The 14,000 Suicide Squad fans who want Rotten Tomatoes shut down because of the 32% and plummeting grade given to David Ayer’s film…well, forget it. They’re going to have to take it and like it. In fact I feel like grabbing those 14,000 fans by the shirt collar and bitch-slapping them for the fun of it. Suicide Squad is expected to make…what, $140 million this weekend? Expect a pushback from the loyalists. “Much better than those nasty critics are saying!” and so on.

I saw Suicide Squad last night at the Grove, but I refuse to “review” it. Movies of this nature only warrant riffs, and I’m being generous in saying that.

And yet I must admit I was mildly into it for about 40 or 45 minutes, give or take. This reasonably spritzy section is mainly about (a) a nifty opening-titles sequence, (b) semi-humorous character introduction and (c) plot set-up, and all through it I didn’t once look at my watch. Then the standard D.C. conflict crap kicked in and my brain melted into a mush of oversteamed noodles spiked with hot sauce. I looked at my watch about six or seven times starting at the 45 minute-mark. I moaned, I groaned, I shed tears of pique. I told myself “stick it out, don’t leave, hang in there.” But the process of soul-poisoning had begun and I began to feel sicker and sicker as the minutes wore on.

Once again the climax had to be about the good guys battling a super-massive, all-powerful, potentially world-destroying uber-villain, and the CG has to blow your sorry ass into the outer lobby. The same shitty climax that ended Batman v. Superman, Ghostbusters…they all draw from the same well, the same climactic blastaroonie over and over and over and over and over.

I saw the faces of the all-media invitees as I left the theatre. They were numb, drained, sucked dry and asking themselves the same question — “What have we done to ourselves as a culture? Why are we submitting to the vision of those malignant Warner Bros. executives, to the overall D.C. Comics grim-itude, to the rancid emptiness of the corporate greed virus? Why are we watching these films? What has happened to our moviegoing souls?”