Yes, I know it’s old. But I wondered to myself, “Self, how could they screw this up? There are a ton of Dirty Dozen ripoffs out there. This one has Will Smith, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, and The Joker. This should be easy to at least get to mediocre.” Well, here at the Soapbox sometimes I watch awful movies so you don’t have to.

And it is just as bad as the critics say. Sometimes they get it right. This is trash. And it’s sad, because this should be lots of fun. Dirty Dozen with comic book villains is a great premise. I’d greenlight that for production. And it’s not like DC doesn’t have any cool villains. So what went wrong? All kinds of stuff.

This movie had a lame plot. Of course, I don’t exactly expect anything wonderful from this sort of movie. The problems run deeper though. The structure is bad. It seemed like the writers couldn’t figure out what tone they wanted, and kept changing the serious/cheesy balance. And they felt the need to put in a lot of badly-structured backstory. It just didn’t work, and it was hard to follow. And it’s unnecessary. This is a superhero movie with relatively well-known villains as protagonists. Give everyone a quick establishing bit with a touch of voiceover and call it good. Honestly, you could probably run the script through a bunch of rewrites and eventually get something good. But you’d have to redo the whole script. I’m told this movie had some reshot sections in order to fix things, but that didn’t help anything.

I want to make note of a few things regarding casting and dialogue. Will Smith seemed kinda wooden and decidedly unfunny, which usually takes some effort. Plus, Deadshot’s fight work hasn’t aged well. We still have lots of jump cuts, and John Wick is just better in every way. On the decidedly positive side is Margot Robbie, who did a great job as Harley Quinn. Really, she’s one of the few who looked like she was having fun in this awful movie.