The new DC Comics supervillain movie certainly brings the crazy with its team of psychopathic ex-convicts, a Dirty Half-Dozen Hannibal Lecters. It also brings the chaos and the surreal disorientation. It’s undoubtedly an advance on that recent uneasy face-off, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But does it bring the funny? Not the way the Marvel movies do it, really: that ingredient of sympathetic humour hasn’t quite worked its way into DC’s mix yet – though I accept that writer-director David Ayer (who made Brad Pitt’s second world war drama Fury, as well as End of Watch and Harsh Times) intended Suicide Squad to be darker, meaner and more violent than that – all of which has earned his film a 15 certificate in the UK.

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There’s plenty to like: Suicide Squad is about a secret US government project to release the country’s imprisoned supervillains and, with a tiny remote-control bomb implanted in each of their necks to induce cooperation, train them to fight any threat from other uber-bad guys lurking beneath the narrative horizon. Margot Robbie is entertainingly over the top as the toxic-barbie Harley Quinn, formerly Dr Harleen Quinzel, the improbable prison psychiatrist who dressed in strippergram clothes even before her journey to the dark side. She fell in love with a patient, the Joker, now on the loose and played here by Jared Leto.

Robbie steals the movie from most of her co-stars, but the real scene-stealer is Viola Davis, playing soberly dressed federal apparatchik Amanda Waller: it’s an excellent, coolly menacing performance. (Waller has a duplicitous plan to use the Suicide Squad to cover up another plan.) If only Davis were involved a bit more; if only we could scale down the inevitable FX-driven action finale involving slightly tiring supernatural forces, in order to beef up the dialogue and the chemistry. And maybe lose some of the more incidental appearances from B-list Squadders who are hardly used, and perhaps even cut the franchise-signalling cameos, like the Flash (Ezra Miller).

As things stand, Superman is off the scene; America needs protection, so Waller dreams up a plan to recruit a top team of badder-than-bad guys and put them under the control of special forces hombre Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), who can exert authority over and above that neck-bomb. His girlfriend is archaeologist Dr June Moone, who regularly morphs into an ancient warrior, Enchantress (Cara Delevingne); she can keep the Squad in line, and as Waller has her heart in a special briefcase, she will have to keep Enchantress in line too. The Squad is made up of weapons fetishist Deadshot (Will Smith), fire-breathing hellraiser Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Harley Quinn (Robbie), Aussie tough guy Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and subterranean monster Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

There is fun to be had as each Squadder’s deplorable backstory is sketched out, and in seeing our mutinous antiheroes submitting with bad grace to some sort of training. Yet no sooner are they together, they find that the Joker has plans to spring Harley from the programme – which gives Harley first-among-equals plot status – and the dark forces they must combat have been somehow called into being by the Squad’s very existence: caused, in fact, by the fraught presence of Enchantress. Clearly, Amanda Waller has a secret she is keeping from them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bats ... Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

It’s a clotted and delirious film, with flashes of preposterous, operatic silliness. But it doesn’t have much room to breathe; there are some dull bits, and Leto’s Joker suffers in comparison with the late Heath Ledger. I was just settling into what promised to be an enjoyable jail-life montage to the accompaniment of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody – a track featured very heavily in the trailer – when the song was yanked, not even a third of the way through, and we cut to something else. (Another trailer promised us a blast of the Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz. Not forthcoming.) There were some funny touches, mainly from Harley, and from Ike Barinholtz’s corrupt prison guard Griggs. (Held at gunpoint by Deadshot, he announces that should he die, his colleague has his permission to shoot Deadshot and then quickly delete Griggs’s internet browser history.)

Suicide Squad promises madness, and a dense downpour of madness is what it delivers. I could have done with more fun and more lightness of touch.