Suicide Squad

What Marvel achieved by painstakingly releasing film after film to establish its superheroes, DC tries to do with hyper-stylised minute-long intros for the dozen characters that populate—no, crowd—Suicide Squad.

Here’s Deadshot (Will Smith); he’s a hired gun who has never missed a shot. You nod in glee, excited to meet the next one. Here’s Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie at her maniacal best); she is a former psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum who got too attached to… The Joker, and ended up becoming a ‘crazier, more dangerous’ form of him (Ha, like that were possible!). But you nod along anyway, and don’t quite care that they never explain where she gets her abnormal agility from. Next. Captain Boomerang. Next. Killer Croc. Next. The Enchantress. And on and on it goes before you give up in fatigue and wonder why they had to cram so many characters into the film in the first place.

Heroes are only as good as their villains, and the ones in this film are no good. The Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) is an ancient sorceress out to destroy the world because she doesn’t quite appreciate how civilisation is too obsessed with machines to pay obeisance to her. Somewhere along the way, she discovers what appears to be a voodoo doll, and manages to revive her brother. It’s all quite hazy, and you absorb all of this in resigned fashion. Towards the end, there’s a scene in which she’s shaking and shivering, like those possessed in our temples do, and tries to appear dark and menacing. It just leaves you fighting an urge to laugh out loud.

As for our villainous heroes, they are too easy to control. When Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) first brings them together, you don’t envy her task. Surely, it cannot be easy to make a group of dangerous sociopaths work together. But she implants small explosives into each of them, and apparently, that does the trick. The occasional threat from any of them is quickly quelled by her showing a mobile phone app (everything The Enchantress stands against), and threatening to detonate the bombs. I couldn’t believe that somebody as maniacal as Harley would let herself be manipulated by such a threat. The Joker definitely wouldn’t, and isn’t Harley supposed to be more unpredictable and dangerous? While on The Joker, Jared Leto is criminally wasted in the measly part. In a film about a bunch of deadly villains ganging up, it’s inexplicable that The Joker, that master of wanton destruction, doesn’t have much to do.

The director David Ayer (End of Watch) has done solid work in the past, so it’s hard to say exactly what went so terribly wrong here without falling back on the explanation that Zack Snyder, who has largely overseen the DC Extended Universe so far, must somehow be to blame.