Solid 5-6 but lots of premise wasted

Rating: 5/10 (13 August 2016)

It wasn't awful, but I had quite a few issues with this film. The top two things that bothered me were the lack of things the trailer promised while disappointing you on the things it did deliver on. For example: All the funny lines in the trailer are the *only* funny lines in the movie-so you've already heard them and they aren't funny anymore, on the other hand you don't get any of the cool scenes with the joker that you were expecting because they aren't there. SO essentially you get lines that were overused with no new material and then the stuff you wanted to see more of, you don't. I hate when all the funny parts are in the trailer- especially with the funny/action tone of this franchise- it feels like a waste of money and a letdown that the writers had that little creativity to spread around.
Second: Harley Quinn was such a disappointment. Her performance was lauded, but another major letdown. I'm actually embarrassed for Margot Robbie since her job was really just to have her ass out and look pretty. She was useless to the plot and it would've been great to see her and the joker's backstory expanded a bit more than bare dialogue flashbacks that don't give you any reason to care about her character.
I wasn't too enthused about the Joker's new look, but Leto pulled it off fantastically. He was great. Even with the ridiculously small amount of screen time he had (and really if this was about suicide squad why not leave him out of it and let him have his own film with Harley? There was really that little point to the scenes he had and was in) Jared Leto was the best part of the movie.
Another gripe- the plot was messy and characters underdeveloped. You don't really buy in to them being bad guys because the amount of time fleshing out the characters is dismal. And making Waller a harda** didn't disguise that. The idea of making her worse than the so- called bad guys was a mistake. Why wouldn't she just call Batman for help with whatever the f*ck was going on? Duh. There should've been exposition of the characters backstories to feed in to why suicide squad was specifically needed against Enchantress. The plot problems really pulled it apart. And being the introduction to a new franchise, the setup is really important here to get the audience on board- not only comic readers, but new fans. They failed. I really feel like it was Ayer's direction too- since he's stated that this was his "director's cut." Ayer being proud of this mess is really damn sad.
I went in to this with my husband saying everyone gave it a solid seven. To me that's an average score and this was not a little worse than average. A solid 5, but no more. The waste of potential is too big, not to mention you'd think the studio would've been more involved in screening the 'director's cut' before release after the bomb that was Batman vs Superman. I hope they can pull DC back together. Sad panda on this one.