Review: Antiheros prove no antidote for 'Suicide Squad'

Riding the trend is David Ayer's day-glo superhero circus "Suicide Squad," a gleefully nihilistic, abysmally messy romp that delights in upending the genre's conventions and tries desperately to, like, totally blow your mind with its outre freak show.

Despite the train wreck of "Batman v Superman" (the last DC Comics challenge to Marvel's dominance), excitement is high for "Suicide Squad" thanks to a marketing campaign that rivals the presidential ones and the promise of some punk in the poppy, PG-13 realm of the superhero movie.

(Sorry, that's unkind to 13-year-old boys.) Based on the comic created by John Ostrander, the film is a cartoonish yet grim "Magnificent Seven" in which a desperate government — for the moment without the services of Superman or Batman — turns to a handful of villains, locked away in prison cells, to combat a yet greater supervillain running amok.

Ayer's previous film was the WWII tank drama "Fury," an overbearingly bleak movie that similarly followed a harsh band of warriors and flipped the good-vs-bad dichotomy of Americans against Nazis into a less heroic story.

Watching "Suicide Squad" (which will nevertheless make hundreds of millions) is to see the superhero movie reaching rock bottom, sunk by moral rot and hollow bombast.

Suicide Squad," a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language.