A couple of weeks ago, I shared a screenshot of all the movies I’ve rated 1/2 a star (out of five) on Letterboxd. Those movies are the ones I hate dearly, the ones that put hate in my heart and turn me incandescent with rage. Some of them feel like betrayals of the whole spirit of movie-making. Anyway, I feel I should try to exorcise some of this evil energy by writing about each of these movies, which I’ll be doing once a month until I’m done. So you can look forward to nearly two years of Terrible Tuesdays from here on out!

We begin with the movie that nearly ended one of my friendships: 2016’s Suicide Squad. (Not to be confused with 2021’s The Suicide Squad. That would be extremely unfair to The Suicide Squad.)

Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) finds “metahumans” like Superman dangerous, and wants to control her own coterie of superpowered freaks so they can do off-the-books missions for her/the government. For some reason, she goes all in on the ‘freak’ part and completely neglects the ‘superpower’ part, assembling:

Prancing around the edges of the movie is Jared Leto, allegedly playing Joker, but really just playing a skinny little sex pest who failed out of clown college.

Director David Ayer went on to direct the Netflix Original Debacle Bright, the supernatural cop action movie in which Will Smith clubs a fairy to death while saying “fairy lives don’t matter today,” so I frankly do not care that he disowned this movie. Studio interference likely made this movie marginally less awful than it would have been in Ayer’s probably weirdly damp hands.

Whoever wrote this scene:

This is this movie’s energy in a poisoned nutshell: indifferent character development, ghastly violence against women played for laughs, and an ostentatious song on the soundtrack.

Margot Robbie and Jai Courtney do the impossible and find the humour and humanity in their characters. Jai Courtney was the biggest surprise to me, since I knew him as a humourless heavy in movies like Live Free or Die Hard and One Of The Terminator Sequels With A Stupid Name, It Doesn’t Matter Which. He’s such a surprise in this one, in fact, that I was disappointed at how little they used him in the sequel (even bigger surprise: The Suicide Squad is a legitimately good movie!).

You know, I have to give special attention to whoever cut the trailers for Suicide Squad, because they consistently make the movie look engaging and sometimes even fun. There’s a certain fizzy scuzziness to them, especially the “Blitz” trailer embedded earlier, with energetic editing to enjoyable songs that feels deeply Edgar Wright-coded. It’s enough to trick one into thinking that you’re signing up for a good time.

But listen well, all of you: this movie is categorically not a good time. This movie is one of the worst cinematic experiences of my life. This movie oozes with contempt: for its audience, for women, for the concept of narrative structure. Jokes land like lead balloons, while emotional beats whizz by with nothing to anchor them. We lose track of where characters are, both in space and in the story. Some characters get multiple introductions, including with sizzle reels packed with freeze-frame Easter eggs; while others get “here comes Slipknot, the man who can climb anything” and that’s IT.

At a certain point—probably 24 minutes in—I began to feel as though the movie was committing a hate crime against me. It’s technically incompetent, morally repugnant, and narratively incoherent. The trifecta of shit.

I dunno, dude. Maybe I was hypnotized. Maybe Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress character bewitched me. But there was also a foolish part of me that felt like I needed to witness this atrocity and warn as many people about it as possible. Unfortunately, my warnings somehow landed as recommendations for too many people. People who, like me, couldn’t believe a movie could be quite so bad while being this expensive and having this much star power attached to it. One of those people—my dear friend Brian—blamed me for his decision, as though it were my fault that me ranting for 45 minutes about the worst movie-watching experience of my life was compelling. I am just a good ranter, people! I am innocent! Free me!

My dear friend Brian would say the soundtrack, but I refuse to give them any credit for buying the most expensive and most on-the-nose songs for every character introduction or scene change for the first act. No, everything redeeming about this movie is a positive externality: the sequel being so much fun that it almost banishes this one from memory (James Gunn, what universe can’t you improve?); me finding two of my now-favourite YouTubers, Jenny Nicholson (below) and Folding Ideas; and the fact that it has a finite runtime.

Every day. That movie was so cursed, so toxic, that I genuinely believe some evil from it seeped into my heart. I felt physically sick for at least a week after watching it. It haunts me to this day. I loathe it with every fibre of my being.

On the next Terrible Tuesday: a movie that I convinced myself was a childhood fever dream, until I read Nathan Rabin’s essay about it as an adult and started trembling with horrified recognition.

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