Viola Davis, Margot Robbie and Will Smith arrive ready to make a nasty, funny film about bad people. David Ayer gives them a witch, a hole in the sky and a pop song every two minutes, and loses all three in the noise.
The idea is sound and about fifty years old. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), a government fixer, wants a team of jailed supervillains she can send where soldiers cannot go, with a bomb in each of their necks in case they get ideas. David Ayer writes and directs, and for the first twenty minutes he looks like the right man for it. The early scenes in the prison, with guards taunting prisoners through bars and Roman Vasyanov lighting the cells a sodium orange, have a dirty, close feel. Then the squad is sent into the city, and the film goes with them.
Davis is the best thing here and it is not close. She plays Waller as a woman who has never raised her voice because she has never needed to, cutting into her dinner while she tells a table of generals that the witch she keeps on a leash will do as she is told. There is no music under her first scene and none needed. We believed every word, and we were a little afraid of her, which is more than the film ever manages with its actual villain.
Margot Robbie and Will Smith come next. Robbie’s Harley Quinn is introduced hanging upside down from a sheet in her cell, and she plays the part as a woman who finds everything funny, with an accent that comes and goes and a baseball bat that does not. Kate Hawley dresses her in a bomber jacket, hot pants and a T-shirt with a slogan, and she wears it as though she chose it herself. Smith’s Deadshot is a hitman with a daughter, and the scene in which he is handed a pistol in the prison yard and empties it into a target without looking is the one time the film is as good as its trailer. We sat up for that scene. We did not sit up again.
Jared Leto’s Joker is the problem the marketing could not hide. He has silver teeth, a forehead tattoo and a laugh that sounds rehearsed in a bathroom mirror, and he appears in flashbacks and on the edges of the plot, where the film uses him as the reason Harley is the way she is. The romance between them is played as a grand love story and it is, on the evidence of what we are shown, a man breaking a woman for sport. Ayer films it in neon and slow motion. We were embarrassed, then uneasy, and the film seemed not to notice either.
The structure is where it falls apart. Michael Tronick and John Gilroy introduce every character twice, once in the prison and once from Waller’s folder with a caption and a pop song, so that by the time anyone does anything we have had the same information in two formats. Steven Price’s score is in there somewhere, under a jukebox that changes track every two minutes. Once the squad lands, Vasyanov shoots the city in rain the colour of a wet pavement, the enemy is an army of men with heads like burnt popcorn, and Oliver Scholl’s subway station and hotel lobby are fought through in a way that makes them hard to tell apart. The threat in the sky, when it comes, is a column of swirling rubble. We were bored by it, and we have seen that column before.
The genre is the men-on-a-mission film, and that kind of film works when the mission is clear and the team has time to hate each other. Here the mission is a lie Waller tells, the hatred is a line apiece, and Jai Courtney’s Boomerang, Jay Hernandez’s Diablo and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Killer Croc each get one story and a close-up. Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag is given the job of shouting at them. Cara Delevingne’s June Moone becomes the Enchantress, and the Enchantress gets a hip-swaying dance and a voice that sounds as though it was recorded in a tin.
Most critics landed near where we have, and the few who enjoyed it enjoyed Robbie, which we understand. If an hour of her doing gymnastics in a cell and ten minutes of Davis at dinner are enough for an evening, there is that, and the 15 certificate is honestly earned. The tagline promises the worst heroes ever. They are not even the worst thing in the film.
