What I Watched, Do Not Follow Me Into Hell: Suicide Squad

Just the worst. I knew going in this was bad, but it's jesus died for the sins of the filmmakers bad. Zero acting, zero script, mediocre CGI that could've been better done with a smoke sprayer and some cel art like Ghostbusters instead. There's shots of the infected building that look just like 1984's better movie.

I've never been more bored by Will Smith; Deadshot's an assassin with no remorse, but here he's daddy of the year. Boomerang keeps tucking a pink unicorn toy into his coat for no sane reason (actual Bronies just get tattoos and jerk it to pony porn, you know?), and barely does anything with his boomerangs or other gadgets. Croc's a gangsta stereotype, and just a normal-sized guy in latex, not a giant half-crocodile mutant who can literally bite a man's head off. Katana is a terrible one-note character in the comics, apparently, but here she's not even that. The rest of the squad are just boring. I like how they didn't even bother to give the disposable example villain any backstory or personality.

The "Hey Vern! It's Ernest!"-looking soldier boss is somehow allowed to sleep with an unstable metahuman whose heart they keep in a suitcase to stop from going on rampages. Amanda Waller is too cartoonishly evil to be in a cartoon, let alone this, you wouldn't trust someone like that with a squad of super-villains, you'd lock her up with them! You tell a room full of professional military that you're operating magic super-villains, but it's OK because the handler is porking her, and they won't thank you for your results. Everyone else normal and nameless dies, and there's zero empathy shown for them or the tens of thousands of people killed by the plot.

The fight scenes are trash. Mobs of black-faced unarmed "monsters" charge into gunfire, like the English murdering the Fuzzy-Wuzzy in Kipling's poem. If you're a reawakened ancient god, and you're building an army, I can see not realizing the value of firearms and modern tactics, but why aren't they armed with swords, spears, bows, slings? Nope, they're literally there to be targets. They rush up, grapple, die. At one point, some of the converted soldiers manage to shoot at the squad, with no cover, and they get annihilated by shitty CGI fire.

The boss fight scene is very directly ripped off from Ghostbusters, with Enchantress playing the part of Gozer, and then gets resolved by her being incredibly stupid, multiple times. You know, it's great that the villains can't hear the squad screaming instructions about "BOMB" across the room, or the surprise of the BOMB might not work. The magic sword that actually hurt you? Just leave it laying around, I'm sure that won't come back up.

This is a version where most of Jared Leto's scenes got cut out; I can't imagine spending more screen time with the loathesome creep who happens to play the Joker so badly. He slurs everything he says like he's got a mouthful of puddin'. He apparently really got into method-acting the Joker on set, which is not how you fucking behave if you're a human being. As I've long noted, the only good thing Jared Leto's ever done was get his head chopped off in American Psycho.

The one bright point to the entire film was Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, who does in fact kill it every chance she gets. "We're bad guys, it's what we do!" She's not just a stripper-with-a-bat, but the only one with any personality, or awareness of what being a super-villain means. Margot did most of her own stunts, and trained hard for it, and it shows. Except where she didn't get to do a stunt, and then it's very obvious, because the crew on this were absolutely incompetent.

OK, now I'm ready to watch Birds of Prey and see her in something good, right?

★½☆☆☆ — the ½ is for Margot.