Suicide Squad: Not Really a Review

I've been wanting to see Suicide Squad ever since it came out, and unsuccessfully tried to talk the family into catching it on the big screen. I finally rented it on Friday (my "day off" as such things go).

Lots of fun. I'll try to avoid spoilers and this isn't rally a review, just some thoughts.

Reasonably good actors doing reasonably good acting, especially Margot Robbie. The film does visually (and promotionally in trailers, etc.) rely quite a bit on her physical assets, emphasis on the first three letters there, which might cause some to misunderestimate her acting ability. She makes the movie in a lot of ways. I've never been a huge Jared Leto fan, but I thought he did pretty well, especially in a role where he was expected to fill the shoes of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger. Will Smith is always a pleasure. And so on, and so forth.

The film is obviously the latest attempt at putting together a DC ensemble that can compete with Marvel's Avengers and X-Men. Fantastic 4 was apparently a commercial calamity (still haven't seen it).

I think it works, and hope for sequels. Of course, they openly cribbing from the Avengers template in certain ways:

The Avengers are recruited/assigned by former S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury. The Suicide Squad is recruited/assigned by another black character, Amanda Waller -- they just made Nick Fury female and her position a little more ambiguous (no formal agency for the sole purpose of the project).

Instead of having the straight arrow military guy be a superhero type (Captain America), they go with a regular human (Colonel Rick Flagg -- I wonder if he's related to Randall?) who happens to be in love with one of the "meta-humans" -- June Moone/Enchantress). But they still have the straight arrow military guy.

Instead of Hawkeye with his ever-ready bow, they have Deadshot who can't miss with a firearm.

I'm not saying that there's nothing original about the film. It certainly stands on its own. But it's pretty obvious, once again, that DC is tired of only being able to do stand-alone superhero flicks (Batman) and wants one of those big group deals. I think they got it right with Suicide Squad.