‘Suicide Squad’ is two hours of soul-sickening, sensory torment

If you know someone you really can’t stand — not someone you dislike, not someone who rubs you the wrong way, but someone you really loathe and detest — send that person a ticket for “Suicide Squad.” The movie takes pop songs and plays them loud on the sound track, lyrics included, not just during the interludes between scenes, but actually during the scenes. It is an awful, overdone and over-laden jumble, full of flashbacks and flash forwards and lots of scenes in which it’s unclear which character is doing what or why it might matter. (I’d mention an action hack now, for reference, but I don’t think people should get bad reviews when they’re minding their own business.) No, this movie was written and directed by David Ayer, the man who wrote “Training Day” and wrote and directed the terrific war movie “Fury” just a couple of years ago. To even talk about “Suicide Squad” is misleading, because it requires imposing a coherence on the material that isn’t really there. The first thing you need to know is that, at the point that the intelligence officer and her assistant (Joel Kinnaman) start naming the members of this “Suicide Squad” team, the plot comes to a full stop for a series of multiple digressions as each character is introduced. Deadshot is a career assassin with an uncanny facility for weaponry, but he also has a conscience and a soft spot for his daughter. The last half hour is a video game, just characters shooting at black shapes, on the way to doing battle against some evil queen (Cara Delevingne), as the drum machines and the horns and the soaring strings underscore everything. Even if you love video games, what do you love about them? The experience of “Suicide Squad” is like watching other people play video games — except they’re not really playing them, and there’s not much suspense about who will win.