Many, many spoilers below. This post is aimed squarely at the people who saw the movie and were like "This is good, critics are dumb." No, sir. No. YOU are the one who is the dumb one.
Seriously, spoilers below. Here's a Harley Quinn gif to create some separation and allow you to leave now without being spoiled:
So, a lot of people are upset at critics because critics didn't like Suicide Squad. The whinging of these silly people has taken many forms—change.org petitions, outrage on Twitter, etc.—and the complaints are often inflected with a weird conspiracy theory that reviewers are out to get DC films. This is, of course, remarkably stupid (see, for instance, the Rotten Tomatoes scores of Christopher Nolan's Batman films, all of which were DC films and all of which are above 80 percent fresh), but, then, these are people who are championing a remarkably stupid movie, so what can you expect?
And make no mistake: Suicide Squad is a remarkably stupid film. It's stupid in ways big and small, stupid in the way it was put together in the editing room, stupid in the way it treats its viewers. It's really, really stupid.
Before we recount just a few of the ways in which it is stupid, however, let's take a moment to appreciate one way in which its great. For all of its problems, you really have to respect David Ayer's commitment to shooting the team from behind, and from a low angle—this, of course, being the best way to capture shots of Margot Robbie's posterior, which is adorned with ever-shrinking short shorts. Like Gregg Toland laboring under Orson Welles on the set of Citizen Kane, one imagines David Ayer screaming "Lower! Lower! I want to see the curvature!" as Suicide Squad's cinematographer Roman Vasyanov rips floorboards out of the studio in order to achieve an ever-steeper angle from which to film her derrière.
I guess what I'm saying is this: Suicide Squad is the Citizen Kane of Margot Robbie butt shot movies. (Feel free to put that on a poster, Warner Bros.)
Given Suicide Squad's opening weekend success—it has grossed more in a single weekend than Lady Ghostbusters will in its entire domestic run; maybe Paul Feig should consider adding a hot clown in hotter hot pants to Lady Ghostbusters 2, if Sony is stupid enough to push ahead with that abysmal failure of a franchise—it's hard to argue against Ayer's unity of vision with regard to Harley Quinn. However, we should take a moment to think about how remarkably stupid it is to include her on this team.
To wit: This is a team of people with extraordinary abilities assembled by the government to tackle superhuman threats—"What if Superman wanted to kill us?" is the question this team is meant to answer. Which, okay, fair. But, let's be honest: If Superman were trying to kill us, I'm not sure a 100-pound girl with a baseball bat and a smart mouth is, you know, the sort of person you want on the team to stop him. Or, like, a guy who robs banks and uses a boomerang as a weapon. Or, um, a guy whose superpower is "he can climb anything!" (More on Boomerang and Rope Dude Or Whatever His Name Was in a moment.)
The inclusion of Harley Quinn on the team renders the fights throughout as vaguely absurd. For instance: The Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) builds an army of magical creatures that have hundreds of eyes and are extremely hard to kill. We see them take bullet after bullet and keep on coming. Deadshot (Will Smith) takes down a whole bunch of them, but, okay, he scores perfect headshots every time. I'm not sure that's quite the same as Harley Quinn bonking them on the head with a baseball bat.
This is, of course, one of the problems with having a magical villainess like The Enchantress. Nothing about her really makes much sense. Supposedly Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has her heart in a box and can kill her by blowing it up. But when the Enchantress goes rogue, she ... doesn't blow it up? She just stabs it a couple of times? That's pretty stupid! You know what else is stupid? Remember the scene where Enchantress is engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the Squad and after a few minutes she just uses magic to pull all their weapons out of their hands and end the fight? Why didn't she just, um, do that in the first place? Stupid!
Also pretty stupid: The Enchantress' magical brother. Quick, name him without using IMDB! Or explain his powers! Or help me understand how he could withstand the power of a metahuman/Aztec fire god roasting him at close range with a flame that must have been thousands of degrees, but got killed by a standard-issue Navy SEAL demo charge. This is a stupid character who is introduced stupidly AND disposed of stupidly.
Speaking of stupidity, let's discuss Jared Leto's Joker for a moment. It's clear from the early advertising campaigns that the Joker was intended to have a bigger role in this film. And, to be fair, you need the Joker to explain Harley Quinn's specific brand of madness. But literally nothing he does in the movie after her introduction impacts the plot in any way. At all. A less-stupid way to handle the character would've been to have him appear with Harley in the opening moments and then again at the end when he breaks her out, setting up a sequel in which the Squad has to take down one of their own.
But Suicide Squad is not a film interested in handling its characters in non-stupid ways! Let's return to Rope Dude Or Whatevever His Name Was (Adam Beach). RDOWHNW served one very specific purpose in the plot: he had to be killed by Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman) to prove that the government was not messing around you guys and would use the bombs implanted in the villains to take them down if they tried to run away. Which, okay, fine. But why introduce a whole new guy to prove this point? Why not just kill Boomerang (Jai Courtney)? He's totally f*&%king useless! Why do we need him? What good does he do the team? Taking out Boomerang would have the double-effect of eliminating an extraneous character and proving that anyone could die at any time—that these criminals are truly expendable. Instead, they introduce RDOWHNW only to immediately kill him, thus inadvertently proving that no one we've met is in any real danger from the Feds.
Like I said: stupid.
I could go on: the action sequences are murkily shot and vaguely incoherent (I thought Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) had turned on the two SEALs in his underwater fight scene at first because I couldn't quite tell what was happening); the sound mix made it virtually impossible to understand either Croc or Boomerang, both of whom sport heavy accents; the exposition dumps, as I noted in my review, are unceasing; it feels like there are two competing films in here that were slapped together in the editing room; why is Katana even in this; et cetera, et cetera. Pretty much the only way to defend Suicide Squad is to say "You're overthinking this, it was fun, just shut your brain off and enjoy the ride."
In other words, the only way to defend it is to accept its stupidity. You're free to do so. Just don't get upset when your betters refuse to do the same.