TV

Will Smith Is Distracting Everyone From ‘Suicide Squad’ Reviews With Impromptu ’90s Songs

Five stars.

by Meg Watson  4 August 2016

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

The promo tour for any movie is an incredibly gruelling and repetitive process. There are endless interviews, photoshoots, fan service, and panels. You have to explain the plot of the movie over and over again. You need to pull out pre-rehearsed stories for talk show hosts, all the while pretending you don’t want to shoot the film directly into the sun.

Now imagine the promo tour for Suicide Squad. After more than a year of solid (and overwhelmingly positive) hype, the film’s landed abruptly in cinemas with some of the worst reviews in recent memory. Will Smith, who plays one of the lead characters Deadshot, presumably woke up, read that critics were calling the film “too shoddy and forgettable to even register as revolting”, and was struck by vivid flashbacks of all the time he needlessly spent with Jared Leto while Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ crept slowly into his subconscious.

Then he had to go on The Late Show.

(I would have grabbed the mic too.)

Smith whipped out this (supposedly) impromptu version of his 1991 hit ‘Summertime’ in the commercial break of the show. It came just moments after he talked about his ongoing political aspirations and the state of race relations in the US — “racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed” — and then deftly pivoted to his excitement over playing “an assassin with a heart”.

I think we can all say this film was not worthy of his talents.