Well, no, it wasn’t, but it came really really close.

In a mailbag episode of The Big Picture Podcast (check out this pod if you haven’t), a listener asked hosts Sean and Amanda to name one film they would ask a genie in a bottle for a ‘do over’ on. That means they run the whole thing back, same cast, same director, same budget, and just let them try it again. Immediately, my mind went to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad.

I’ve revisited this movie several times since its release. Each time, I have faced a frustration that I couldn’t quite trace the source of, until recently. I had known since the first time I saw it in theaters that this movie should be good. Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Will Smith as Deadshot, and Viola Davis as Amanda Waller were among some of the most ambitious and inspired casting moves in the history of live-action comic book movies to that point. Even some of the below-the-line parts like Rick Flag, Captain Boomerang, and Enchantress had perfect actors cast.

For a time, I assumed this was just a simple misfire. Leto’s Joker was ill conceived, the script was bad, and the individual parts that were good just didn’t fit together coherently. These are true facts that I won’t try to deny, but I think 2016’s Suicide Squad actually gets even more right than the casting.

Ayer uses a hyper-stylized, sometimes campy aesthetic for this film. He’s using neon pink and green highlighter colors, freeze frame text-on-screen character intros, and mile-a-minute needle drop soundtrack queues throughout the first thirty minutes that create something that is tragically absent from most comic book movies in the past decade — unique style. Some champions of Zack Snyder’s DC films will tout that he brings a unique style to his films, and they’re right. The issue with Snyder’s style is that it just doesn’t work in the context of these movies. His uber-serious tone betrays the absurdity of the plots, characters, costumes, and source material of the stories he is trying to tell. Ayer’s style on the other hand, actually leans into this absurdity, acknowledging that of course it’s silly and ridiculous that these characters would ever exist, let’s just have some fun with it.

Sure, not every weird insert worked as well as it could have (this movie would have benefited from a more resolute editor), but Ayer’s campy style was right in the Goldilocks zone (not too self-serious, not too self-aware) needed to bring these characters together. It even makes Ezra Miller’s Flash work, and that’s saying something!

Herein lies my frustration with the movie: we have a perfect cast, and finally a director who understands the tone needed to effectively take this story to the silver screen, and yet the movie just. still. doesn’t. work. They were so close!!

So what’s ultimately holding this movie back? Well, its a script that just really doesn’t deliver. Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, recently commented on their podcast about how a bad script will lead to a bad movie, and a good script will also lead to a bad movie unless 100 other things also go the right way (I’m paraphrasing, but that was his gist). I think this movie is a case of the inverse. Everything was right except for the script. The plot just isn’t compelling, there’s a villain problem (a common theme for Snyder’s DC films), and they make the classic mistake of assuming that we care about the characters that we don’t already have a relationship to (the emotional climax of the movie is predicated on me giving a shit about what happens to Chato Santana aka El Diablo? Really??)

The dialogue is clunky and while the best actors of the cast are able to sell it (mostly), the lower level guys just can’t do it. When you pair a campy directorial style with bad dialogue and a bad plot you get — well, a bad movie. And that’s what we get with David Ayer’s Suicide Squad: a bad movie. The best of intentions from everyone involved, but they were doomed from the start.

I take it that I’m not the only one who noticed this, as the studio actually DID decide to run it back. They came up with a better script, got rid of some of the actors that weren’t working, and secured a much needed R-rating. They brought in James Gunn who had done a good job bringing as much style as he could get away with to the MCU with his Guardians of the Galaxy films. This time, they made a good movie. It’s good! It’s not great. Ayer was taking a bigger swing, and he missed by an inch. We should all be so lucky to have the #AyerCut released. If you believe in the multiverse, then we can believe that there exists a universe in which 2016’s Suicide Squad was good and it changed the course of comic book movies (thus changing the course of movies in general) for the better. Unfortunately, we live in this timeline, where we have to settle for the gift of Skrillex and Rick Ross’s Purple Lamborghini, which was the best song of 2016 and I am prepared to defend that take.