I stand before you ashamed to admit that I was seduced by Margot Robbie and a Queen song. After Zack Snyder dragged his grey, slow-motion balls across my forehead with “Man of Steel” and then waterboarded me with the unredeemable shit show that was “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” I swore I’d never see another DC movie again.

Then I saw the “Suicide Squad” trailers and God help me the movie looked good: the live action debut of Harley Quinn portrayed by an actress who nailed the character’s voice and attitude, someone brave enough to reinvent the Joker after Ledger’s classic performance, and is that Enchantress? Deadshot! Killer Croc! And David Ayer is writing and directing? You mean Zack Snyder isn’t going to be there to run the plot through a wood chipper and the rest of it through an Instagram filter?! Despite the disparity of tone between the first two trailers I remained stoked to see this movie. And then Ayer and co. dosed me with an Ambien and dragged me behind a jet ski through a grease fire for two hours and 10 minutes. This movie sucked, and I didn’t think it sucked because I’m a comic book purist crying over source material or a Marvel Cinematic Universe fanboy. I hated this movie because the script would have flunked out of Screenwriting 101, the editing was choppier than a back alley circumcision, and what passed for internal logic, narrative drive, or simple fun fell deader than Bruce Wayne’s parents.

Mild to moderate spoilers ahead for any of the DCU movies.

What We Could Have Had: Trailers 1 and 2

I found the first trailer the less enthusing of the two simply because it presented this film as dark and narratively substantial and DC was already 0 for 2 in terms of executing lofty ideas. With Snyder at the helm, smashing together the Nolan-esque high-concept treatment of superheroes with the gritty comic book re-imaginings of the late 1980s worked about as well as vacuuming the curtains and had me clamoring for an off switch with equal fervor. Snyder’s attempt to unpack the ethics and implications of a “superman” amounted to little more than the supplanting of theme by mixed metaphors, the unbearable repetition of “unilateral” as a trigger word to signify the Discussion of Deep and Important Issues that would barely be addressed even superficially, and an already unsteady plot getting T-boned in the second act by a goofy villain scheme to spur a fight that would have otherwise grown organically from the established conflict if the damn thing could have just been left alone.

But Ayer isn’t Snyder, or so I thought at the time. “Suicide Squad” looked like it could have built something wonderful out of the mistakes of the last two. In a continuity where Superman is a Christ figure on the fence about the Cross and dangerously unconcerned with the collateral damage he accrues in his struggle to choose a path, where the last vestige of justice in Gotham City is an ultra-conservative, pro-torture, murderous fascist and doomsday prepper in military pajamas, this movie was poised to show us what a villain from this world would look like. Given the ultra-bleak and grim impressions of heroes that Snyder left us with there would be nowhere to go but in the other direction. Ayer would have to make these people at least remotely likable.

We could have explored an ex-therapist blissfully lost in her own mental illness born of brain damage, post-traumatic stress, and Stockholm Syndrome spurred compulsively by her (albeit whimsical) inability to maintain clarity into a toxic codependency with her crush-turned-tormenter-turned-lover; a man who can’t reconcile his unrivaled prowess and serene acceptance of the horrific things he does for a living with his desperation to be a role model and provider for his daughter; a gang member whose literal burning rage could not be quenched even by what he lives for; a doctor overtaken and thwarted by a malevolent metaphysical force that defies every scientific and empirical tenant upon which she centered her sense of self and built her life’s work. I could go on down the list of characters, but most importantly we could have seen a group of peers subvert their cycles of crime or instability to reclaim their humanity in the face of the victimhood of their own inherent iniquities, the personal responsibility for reform they must acknowledge in spite of that victimhood (whether they choose to act on that responsibility or not), and the sub-human status imposed on them by a society and government with a vested interest in exploiting the disposability of damaged people.

Or we could have had none of that. We could have jettisoned the emotionally wrought doom and gloom in favor of a romping and shallow character piece that doubled as a breezy role-reversal action flick. You know, the kind of fun the second trailer made us believe we could have with this movie by setting quips and explosions to Bohemian Rhapsody.

I personally would have been all kinds of down to see either of those films. Instead, Ayer pees in our faces for two hours with an approximation of a movie that attempts both scenarios and achieves neither. Let’s take a quick (and at this point partial) look at what this movie hecks up.

Say It, Don’t Spray It

The dialogue in this movie is aggressively embarrassing. After what amounts to a moving listicle in the film’s beginning (which itself is narrated by Amanda Waller as the screenwriters reach up her ass and move her mouth up and down to get the plot going, a sad thing given that Viola Davis plays the closest thing this movie has to an interesting character next to Margot Robbie’s Harley) any and all further exposition falls out of someone’s face. The whole movie plays like a radio show that Warner Bros retroactively shot and synced images to. The audience isn’t trusted to comprehend any action at face value so we constantly cut to a character explaining everything to the people in the theater but looking at someone onscreen. It’s like somebody put the “show don’t tell” chapter of a basic writing handbook in front of a dyslexic or an out of touch exec chimed in with figures suggesting that the blind make up the majority of theater goers. With this incessant need to handhold through every turn you’d at least think the writers would have remembered to tell you the second main antagonist’s name (it’s Incubus). Oh, and every action sequence is punctuated by a canned one-liner that feels so lifted from other material or otherwise shoehorned in that they all more or less come off as non-sequiturs. Speaking of lifted from other material, Bane’s “You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it” line from “Dark Knight Rises” is an inversion away from direct plagiarism by Killer Croc’s “I live underground, you’re just tourists.” Jesus.

My Handy Dandy Notebook

Every black ops government intelligence agent knows that your secret files should be compiled in a standard Office Depot binder with a fire engine red front face prominently marked “TOP SECRET SO SECRET OH MY GOD DON’T EVEN LOOK I’LL BE SO ANGRY” and that they should bring that binder to all of the steak dinner debriefings they definitely have in public restaurants, but only the best agents keep that binder in the van that will be driven to the super secret mission so that one of the characters can find it, speed read it, and glean all of the information they’d have to be a moron not to have already realized about why they’re here to do what they’re doing. Every movie is guilty of dumb details like this but the good ones keep them at just that: details. “Suicide Squad” plays this particular blunder as its Big Reveal.

Now You See Me

As much ire as I have for this movie, I don’t actually place any blame on the actors (except Leto, who for all the mythos surrounding his method immersion phones in a performance so hideously bad it could ruin his career, but that’s an entire other article). It’s very clear that Robbie, Smith, and the others did the best they could with the bland and rudimentary script they were given while the rest of their performances were lost in edits so wide and brutal they give the movie a pasted-together flow that resembles an escaped experiment more than a narrative. Characters appear with no regard for how they got there and disappear just as suddenly. Captain Boomerang doesn’t hesitate to leave the group at another point in the movie’s one legitimate laugh out loud moment and should be blocks away by the time he steps from the left of the screen to join the Slow Motion Entourage Walking Shot (which nobody questions and Boomerang himself never bothers to announce his change of heart). We’re even introduced to an extra squad member who was left off the roster at the beginning only to find out that was an intentional choice made by Ayer who planned to unceremoniously kill him five minutes after his offhand introduction (furthermore, this is character who is reduced to a footnote before being casually murdered is a Native American. That sequence doesn’t sound familiar at all though, right?)

Now You Don’t

The plot hits the ground running so fast its legs buckle under it. None of the characters are given time to actually develop. It’s all reminiscent of Snyder’s phobia of establishing shots that leads him to skip all of the build-up that make climaxes so rewarding. So instead of a few quick humanizing moments of a man caring for his daughter juxtaposed against brutally efficient sniper hits we get Will Smith dressed like a pimp kneeling to hug his daughter once in the snow with a bunch of shopping bags and not only are we meant to label him as a universally attentive and loving father from that one act but we’re supposed to bond with him enough to feel pity for him in the thirty seconds it takes Batman to show up and hand him his ass in an alley. Same with Quinn. Instead of showing anything about how the Joker seduced her we’re given one near kiss and her nonplussed reaction to an inmate requesting a machine gun before we see her on a stripper pole while Leto opines about how much he cares about her. And again, from this we’re meant not only to assume the rest of the plot details but to give a damn about the relationship between these two. It becomes clear very early on that a whole other movie was cut out of this before they sutured it back together and sent it limping to theaters. There’s so much more I wanted to address but I’m well over the time we have together and my blood pressure can’t take it. Don’t see this movie. Sorry DC. I don’t care how many movies behind Marvel you are, you’re going to have to take me to dinner or at least lube up before I put out like I did for “Civil War.” F*ck this movie I’m done.