Harley Quinn is an embodiment of all the conflicting things this frankly disastrous new movie, choppily written and directed David Ayer, is attempting to do. She’s meant to be fun in her I’m so cra-azy way, but she’s also a woman in an abusive relationship the movie has no idea how to handle. She’s supposed to be strong, and in the literal sense, she does bash things with a baseball bat. But she’s also a psychological prisoner who has surrendered her sense of self. She’s a goth icon who talks like a 1930s gangster moll and who owns a gun reading “love” and “hate” on the barrel, but in her deepest heart, all she wants is to be a housewife in curlers, looking after the kids while her green-haired hubby heads off to work. She’s anarchic, but not really, and a good time, but not really, and she’s fucked up, but not really — or at least, not really in a way the movie’s ready to take time to explore. Sure, Harley is a tricky character, but she’s been shaped into an intensely sexualized mascot for a film that yearns for edginess, but can’t get over the rounded curves of its female lead.

Suicide Squad is a movie about criminals and miscreants that makes surface gestures toward upsetting superheroic expectations, but that turns out to be thuddingly retrograde in its choices. Its characters are supposedly hardened, selfish outcasts who nevertheless declare themselves family faster than a bunch of tenderhearted fourth-graders at summer camp. Its plot is maddeningly circular, with the Suicide Squad getting activated to fight a frustratingly silly-looking antagonist who wouldn’t be around if someone hadn’t tried to put together the Suicide Squad. That someone is Viola Davis, who infuses ambitious government agent Amanda Waller with wonderful I’ve-seen-some-shit steeliness. (Her best moment is how zestily she eats while walking someone through the dossiers of the convicts she’s planning on rounding up, as if she could just as easily be devouring her pesky higher-ups.) But even Davis can’t circumvent the fact that the whole movie is about how terrible Waller’s ideas are and how they lead to a sizable chunk of Midway City being destroyed.