Suicide Squad: The Official Movie Novelization is a quick, scattered read
There’s a chance you can still catch Suicide Squad in theaters somewhere if you haven’t seen it yet. For those looking to complement the movie with some reading material, Titan Books has released a novelization to hopefully help fill in some cracks. I actually read through the book before I watched the movie, which is rare, so I went in knowing the plot and all the beats. Should I have been surprised that the movie wasn’t great? Did the book illuminate any of the glossed over bits the movie missed? Honestly, I just wasn’t impressed with either iteration of the Suicide Squad story, but the book was a little meatier than the movie (as is usually the case).
Whether you can’t get enough of these characters, want to read into motivations, or simply enjoy movie novelizations, Suicide Squad: The Official Movie Novelization might be worth a quick look. Read a short review after the jump.
This is going to be short and sweet, because it was tough to get behind the book as something I’d recommend to readers or fans of the Suicide Squad characters. Let me preface by saying, as a movie buff, I was 100% on board with David Ayer (Fury, Training Day) trying his hand at a superhero movie. Hell, he even got the misfits of the bunch, and his style of storytelling mixed with gritty action sounded perfect for a DC universe entry. Throw in faces like Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, and a handful of “they’ll do in a pinch” actors and cameos, and Suicide Squad seemed to be shaping itself into something worth getting excited over. Unfortunately, as more marketing material reared its head, it became apparent that instead of a unique R-rated badass of a movie we were going to get the angsty Hot Topic-inspired, trench coat-wearing weirdo Suicide Squad eventually turned out to be. The movie is just…off…in so many ways, when it should have been inspired and outrageous. Maybe that’s just my personal opinion, but through both the book and the movie I couldn’t help but feel things were askew in a bad way.
As far as the novelization is concerned, I suppose I couldn’t have expected Shakespeare. Suicide Squad reads like a book I would have picked up and blazed through in junior high. It’s light, flighty, and zooms along like a paint-by-numbers blockbuster, which isn’t surprising. What was surprising was how hard it was to keep track of side characters and situations that should have been clear. Throughout the book, I kept asking myself how many soldiers were left and just where crucial players were hiding as set pieces and action scenes played out elsewhere. The soldiers really got to me, with them popping up and getting mowed down whenever necessary, and when I finally watched the movie things weren’t much different. So, there are little nitpicks that made it tough to immerse myself in the novel, and it turns out most of the confusion carried over to the movie.
What’s also lost in the novel that shone through in Suicide Squad’s on-screen adaptation was the prowess of actors we know and enjoy (for the most part). I’d seen trailers and posters, so I knew who would fill the shoes of specific characters in the movie. So, when the Joker had a moment or when Batman popped up, it wasn’t hard to picture Jared Leto or Ben Affleck for a second. That said, the pizazz and presence actors like Leto, Affleck, Robbie, Smith, Jai Courtney, and even Joel Kinnaman or Cara Delivingne brought to the big screen was missing from the novelization and it showed. On screen, the director can play with inflection and an actor’s ability to bring little things to life within the character, but in the pages of the novelization these same characters came across as one-note and flat in their eccentricities. It was unfortunate, because there was a lot of color to play with. Instead of a larger-than-life representation, the book came across as a fill-in-the-blank assignment some poor soul had to put together based on the movie’s screenplay.
Personally, I can’t recommend Suicide Squad: The Official Movie Novelization to someone who loves the Suicide Squad, and I’d be hard pressed to find something worthwhile to recommend to even the most passive DC universe fans. The book is an unfortunate case of “didn’t need to exist but does for marketing reasons” material, and the movie wasn’t much better.