Suicide Squad is... fine. Totally fine. It’s a patched-together mess, and it’s more boring than any movie starring a crocodile man and someone named “Captain Boomerang” should be, but it’s got its charms.
Take the cast, for starters: As glowering hardass Amanda Waller, Viola Davis brings together Suicide Squad’s overstuffed ensemble. Following Batman v Superman and Man of Steel’s city-smashing catastrophes, Waller creates a team to combat extraordinary threats: A group of supervilliains under the command of soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). Naturally, an extraordinary threat quickly emerges, so: Here’s cranky assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), leather-skinned Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje), Aussie thug Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), human torch El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), and evil witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne). But the squad’s star is Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the former psychiatrist of the Joker (Jared Leto). Harley’s now insane, spending half her time chirping flirty quips and the other half bludgeoning anyone within range of her baseball bat. Funny, freakish, and surprisingly sympathetic, she’s by far the best character to emerge from DC’s attempts at blockbustering, and Robbie, as always, is fantastic.
(Less fantastic is Leto’s Joker, who flounces onto the screen entirely too often, his forehead tattooed with “Damaged” and his chest tattooed with “JOKER,” just in case you forget that he’s damaged or that he’s the Joker. Part Juggalo and part theater kid, this Joker mostly serves as a reminder: Jared Leto is a bad actor who should not be allowed to act.)