Hearing that most of his scenes got cut makes a lot of sense. Joker is pretty much irrelevant to the goings on (outside of Harley's back story) in the final cut. If his role was reduced that much, it probably would have been better to cut him completely.

Well, as expected, I loved it.

My expectations were not high going in, but a fangirl friend wanted to see it so we did and both liked it.

I thought the characterization was very strong, the threat was good, the characters connections made sense.

Will Smith was great as Deadshot, as was Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, a character I mostly don't like.

Amanda Waller was great and Boomerang, Croc, and Diable were all in character. I didn't feel the movie let down at all.

I'll bet there's a sequel and at some point they will clash with the JLA.

I saw it on Saturday and really enjoyed it in spite of some (minor) flaws. I thought it had a lot of heart and, like many others, I was really happy with Smith's and Robbie's performances as Deadshot and Harley. It was perhaps a bit more standard action movie fare than I had expected it to be, but in that capacity it really delivered. I liked the action, the humour, the effects, and I'd like to see more of these guys in the future.

Or it could be that they're mostly pretty darn awful.  

My take-WB is doing the same thing with the DC movies that DC does with the comics-gear them to the hardcore fanboy audience and go for stuff that makes fanboys squeal cool without doing anything to make them appeal to a mass audience, so they look cool in trailers get massive initial turnout but don't do anything to satisfy the more casual moviegoer who goes away unimpressed and give it bad word of mouth, and the reviewers who are not hardcore comics fans do the same. The result is that strong surge of initial interest that fizzles out and then underperforms in the long run. They don't trust the source material and the aspects of these properties that have made them icons and try to make them kewl for a mass audience but utterly fail to please anyone but the hardcore comic fans.

The Marvel movies still have stuff to make the fanboy squeal, but they seem to be more conscious of providing things that will satisfy the more casual moviegoer and trust the stuff in the source material that has allowed these properties to endure for decades to translate into a story for the masses.

I don't see the approach changing with Geoff Johns now running the DC film division as he is chief fanboy of DC. Either WB has to change their expectations and accept the still profitable but not as big as they want movies for what they are, or they have to change their approach on how to make these movies. Batman transcends the hardcore audience by being Batman, but DC has not managed to get anything else to resonate with the mass audience, and as we saw with the first series of Batman films, even Batman can have diminishing returns with the mass if not done right and they get tired of it.

The divide I have heard on reaction to Suicide Squad is just what I highlighted-comic oriented fans found something to like in it, the mass audience who are not comic fans came away unimpressed and disappointed by another DC movie.

-M