DCEU: All 16 DC Extended Universe films ranked from worst to best (including Aquaman 2)

15. Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad is the perfect example of how you can have all the right ingredients and still get it horribly wrong. Now, the film’s reputation was never going to be squeaky-clean, but perhaps its greatest sin is that it took a group of relatively grounded (and, for the most part, relatively human) supervillains and instead of placing them in an equally grounded environment, they were forced to save the world from the cliché beam in the sky.

The rag tag group of misfits were as unorthodox as we could have hoped, with Deadshot and Harley Quinn serving as surprisingly strong protagonists (the latter of which was a joy from beginning to end), while Viola Davis was nothing short of perfection as Amanda Waller, and the film was nearly as aesthetically-pleasing as the trailers suggested, but everything else was a complete misfire.

This should have been a hard-hitting, gritty and grounded piece about whacky soldiers with a surprising amount of character development, not an over-the-top visual spectacle with an unusual Joker and an unbelievably kooky supernatural villain in Enchantress.

There are flashes of brilliance here – most of which are engineered by the incomparable Margot Robbie – and, if you can get over the fact that this wasn’t the movie Suicide Squad should have been, it’s a fairly decent (if overly-complicated) campy superhero adventure. Unfortunately it’s still pretty hard to get over that when all the ingredients for a great film were right there.