SPOILER ALERT!
Suicide Squad is a recently released movie with some pretty large names, including: Jared Leto, Will Smith, Viola Davis, Margot Robbie and Cara Delevingne. The film follows the Suicide Squad as they embark on a dangerous mission in order to receive 10 years off of their prison sentences. The Suicide Squad is a group of super villains that appear throughout the comics that have been captured and jailed, for good reason. Amanda Waller, a bad-ass government agent decides that these villains could be put to better use.
Amanda Waller gets her clearance and attempts to bring the Squad together, with some resistance from the inmates of course. In this film adaptation, the Squad consists of: Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and good-guy Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). Also appearing in the film is Joker (Jared Leto), Batman (Ben Affleck) and the evil Enchantress (Cara Delevingne). Side Note: Slipknot appeared for about 30 seconds. In order to ensure that the Squad does not harm the soldiers and does not try to escape, Waller has placed tiny bombs with the power of a hand grenade into their necks, thus, "Suicide Squad" was born (including the fact that the missions they are sent on generally ensure their deaths).
The Suicide Squad can do some serious damage. They are all killer in their own way and possess certain characteristics that show they don't have remorse or control. So how much damage could they do to our actual society? Marvel and DC Comics, especially DC, have had very sketchy pasts into how they address mental illness. In fact, DC has a game based on Batman which is located in the Asylum in Gotham City where a feature of the game is to attack the patients at said Asylum. The movies have also tended to glorify or make light of characters with mental illnesses. Not all of the Squad seem to be mentally unstable, but some show characteristics of mental illness. And some can easily be diagnosed. The primary tactic for drawing in audiences has been seen through their commercials, "Come see how crazy these people are!" It is movies such as these that prolong and enhance the stigma that some are working so hard to change. I am one of those people. Suffering from mental illness does not make you crazy, does not mean you are going to do evil things, and it does not mean you are going to act in certain ways. Margot Robbies' character, Harley Quinn, was in fact a criminal psychiatrist before falling for the Joker and (in my belief) suffers from Schizophrenia, erotomanic type. Which means she believes someone of high power or status (Joker) is in love with her. And as the Joker plays with her she eventually becomes a female Joker, out of her mind and now psychotic. The only good that comes from this story line is maybe that it shows the world that anyone can develop or suffer from a mental illness despite their education level or where they come from.
I also have some anger with how they sexualized Harley Quinn to the point of a prostitute, but that is another problem too big to cover right now. Suicide Squad was an okay movie, I would give it a 'B' based on nothing but story line, plot and character performance. But I am worried what the damage this movie could do to the progress we have made in changing the stigma that surrounds mental health. Mental Disorders and diseases are not for us to make fun of or use for entertainment. They are serious and unpreventable, and sometimes fatal to the sufferer or others around them. Our cultures encourages and discriminates against those who have illness only because the world can not "see" the symptoms all the time. I know this film probably never thought about what they portray once, but after watching it I was both entertained and unsettled. I hope our country can take a step back and realize this movie could cause a lot of damage the world of Mental Health.
