I want to start off by saying that the movie was pretty enjoyable while watching it, and I didn’t regret my time in the theater. The action is fairly well paced as it flows from scene to scene. While there are a lot of plot holes in the internal logic and even in the time tables of the story, there’s an emotional logic to it that will prevent it from bothering most people until they stop and think about it.

If you can turn off your brain and enjoy a dumb movie for two hours before tearing it apart, go watch it before you read anything else about it. It will do that for you. Ultimately there is more bad than good here, though, and you’ll either forget this movie pretty fast or remember it more for what it does wrong than right.

This review stewed for a few extra days, and that really has not been good for it, because it is exactly the type of movie that gets worse as you think about it. It falls further and further apart on reflection because it was never meant to be reflected on. It was meant to be Guardians of the Galaxy (DC edition).

Suicide Squad fails absolutely at being Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s characters are truncated and never get a chance to express individuality. They’re reduced to their most superficial elements, and all of this is reflected in the soundtrack. The film switches you through classic tune after classic tune, a tour of all the best parts, but never more than a taste and never long enough to satisfy a fan.

When you look past what the final cut of the film is trying to force the movie to be, and then examine what it is, all that is left is a mess. The audience is shown scene after scene where sub par writing reaches desperately for fantastic moments, but never once provides the connective tissue to tie the scenes together in the meaningful way they need to be to earn those moments.

What’s tragic is this is becoming the fingerprint that defines a DC movie, a collection of almost random scenes that vaguely reflect what could have been great ideas and fall apart because no one cares enough about what’s in between to make them work.

When you try to move into the climax of your movie by literally having a character pick up a book labeled top secret and then flip out about supposedly finding something out that everyone already clearly knew because it was the point of the entire movie, then it’s obvious that you don’t care how we get from point A to point B. It’s never as bad as two characters completely changing their disposition over a trivia fact, but only because it doesn’t try to change its characters at all, really.

The movie wants us to feel like things have changed, but have all the characters stay the same, sitcom style.

A lot of people spent a whole lot of time worrying about how Jared Leto would be as the Joker and we just don’t really know because he’s barely in the movie and the parts he is in don’t matter. Maybe he’s fine, we don’t know. We never get a sense of him at all. I’d definitely say that there’s not enough here to see any flaws in his performance, and it was one of the few things I left the theater wanting more of. I want more of this Joker, I want to see what he can do, because it looks like it can be good.

So what do we get instead of the Joker? A walking Deus Ex Machina. A character that is invulnerable to bullets and bombs unless they’re the bullets and bombs that our heroes are using. The movie constantly emphasizes that this is a villain that just cannot be beaten with guns and explosives, and that we need super humans to beat it, and then at the climax of the film all we get is a gun fight, the thing we were consistently told and shown just wouldn’t work.

Suicide Squad fails at just about every aspect of what it is or tries to be. It fails at being Guardians of the Galaxy, it fails at being a unique interpretation of villainy, it fails at pacing, it fails at character development, and it can’t even make you feel anything real with all of the most real and emotional song from decades of artists that it can possibly cram into its run time. But, at least you’ll get to watch things explode and Margot Robbie’s ass for an hour and change. So, there’s that.

If that’s all you want, you’ll at least get that. Me, though… I wish we’d gotten something better than this. We could have gotten better. We should have gotten better.