enchantress and basically had the same plot but with real enemy soldiers instead of whatever those were supposed to be. But instead we got pretty generic stuff. I know most action movies are basically video game plots but this one was just less disguised with a battle-bigger battle-boss-finale progression. Not the worst of crimes, just wish it wasn't quite so predictably linear. Be interesting to see if it drops a lot in the second week. I don't really see this as something like GotG that'll have decent staying power in theatres.

Honestly, I would've kept the Enchantress stuff for the sequel and just had the villain be Kobra, something simple and earthbound like that. Aside from the fact that there was like no design or imagination given to whatever the hell the tar zombies or whatever were, Enchantress going nuts invalidates the Squad concept in-story (Contingency against an evil Superman? Waller created one!), which brings up a lot of questions about how to keep the Squad going for the inevitable sequel. Plus, we didn't get to know anything about June, so Enchantress taking over doesn't make us fear for her not being able to come out of that state. If we had spent a movie with her being Enchantress in a green gothy/witchy costume closer to the comic stuff, and then suddenly it's Suicide Squad II: Double Dragon II: Operation Wolf or whatever and NOW she looks like a crazy feral tribal goddess, it's actually a shock.

I don't think it's gonna be a huge drop in week 2, because audience response has been much more positive than critics, and people seem to be connecting to the characters. It won't have GotG's staying power, because that was a much better film, but it looks like the audience is digging on the promise of this one. A tighter sequel with more character work would cement this as a franchise.

Also, you run into an issue of scale - after the supernatural invasion here, where do you go with Squad 2? It's like how the Marvel films have the burden of growth, so much so that even the solo movies are basically Avengers flicks now. But in this case, they started with Gigantic.

DC/WB needs to quit making movies while they're still behind...that should've been a "Mad Love" movie instead of what we got

First of All, I was never, ever was a Suicide Squad Fan and having said that ... I'm not really interested in this movie at all because I find this group too bizarre and there were so many incarnations that I totally got lost in the process. Sorry, Everyone ... I find this movie not my cup of tea.

I completely agree Doc...I saw this movie and while it was entertaining; I went into it 2 pints deep (thank God) and with the expectations of Green Lantern...but this movie is just as awful as every DC/WB movie they've made so far; my hope for these movies have almost dwindled completely

Eh, after suffering through years of the New52 I think this is the best you can hope for. Would I have preferred to see an Ostrander Suicide Squad with Nightshade and/or Vixen? Sure, but I doubt the movie gets as much hype or sells as many tickets without Harley and Joker so they're kind of a necessary evil (literally) to greenlight the movie IMO. Yeah, the actual plot was crap, but I liked the characters enough to give the movie a passing grade. It wasn't great, but after MoS it was at least watchable.