Like the first entry in Lukewarm Takes, DC’s Batman Vs. Superman: Everything Is Extreme Now, Suicide Squad serves as a vivid and oddly encouraging reminder of something I’ve almost forgotten: during my 18 years as a film critic, the vast majority of the movies I saw and reviewed were fucking terrible. Just god-awful. And they generally weren’t bad in a weird, interesting, challenging ways. No, they’re terrible for the same reason Batman Vs. Superman and Suicide Square are terrible: they are very transparently exercises in cynical commerce and brand extension unconvincingly masquerading as entertainment.

For over a year the majority of the hype focussed on the “crazy” things Jared Leto was doing to get into, and then stay in character as The Joker. These famously, (or should I say infamously!) ranged from grave-robbing Heath Ledger’s grave so he could eat his heart and gain his strength, to poisoning the New York water supply to give him a sense of what it’s like to kill a bunch of people, to sending Viola Davis a dead pig as a chilling illustration that, as a good-looking white heterosexual man, he can get away with just about anything.

Then the movie came out and the finished cut was a terrible shock for Leto and a wonderful surprise for people like me, who consider Jared Leto the worst actor alive. I know that’s not fair but Leto inspires a level of visceral hatred in me relatively unique among big name actors. On more than one occasion, I’ve left a Jared Leto movie (Chapter 27, the 30 Seconds To Mars documentary) and thought, “Not only did I hate that movie, but I’m overcome with a strong urge to punch Jared Leto right in his smug fucking face.”

What enrages me about Leto? Some of it is undoubtedly his “suffering artist” persona. Some of it comes from my irritation at Leto’s overacting and part of it is attributable to Leto being given the highest honor in acting for an an absolutely dreadful performance. During an interview with the BBC, Leto hypothesized that his role in Suicide Squad ended up getting cut because, "I brought so much to the table in every scene that it was probably more about filtering all of the insanity, because I wanted to give a lot of options, and I think there’s probably enough footage in this film for a Joker movie.”

So there you go: Leto’s role was reduced to an obnoxious cameo because Leto was too good. By Leto’s reasoning, if audiences were exposed to the full force of his awesome intensity and intense awesomeness, their brains would explode and they’d be unable to process the movie.

I suspect that the real reason Leto’s performance as the Joker was slashed to ribbons is because Leto, being the artist that he is, somehow got it into his head that he was simultaneously playing The Joker and longtime Howard Stern affiliate Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling. So he decided to improvise “Baba booey, Howard Stern’s penis, Baba Booey, Howard Stern’s penis” in every scene he shot.

Leto is uncompromising, so no matter how often writer-director David Ayer begged him to stop saying “Baba Booey, Baba Booey” and/or “Howard Stern’s penis” he refused to break character and would instead cackle with maniacal delight. Ayer eventually lost the will to fight after a certain point, and rumors persist of a 147 minute long “David Ayers Gives Up” cut that features seventeen straight minutes of Jared Leto hollering, “Howard Stern’s penis! Howard Stern’s penis!”

Leto’s other idea for the worst Joker ever entails re-imagining Jim Carrey’s motor-mouthed, rubber-limbed goof from The Mask as a Goth lady’s man, a psychotic Casanova who swoops in every twenty five minutes or so at random for some hammy shenanigans. So there were probably a few deleted scenes as well where Leto got way too into character and would yell, “Smoking!” or “Somebody stop me!” over and over again, to the point of madness.