Suicide Squad (2016) Review: Great Characters, Ruined Film

🦸 This review is part of the The Old DCEU – Every Film Reviewed – watch every DCEU film from Man of Steel to the finale (2013–2023).

Suicide Squad is what happens when a studio gets scared halfway through production and tries to fix their anxiety by dismantling the thing they made. David Ayer’s original film — whatever it was — is not the film that arrived in cinemas in August 2016. What hit the screen is a compromised hybrid of two competing tonal intentions: the darker, grittier Ayer version, and the lighter, quippier re-edit produced by a trailer house in response to Batman v Superman’s mixed reception. Both versions bleed through, creating something that can’t commit to either identity and suffers constantly for it.

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None of which is the cast’s fault. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is one of the great superhero movie performances of the past decade. She arrived fully formed — the manic energy, the vulnerability underneath, the Brooklyn accent, the combination of genuine menace and pratfall comedy — and created a character that audiences responded to so powerfully that she got her own franchise. She’s working from a thin script with inconsistent motivation and still manages to make Harley feel like a real person. It’s a remarkable achievement against the film’s limitations.

Will Smith’s Floyd Lawton / Deadshot is the film’s moral center. Where Harley is chaos, Floyd is discipline — a contract killer who genuinely loves his daughter and exists in the film as the closest thing to a traditional action hero the squad has. Smith is doing what he does best: making a fundamentally unlikeable premise (a hitman-for-hire) emotionally engaging through sheer force of charisma and the specific pain he puts behind Deadshot’s eyes when his daughter is mentioned. The scene where he tries to explain his profession to her is quietly excellent and completely at odds with the rest of the film’s tonal register.

Narrative Architecture: The Squad That Almost Was

The core premise of Suicide Squad is genuinely clever: Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), a government intelligence officer who makes the CIA look like a book club, assembles a team of imprisoned supervillains to execute dangerous black-ops missions in exchange for sentence reductions. The joke is the threat: she has bombs implanted in their necks. Comply or die. It’s a premise that promises moral ambiguity, character complexity, and a fundamentally different kind of superhero movie.

The film squanders it on a villain who is both the weakest element of the script and the least threatening antagonist in the DCEU canon. The Enchantress — June Moone’s archeological find of an ancient witch who progressively overtakes her host — spends most of the third act gyrating in a generic apocalypse machine while her brother assembles an army of faceless monsters. She has no relationship with the squad, no meaningful connection to any of the main characters, and no defined goal beyond “destroy humanity” in the vaguest possible terms. The Suicide Squad exists as concept; this villain does not test the concept at all.

Jared Leto’s Joker is the film’s most discussed element and its least necessary one. He appears in flashback, he appears to rescue Harley, and then he disappears. Leto committed deeply to an interpretation of the character — tattooed, silver-toothed, more gangster than psychopath — that is genuinely interesting in theory and frustratingly underdeveloped in practice. Rumours have persisted for years that his scenes were substantially cut in the theatrical edit. Whatever the truth, what remains is a performance preview rather than a performance.

Style as Substance: The Ayer Aesthetic

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What the film does well is the introductory sequence. The character cards — bold graphics, freeze frames, and a soundtrack that cuts from “House of the Rising Sun” to “Bohemian Rhapsody” to “Fortunate Son” — are unapologetically fun. They create an immediate sense of personality for each squad member that the rest of the film struggles to sustain. David Ayer knows how to shoot a character intro. He knows how to make criminals look cool. The problem is that cool is not a substitute for stakes, and the film’s villain generates none.

Viola Davis deserves separate mention. Her Amanda Waller is, without question, the most purely frightening character in the entire DCEU. She is not a superhero or a villain — she is a government operative who uses supervillains as tools, who assembled this squad not to save the world but to protect her asset advantage, and who proves in one brutal scene that she has absolutely no compunction about ordering the execution of people who inconvenience her. Davis plays her with a terrifying calm that makes every scene she’s in feel genuinely dangerous. The film loses something every time she’s offscreen.

What the Ayer Cut Would Have Been

David Ayer has been explicit on social media that his original cut of Suicide Squad is significantly different from the theatrical release. The timeline is damning: when Batman v Superman received mixed reviews in March 2016, Warner Bros. commissioned a trailer house to re-edit Suicide Squad to be lighter and more fun. Reshoots added comedic material. The darker, more grounded version Ayer had assembled — which reportedly focused heavily on Joker and Harley’s toxic relationship as its emotional core — was replaced with something designed by committee to differentiate itself from Snyder’s grimness.

Unlike Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the Ayer Cut has never been released. Ayer continues to advocate for it. Based on what survived in the theatrical cut — the raw performances, the occasional glimpse of darker character work, the clear evidence of excised material — it would almost certainly be a more coherent film. Whether it would be a better film is impossible to know.

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Is Suicide Squad (2016) worth watching?

Yes, primarily for Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Will Smith’s Deadshot — both are excellent. The film around them is a compromised, choppy mess, but the performances justify the watch. Keep expectations realistic.

What is the Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad?

Director David Ayer has publicly stated that his original cut is substantially different from the theatrical release, which was re-edited by a trailer house after the Batman v Superman backlash. Unlike Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the Ayer Cut has not been released and has no confirmed release date.

Who directed Suicide Squad (2016)?

David Ayer wrote and directed the film. He has been vocal about his dissatisfaction with the final theatrical cut and maintains his original version was a meaningfully different film.

Is Suicide Squad suitable for kids?

PG-13. Violence, some intense sequences, and morally complex characters throughout. Fine for 12 and up. Harley Quinn is entertaining but presents a deliberately unhealthy relationship dynamic that younger viewers may not have the context to read critically.

How does the 2016 Suicide Squad connect to the 2021 version?

James Gunn’s 2021 film is a soft reboot sharing only Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, and Amanda Waller from the 2016 cast. It is set in the same universe but is otherwise entirely independent. Think of it as a sequel in premise only.