Suicide Squad director David Ayer has defended his film from poor early reviews by quoting Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

The Zapata quote, which is often attributed to Che Guevara and was co-opted by Charlie Hebdo’s editor Charb before his death at the hands of terrorists, translates as: “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.” It was tweeted by Ayer just over an hour after the first reviews for Suicide Squad were published. Ayer qualified his use of the quote in a second tweet.

Suicide Squad, which is released on Friday, has been called “ugly and boring”, “comic book pornography” and “a puzzlingly confused undertaking” by critics. The poor critical response follows the bad reviews accrued by Warner Brothers’ last big superhero film, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, who had issues with Suicide Squad’s treatment of its female characters, called it “crushingly puerile” in his two-star review. Writing for the Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy questioned the choice of Ayer as director, saying he lacked the “darkly subversive cartoon style” needed to keep the film entertaining, while Richard Lawson, writing for Variety, said it was “ultimately too shoddy and forgettable to even register as revolting”. Lawson also highlighted the objectification of Margot Robbie’s character, Harley Quinn. Robbie is Vanity Fair’s cover star this month. The interview with her, in which writer Rich Cohen called the actor “sexy and composed even while naked, but only in character”, was slammed for its sexist portrayal of the actor and called “really weird” by Robbie.

Among the few critics coming to the squads’ rescue is the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who gave Ayer’s film three stars and praised the performances of Robbie and co-star Viola Davis. He’s been joined by a gang of 5,000 fans who have signed a Change.org petition to shut down Rotten Tomatoes. The petition, which is reacting to Suicide Squad’s 35% RT score, argues that the entertainment site deserves to be taken offline, because it “always give the DC extended-universe movies unjust bad reviews”. Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregator that groups critic’s verdicts from other websites into an cumulative score.