If this is how parents feel when they say, “I’m not mad, just disappointed”, then I totally get how shitty that feels.

I like this movie. I truly do. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop me for being so frustrated in its wasted potential that I ultimately don’t like it in equal measure.

“Suicide Squad” has been charming me for over a year now, with exciting and thrilling trailers that made me believe that this was finally DC/Warner Bros.’ shot to finally congeal their Cinematic Universe with its own singular identity and some serious momentum. Unfortunately, we get just another sputtering outing that inevitably promises, “Just you wait! We’ll really show you something next time!”

The problem is that every time is the next time. (Insert disappointed -_- emoji here.)

“Suicide Squad” is about a group of incarcerated super villains, you know, the kind that could have only been captured by members of the Justice League. Amanda Waller, played perfectly by Viola Davis, decides to place these superskilled/superpowered convicts in a task force, just in case the next Superman decides to be a real douchebag and the US government needs their own gang of metahumans to solve the crisis.

So, just to be clear, the premise of this movie is about a group of superpowered “bad guys” tasked with helping the “good guys”. Sounds like a slam dunk, right? I’m sure if I was so inclined I could find a YouTube clip of even Michael Jordan missing a simple layup. However, that doesn’t help ease my disappointment.

All the signs of greatness are right there on the screen, the performances and spot-on casting are the main event (read: saving grace) of this show. Margot Robbie was born to be Harley Quinn and manages to skip around with a baseball bat and .357 Magnum revolver with enough glee to make us think that yeah, being a bad guy would be a lot of fun. Will Smith is still incredibly charismatic as Floyd Lawton a.k.a. Deadshot who revels in his marksman skills but is ashamed that his daughter has a hitman for a dad. Maybe being a bad guy won’t be as fun as we think it might be…

Jared Leto’s Joker is more like a tease in this film, promising that we’ll get to inevitably see more in the next Batman film but what little I saw is more than encouraging. This Joker is equal parts kingpin and cult leader who revels in the myth of “The Joker” and believes that every emotion and impulse is meant to be acted upon. It’s not a bad interpretation but like the rest of this movie, the good ideas present are just left unrealized and pubescent. On a brighter note, Jai Courtney finally introduces himself PROPERLY to the world as a character actor who can do action rather than the pretty boy action star that Hollywood has been horribly miscasting him as. I hope this is a trend we can look forward to and it’s nice to meet you Mr. Courtney.

My only real criticism of the cast is with its lead, Joel Kinnaman, who plays Rick Flag, the Squad’s field commander and handler. This movie seems to be under the mistaken notion that a movie about the Suicide Squad called “Suicide Squad” should be focused on the one human who isn’t a felon or superpowered or especially compelling. Couple that with the fact that Kinnaman plays Flag with an extremely thick Southern accent that even I, a born and bred Southerner, found difficult to understand and it just added to my general confusion as to why so much screen time was devoted to him. It’s also more concerning when a better and more interesting leader arises in Will Smith’s Deadshot who knows his stuff and manages to be more effective than Flag’s entire team of soldiers in one particularly thrilling sequence.

I believe that David Ayer’s strength has been in his characters, knowing exactly what to make them say and do so we understand them as perfectly as he does. The editing and plot of this movie is so unbalanced and haphazard that I feel like if we had just had another 30 minutes I might have a better idea of why these characters are saying one thing but doing another. For example, there are bad guys who insist they are bad guys but then get offended if someone else alludes to their badness. Obviously, this is meant to show that there’s more than what’s going on at the surface and promises a full, complete character arc. Those arcs are little more than a starting and ending point with just a series of dots in between that we’re meant to connect on our own. Not because the movie believes in demanding more of its audience but because they just ran out of time or were making it up as they went along.

Even a generic “end of the world” plot line proves to be too much for this movie to handle since it believes that a generic plot line should serve as shorthand; “No, we don’t have to explain what’s going on, you’ve seen this happen in almost every single comic book movie!”

Uh, no. In a better movie, a generic plot line would’ve been the way to go so that you can get in, get out and let us have more time to enjoy these amazing characters and performances. Here, I get a plot with huge gaping plot holes that only serve to get this movie to eventually end.

I’m not sure how this movie went wrong but I’m certain of this: A few months down the road we are going to get “Suicide Squad: The Director’s Cut”. Much in the way most of us felt about “Batman v Superman: The Ultimate Edition”, this alternate version is going to prove to be superior to the theatrical cut and maybe we’ll get an explanation as to what happened.

It’s incredibly disappointing to get a cast of characters that want desperately to talk about what it means to be “a bad guy” as opposed to a person who has done bad things but then are never left alone long enough to have the discussion. The Suicide Squad is imprisoned in its own movie and I can only hope that another mission will see them truly unleashed.