There’s a drought across the land, and I’m not talking about the arid state of farming or sweeping brush fires, but the strangled flow of quality films on their way into theaters. We’ve already suffered through“Batman v Superman,” and Matt Damon, while jacked up for “Jason Bourne,” was hogtied by an inert script. Now here comes “Suicide Squad,” another DC Comics entry (think Superman and Batman), looking to take a bite out of the Marvel pie (think Captain America and The Avengers). Hyped as a quirky anti-superhero flick, the project showed great promise during incubation; now, in realization, it’s a busy, bombastic bounce that bites off more than director David Ayer can chew.
If you’re not familiar with Ayer, he’s a guy’s guy, the testosterone-probing hand behind such brooding character studies as “Harsh Times” and “Fury.” He doubles down here, tackling script-writing duties as well, and in that you’d think he’d own the material and put his stamp on it. But what becomes clear in the first few frames, as we get a seemingly ceaseless recap of the potpourri of criminal personas that will become the Squad, is that Ayer’s not a very nimble multi-tasker. We’re left down deep in the liftoff-weeds water when there should be action, heroics and a sardonic edge – i.e., plot and forward motion.
Basically in the new “Jason Bourne” we’re a long way from the Robert Ludlum material that was so organically and intricately concerned with spy games and double dealings at the highest levels, with Jason Bourne caught up as the harried fly in the ointment. In the five installments – four starring Matt Damon and now three of those helmed by chaos choreography maestro Paul Greengrass (“Captain Phillips” and “United 93”) – the impetus has moved from an internal struggle driven by outside forces to dubious machinations in those external structures (the CIA and its splintered sub-organizations) looking for any excuse to put Bourne in someone’s crosshairs. In this case it’s those of CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggy Tommy Lee Jones, inheriting the role of heavy from Albert Finney) who doesn’t want Bourne (and his long-running inside collaborative, Nicky Parsons, played again by Julia Stiles) to pull a WikiLeaks dump of the Treadstone file (listing all the behaviorally engineered Bourne-like assassins). Plus he’s got his hooks into social media mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), an amalgam of Zuckerberg and the Google guys, and wants to leverage the company’s Deep Dream network platform (think Facebook) as a tool to acquire info on anyone, anywhere, anytime. 
For What it's Worth 