Review Detail

Though it may sound like damning with faint praise to call this edit of Suicide Squad "astonishly coherent," anyone who has seen the original cut will know that Wakeupkeo has worked a bonafide miracle by forcing this movie into somehow ACTUALLY MAKING SENSE. The editing on the original film is some of the worst I've ever seen, introducing over a dozen characters while ping-ponging around in time and space, and asking the audience to buy into all the magic, super-science and political paranoia of a half-baked grim-and-gritty superhero cinematic universe. The beloved Suicide Squad comic worked and was subversive because it was built on the foundation of nearly 50 years of superhero tropes and back story and continuity. The film adaptation was working from a couple of bleak Superman movies that established a tiny corner of what is apparently a world filled-to-overflowing with superpowered beings, most of whom are psychotic (and not just the bad guys).

Original sins of the concept aside, Keo has worked a great deal of magic with the flow of the movie, and while certain aspects of the Flagg/Enchantress storyline are unavoidably tied to jerky time-jumps, so much of the movie has been streamlined that it is possible to discover anew the virtues of the film, from inventive villain effects, to clever sequences, to some surprisingly deft and fun characterization. Thanks to some very canny subtitle-tweaking, the film even manages to fulfill an important plot function within the larger DCEU.

My only real complaint about the edit itself (and one I'm surprised to be making) is the lack of Jared Leto's Joker. While I'm glad that his annoying and derivative characterization of "Mr. J" has been shortened and largely relegated to Harley's mercifully brief flashbacks, his quest to track down Harley seems interspersed with the main narrative in a slightly haphazard way and felt like it needed a bit more massaging to pay off properly when Joker tracks her down. As it stands, I don't recall it being completely clear what Joker's goal even is until Harley starts getting texts from him.

In all though, one of the worst superhero films of the century has been rescued to a form that is remarkably enjoyable, occasionally moving and certainly sits well alongside one's DCEU fanedits of choice, not to mention the excellent James Gunn follow-up.