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Movie Review: 'Suicide Squad'

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Here we sit in the ECBIM (the Era of the Comic Book-Inspired Movie), when the last thing any such new project is committing is suicide. Which brings us to 'Suicide Squad,' an ensemble superhero flick based on the DC Comics antihero team of the same name in which a bunch of bad guys (and gals) get time off for "good" behavior.

But the movie, while not suicidal, is not good either.

In it, a secret government agency has recruited a gang of the world's most desperate, dangerous, despicable supervillains – currently behind bars, where they belong -- to execute dangerous black-ops missions, thus saving Gotham and the world from a powerful threat and working a narrative variation on The Dirty Dozen.

Speaking of which, the memory of that film is instructive in demonstrating how little Suicide Squad actually does with its premise. Why do the bad guys agree to this? In exchange for clemency.

Seriously, but why?

Because they have nothing to lose.

No, c'mon, why?

Just because.

Which might be the best way to approach a narrative this confusing, one that lacks gravity and levity, one that traffics in an onslaught of mayhem and sanitized violence, with a hyperkinetic editing style that makes music videos seems relatively relaxed.

But back to the story no one cares about anyway: So the feds provide them with the most powerful arsenal at their disposal, and send them off to do battle with an enigmatic entity. But they soon discover – no big surprise – that they're not really expected or supposed to emerge victorious.

What they offer their "employers" is culpability if – that is, when – they fail. Writer-director David Ayer ( Harsh Times, Street Kings, End of Watch, Sabotage, Fury) gives us a thriller that features not "good versus bad" or "good versus evil," but "bad versus evil."

An interesting choice.

But after introducing us to the characters and their back-stories in the early going, Ayer drops just about every other aspect of the narrative and instead treats it like a pure action spectacle: technically proficient, but relentless in its frenetic rhythm and seemingly disinterested in really making us root or laugh or care. That is, the characters go through the motions, but the emotions don't even come into play. The characters, then, are essentially chess pieces, and the actors are severely underemployed.

Will Smith, the first among equals in what is not really a "Will Smith movie" per se, is Deadshot. Margot Robbie, continuing to impress with her expanded range, is Harley Quinn.

And Oscar winner Jared Leto gives us a new interpretation of The Joker, played in other ways and other movies by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger. They're joined, for badness' sake, by Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flag, Jai Courtney as Boomerang, Jay Hernandez as El Diablo, Adewake Akinnvoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc, and Adam Beach as Slipknot.

And Viola Davis plays government official Amanda Waller, who recruits them and perhaps has an agenda of her own. But neither the characters nor the actors playing them nor the acts of violence have much effect on us in Ayer's operatic, overcrowded, over-the-top action-a-thon, which because of this approach gets tedious very early on.

It's as if Ayer dispensed with character delineation and interaction and instead just decided to rely on the audience familiar with the material to bring their own memories and perceptions.

That is lazy filmmaking.

And the few stabs at humor in the vein of Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy fall woefully short.

So we'll imprison 2 stars out of 4 for Suicide Squad, a one-dimensional Villains-R-Us thriller that asks faithful fans of the source material to do most of the heavy lifting.

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