"The Dirty Dozen" meets "The Mummy" ...

Rating: 4/10 (5 August 2018)

...but without the verve or charm that either of those two older movies had. The settings and staging are dark to the point of obsession, and I don't just mean the overall tone of the plot and script. The whole look of it is dark, dirty, and grimy, as if exposing any given scene to sunlight would reveal it for the ridiculousness that it is. A low-life bunch of criminals is conscripted to take down a mystic villain and her long-dead and now resurrected consort. Attempts to make this believable are hard going right from the start and never becoming convincing.
What's probably worse though is the derivative nature of what's going on. There's actually nothing original here; any scene is something we've seen before in a different context. Same for the script, which is filled with trite dialog on all sides. The acting? The thing about a bad script and bad premise like this is that it tends to flatten everything, drag all the actors down with it to the same uniform low level even if they're capable people to begin with. There is actually almost no one here among the characters who you feel like rooting for or identifying with. Probably the only cast members who escape with their dignity intact are Will Smith (whose inimitable style seems to be able to carry him through anything) and Viola Davis (whose harder-than-nails Amanda Waller actually borders on believable -- though even she looks like she's rather be somewhere else). I know Margot Robbie is getting credit for standing out among this low bunch, but to me she looked trapped, as if "how did I get involved in this mess?"was coming out through her eyes whenever she said or did something. Give her credit for trying. As for all the rest, they behave like escapees from the Monty Python School for Overacting. Adam Beach is probably glad that his character got killed off early.
What remains is the special effects and CGI. Not bad, but ugliness overtakes them too. The Enchantress (Cara Delavigne) villain does leave a strong impression in both her guises, as some sort of tribal priestess and then as a powerful ancient-god kind of creature, but otherwise the highlights are few.
Hard to believe they're intending to make a SS 2 (news as of mid-2018) rather than working on the more promising paths of the DCEU that are starting to open up. This however is probably more a statement about the standards of the studio and Hollywood in general than about anything related to quality.