Harley Quinn sprinkles glitter in overstuffed Squad

 SUICIDE SQUAD (2016)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

No matter what movie she is in or how it is geared to audiences - Margot Robbie stands out. Okay, she is not the only actor to stand out in the wicked "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and she shared equally stirring time with Alisson Janney in the garishly entertaining "I, Tonya." Robbie reigns with glee and sheer manic power in the disappointingly thin "Suicide Squad" only because her performance, though seemingly trimmed as is everyone else's role, has gargantuan-sized fire and passion written all over it. "What? I got a hickey or something?," she asks during several shoot-them-up scenarios. That is the overall problem with "Suicide Squad" - too many shootouts, too much CGI spectacle and too little character investment. Yet Robbie's Harley Quinn - we love yah, you sick demented girl!

The set-up has promise yet even that is so frantically cut and short-circuited that it never breathes through its relatively thin story. Robbie is Harley Quinn, a complete madhouse of a woman who licks the bars of her cell and flings herself violently against it - she is Joker's ashen-faced girlfriend. Will Smith is Deadshot, a professional assassin who is aware that his young daughter knows what he does for a living (he is later caught by Batman, played in a quick-as-a-flash cameo by Ben Affleck). There's also Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang who occasionally throws one; Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a reptilian metahuman who emits more grunts than words; the literally fiery metahuman known as Chato Santana / El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) who has certain regrets regarding his dead family; Karen Fukuhara as Tatsu Yamashiro/Katana who is deadly with a sword that carries her husband's soul (she is not a criminal), and there is an archaeologist (Cara Delevingne) who becomes some sort of a super witch (The witch can go a long way towards tedium). Essentially we have bad guys summoned by Viola Davis as an amoral government official who is good at making threats and is quite efficient at shooting and killing people at random. The team is known as Task Force X and they have to destroy the witch - failure in this mission can result in death for the team of bad guys.  

"Suicide Squad" is too anxiety-ridden from the start with too many fast millisecond cuts, too many quick introductions with too many characters, and it is too eager to keep its mojo of relentless shootouts going. When the film settles down from all the noise during a bar scene, we learn a bit about our villains such as El Diablo's past as a former L.A. gang member. I also enjoyed some of the backstory involving Deadshot and his devotion to his daughter yet much of this is truncated. Only Robbie's Harley Quinn is somewhat three-dimensional by comparison - she has a memorably giddy wickedness that blows away all the competition including the underwhelming Jared Leto's ultra-punk tattooed version of the Joker. Director David Ayer (who also wrote this) and editor John Gilroy keep cutting away too often from the character interaction. The action scenes are an eyeful towards the climax yet the rest of the action was mediocre at best - nothing here was nearly as astounding as Nolan's Batman trilogy (or for that matter, "Batman v. Superman"). "Suicide Squad" resembles a movie that somebody fast-forwarded through, leaving its motley crew of supervillains in the dust.