Let’s just get this over with.

What’s It About? Five supervillains are forced into action as a black-ops squad in order to accomplish a secret mission in Midway City.

STRAIGHT UP: A few solid performances can’t save this train wreck. 1/5

What I Liked

Will Smith as Deadshot – Although his backstory scenes fall flat, Deadshot is still the best character in the movie thanks to Will Smith’s cool and charismatic performance.

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn – Robbie’s Harley is true to the comics, and she even gets to wear the classic costume in a flashback scene. Fans should be pleased, even though some of her lines are… just embarrassing.

A sincere attempt at crowd-pleasing – I appreciate Suicide Squad for being the first DCEU film to have a sense of humor, and to try and engage its audience with fun spectacle rather than alienate them with dour morality plays. The cast and crew clearly had more fun making this one than their counterparts did making Batman v Superman – something I desperately hope the studio notices.

What I Disliked

Jared Leto as the Joker – Joker’s new look is a disaster – those tattoos are the worst – and Leto’s peformance is mostly unremarkable. After all the hype, this is a huge misfire.

Rick Flag and Enchantress – The relationship between these two characters, which is meant to be one of the emotional cores of the film, falls completely flat as neither the actors nor the screenplay can provide a reason for anyone to care. Also, taken at her own face value, Enchantress is probably the most bottom-of-the-barrel antagonist to appear in any recent superhero movie.

Hack-job editing – Rumors of multiple cuts and back-room drama appear to be true. Suicide Squad‘s visual flow is so awkward and the transitions between scenes are so flimsy that the film feels less like a single cohesive work and more like two dozen trailers stapled together.

Hollow characters – I don’t get why people say they liked the characters in this movie. There’s hardly anything there to like! Only Deadshot and Harley have any depth, and that’s largely thanks to what their actors give them. The others are lucky to get a handful of lines and a single personality trait. Poor Katana is literally introduced as an afterthought! It seems like the excitement out there is for the idea of what these characters could be, rather than what they really are onscreen.

Lackluster visuals – The whole film insists on using the same dark, washed-out filters that are standard for DCEU pictures, despite the characters’ bright-colored costumes that beg for something different. Also, the final battle scene is shot at night, in the rain, with fog, which means that approximately none of it is visible.

Overbearing soundtrack – Suicide Squad‘s music is so on-the-nose that it’s almost insulting. Not only does the film’s collection of licensed songs play constantly over every scene – even ones that would be more effective without music – but most of them feature lyrics that explicity reference the action onscreen as they’re playing. In terms of technique, that’s only one step above Blue’s Clues.

Executive meddling – The revised tone and PG-13 rating were clearly mandates from the studio, but they only serve to handicap director David Ayer, who initially seemed tailor-made for this kind of material.

Casual misogyny – The way other characters constantly (and exclusively) describe Harley and Katana as “crazy” bothers me. I can think of many more interesting and complex ways to describe those two, but who cares? All women are crazy, am I right?

And more! – I could go on about the badly botched role of Amanda Waller, the sexual harassment that members of the cast endured from Jared Leto, or how the entire production feels about as edgy as Hot Topic. But this is a movie review, not a thesis statement, and I feel like I’ve made my point.

CLOSING THOUGHT: DC is just embarrassing themselves at this point. How can they hope to compete at the box office when their movies routinely screw up basic elements of composing an effective shot or telling a functional story? This studio has all the tools to produce a great film, but the day that happens still seems far away. Until then… make mine Marvel.