Cape Town – The first reviews for Suicide Squad are in and they are not very pretty.
Reviewers and fans alike have blasted the much anticipated big budget supervillain movie by writer-director David Ayer and the A-list cast including Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Cara Delevingne.
Here are five of the worst things reviewers have said:
1) Not cool
A puzzlingly confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of supervillains and then doesn’t know what to do with them. - Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter
2) It's just bad
Suicide Squad is bad. Not fun bad. Not redeemable bad. Not the kind of bad that is the unfortunate result of artists honourably striving for something ambitious and falling short. Suicide Squad is just bad. It’s ugly and boring, a toxic combination that means the film’s highly fetishized violence doesn’t even have the exciting tingle of the wicked or the taboo. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair
3) Limp-dick
Who stole the soul of Suicide Squad? I'd say it's Ayer's willingness to go all limp-dick and compromise his hardcore action bona fides for a PG-13 crowdpleaser that would rather ingratiate than cut deep, or even cut at all. – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
4) The worst
As storytelling, Suicide Squad is the worst of the worst, but it’s no different in kind from the best of the best. This is all just high-priced junk. - David Edelstein, Vulture
5) Can't escape it
The experience of Suicide Squad is like watching other people play video games — except they’re not really playing them, and there’s not much suspense about who will win. And you can’t escape. And the music is terrible. And you barely know what’s going on. And you’re stuck there for two hours. And then, it’s a little depressing, too, because Suicide Squad wasn’t worth making, and it wasn’t worth releasing. - Mick LaSalle, SF Gate
Suicide Squad releases in cinemas on Friday, 5 August.