While I kind of enjoyed this film in theaters, I knew it was a giant missed opportunity. I bought the Blu Ray extended edition last night and watched it again.
While the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition made what I thought was a strong film a great film, this offered very little improvement.
Suicide Squad is just such an epic missed opportunity that it makes me mad to watch it. The characters are great. Their interactions are fun. The actors are all game. They're just stuck in a piss-poor, awkward and weird story.
The main issue falls on The Enchantress. She's just weird, cheesy and way too silly to be taken seriously as a threat. Her "machine" is completely generic. The time table that it takes to create the machine is horribly arbitrary and her powers are never clearly defined.
Delete her (and her terrible, terrible brother) from the movie and give the Squad a threat worthy of the team's chemistry and the actors playing them.
David Ayer shot for the moon with the threat level of this film, thinking he had to go apocalyptic. Not every super hero film has to be about saving the world! This would have been a much better film with a small-scale but dangerous threat.
Further, lose the "metahuman defense" angle. It makes no sense with the characters you are using:
Deadshot - not a meta
Harley - not a meta
Harkness - not a meta
Katana - not a meta
Splitknot- not a meta
Flag - not a meta
You have TWO metahumans on this "metahuman" team: Killer Croc and Diablo.
I know it's been suggested, but it's really a no brainer ... Joker should have been the main villain of this movie. Weaving him in and out of the story the way they did as a B-player was an awful waste of a great character and an amazing actor. Outside of a deleted scene that's added to the Extended Edition, this Joker has no world view. We don't know why he's doing anything he does. All we know is that he's a bad dude and a ruthless gang leader. If we erased the 70-plus years of Joker history and were only introduced to him with this film and no previous baggage, there's nothing to fill in the gaps to understand who the Joker is. Conversely, The Dark Knight gave us a full grasp of who this guy was.
I'm a HUGE Man of Steel fan and very much enjoyed Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice even though it wasn't the way I would have brought those two characters together ... Suicide Squad disappointed the hell out of me.
-R
Agree with everything you said, except I think it actually wasn't a bad idea to have Joker as a side character, they just botched it. I think give us just enough of him to get people excited about the new incarnation, and wanting to see him in a Batman film, like maybe they needed Harley to return to Joker undercover because he has some underworld connection that they need to get information, like setting up a meet with some terrorist cell, and Harley has to wear a wire, and they have surveillance and Joker is suspicious of her and asking her how she got out of prison, something along those lines, similar to what you'd see in an FBI or CIA type movie. Give the audience just enough of Joker that they can't wait to see more. Like, can you imagine if Ledger's Joker showed up for a couple big scenes in a movie prior to Dark Knight, people would be intrigued and want more.
Agreed that the movie was a big missed opportunity, it even kinda has me less enthused about other upcoming DCEU pics, because it gives me the impression the studio doesn't care much about getting it right. Which is a shame, they should be going all out trying to offer quality films, to combat the Marvel bias, and cement people's trust in their brand, to get bigger box office results in future films.
Been thinking about it, Suicide Squad should have been rated R, deliver on the bad guys premise, stylized with violence and gore and dark humor, and fun. I'm not the biggest Quentin Tarantino fan, but I do enjoy most of his films, and I think SS would work perfectly with the Tarantino style of movies. I actually think it could've been great if Tarantino were willing to write and direct it, to bring in his fan base, and I think the characters and story is tailor made to his sensibilities, I imagine he could do really good things with crazy, over the top characters like Harley and Joker, like DiCaprio's Calvin Candie for one example. Suicide Squad should've had that Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Django, Inglorious Bastards, Pulp Fiction, Hateful Eight vibe, go all out with the multiple crazy characters, vulgarity, violence, and dark humor. Could've even been a bigger R rated hit than Deadpool.
I mean, I think I read on here David Ayer had been lobbying to do a SS movie for awhile. Idk if that's true or not, but if so, you'd think he had it planned it out as a better film, to begin with, regardless of if he was given only 6 months to write the script.