To prepare for The Suicide Squad, I decided to rewatch its predecessor, Suicide Squad without the The. it's a film widely despised by DC movie fans ... but then again, I'd be hard-pressed to find a DC movie that was released to universal acclaim. Ultimately, Suicide Squad is not the worst of the lot, and although the plot is a mess and there were questionable choices made, the film does have its strong points.

It was, remember, DC's first attempt at an ensemble film, a year before Justice League was released, and they were trying to emulate the success of the Marvel juggernaut without using any of their A-list heroes (except for a couple of very brief Batman cameos by newly anointed Caped Crusader Ben Affleck). And the movie is actually quite good up until the moment the mission begins; the buildup as Amanda Waller assembles her team and the brief vignettes that introduce us to the villains are a lot of fun.

Things start to go sideways when they enter the giant soundstage meant to be Midway City. While the big bads are some kind of ancient Egyptian gods with a grudge, most of the fighting is with anonymous minions of blobby, amorphous type (presumably so the viewers aren't at risk of feeling any empathy for them as they're mowed down by the score, considering that they're just people who were "converted" to minions just hours or minutes before). Of course there's a sky beam, because there's always a sky beam, which is going to end the world as we know it, because that's what sky beams do.

Let's look at the team.

The movie of course belongs to Harley Quinn, brought to life by Margot Robbie. Some people complain that she's there as eye candy, and she is, but she brings actual charm and delight to every scene she's in. There's a reason she keeps coming back to the character, and fans keep filling seats to see it. (She was, after all, the only consistently good thing in the Birds of Prey movie.) I hope she sticks with the role a while longer.

Will Smith is also pretty good as Deadshot, the mercenary hitman who never misses. He does as much as can be done with it, giving some heart to a thankless role, and I can't see how anyone could have a complaint with the job he does.

Boomerang doesn't have a lot to do in the movie, but actor Jai Courtney adds a lot of fun to the role. Neither Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) nor Diablo (Jay Hernandez) is particularly memorable, they're just there to serve plot points along the way. Slipknot (Adam Beach) pops in just to prove the bombs in their necks are real.

Cara Delevingne brings an eerie otherworldliness to Enchantress through her movements, mixed with makeup, costuming and a lot of CGI. And yet the menace doesn't feel real, the package is more silly than scary. As archeologist June Moone, Delevingne is really bad at her job. Her brother Incubus (Alain Chanoine) is mostly CGI, and he's there to look menacing. Combined -- one wonders what the point of their Big Evil Plan really is. I mean, who wins when you destroy the world?

On the side of the light, you have Amanda Waller, Captain Flag and Katana. Viola Davis, as Waller, does the icy bits well, and you believe from the start that she will sacrifice any member of the team -- or all of the team, frankly -- to achieve her aims, so including a scene where she murders her staff just to prove a point is entirely unnecessary. The other two -- Joel Kinnaman and Karen Fukuhara -- are fine in their roles, passing competently through the movie without really developing much of a personality or gaining any empathy with the viewers.

And then there's the Joker. While Jared Leto's take on the character is widely reviled, I actually like it a lot. Not as The Joker, but as A Joker, an interpretation of the character much like Joaquin Phoenix's in the eponymous 2019 film. I don't want to see him reprise the role in a Batman film, but in this, playing off of Harley, he is a hoot.

Anyway, Suicide Squad is not an awesome film, but it's not the travesty some folks make it out to be. It starts strong, stumbles in the middle and flops at the end, and the script definitely needed a lot more work. But the movie introduced some good characters -- Harley especially -- to the DC movie universe and provided some entertaining moments along the way. It's a weird and crazy comic-book movie that doesn't always make sense, but it looks like the cast and crew had fun making it, and that sense of fun is, at times, infectious.