The reception to Suicide Squad has been pretty unrelenting; since the official premiere earlier this week, it seems every single critic has come out of the woodwork with their own takedown of the film. A lot of the reviews I’ve read have said that the film is somehow even worse than Batman Vs. Superman and the ill-fated Fantastic Four reboot, which is a pretty big claim considering how awful those movies were. Now, fans of the film have written an online petition to shut down Rotten Tomatoes over the bad reviews, clearly not regarding that Rotten Tomatoes simply aggregates these reviews, and has no part in writing them.
As someone who is pretty disconnected from superhero movies altogether (except Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the original Spiderman films and the very first Iron Man), I didn’t really have much of a personal stake in this fight. I had a feeling that Suicide Squad wasn’t going to be the best film of the year from the moment it was announced the film was undergoing reshoots following the disastrous release of Batman Vs. Superman, and the unbearable press tour that followed Jared Leto taking the role of The Joker. Nevertheless, I couldn’t believe that there was a film worse than Batman Vs. Superman, and so I decided to see the film for myself.