Mark Reviews Movies: THE SUICIDE SQUAD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2021

Writer/director James Gunn possesses the imagination, the ability to give us some weird stuff, the willingness to indulge in bloody violence, and the general sense of the absurd that material like The Suicide Squad needs. We can spot these qualities, not only from what actually happens in this movie, but also in comparison to the first attempt to make a movie out of team of supervillains, counterintuitively trying to save the world.

Enough bad things rightly have been said of Suicide Squad from 2016, so to call Gunn's reboot/sequel/variation an improvement isn't saying much. It is an improvement, though—much funnier (again, not saying much), intentionally sillier, far more coherent, wicked enough that the bad-guy heroes actually seem as if they could be, well, bad guys in another situation.

These are the basics of what we expect, though, so to praise Gunn and his movie for only doing that—and, hence, being much better than the first installment of this isolated series within a larger franchise—wouldn't be fair. To be fair, Gunn does do a bit more than the basics, giving us some truly strange characters, a couple of clever subversions, and a plot that becomes admirably wacky in the third act.

Everything before that climax, though, relies on the characters—how eccentric they are, what personalities they have, the arguing and bantering among them. They're a generally entertaining bunch, although not quite enough so that they can carry and elevate a pretty routine plot.

The story opens with the movie's cleverest sequence, which introduces us to a whole new team in the Suicide Squad, officially known as Task Force X (The other name is a bit "denigrating," according to one member). Along with some inspired cameos of the glorified variety (and a comically unsettling computer-generated character), a few familiar faces are on this mission to an island country off the coast of South America, too, such as the deranged jester Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), team leader Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), and the self-explanatory Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney). Things go wrong rather quickly, splendidly, and bloodily, and that's when we meet the actual team, elsewhere on the island and relatively safe from danger.

This one is led by the sharp-shooting Bloodsport (Idris Elba), who shouldn't be confused with the hero of the previous entry (although the similarities are clear enough that Gunn is probably having a laugh at replacing one movie star with another, without hiding or making excuses for the change). He's enlisted by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), the creator of the squad, with the threat of his daughter going to prison as coercion. Bloodsport and the other team members have to destroy a research lab on the island.

The country's new leaders, who have taken Harley hostage, plan to use what's inside the lab to take over the world. Bloodsport's squad has to rescue her, on their way to abducting lab's chief the Thinker (Peter Capaldi), whose super-intelligence is created and signified by rows of Christmas-light-like bulbs on his bald head.

All of this is basic stuff, so it is up to the characters to make anything engaging out of the material. Gunn has assembled a mostly amusing team, at least.

There's the jingoist Peacemaker (John Cena), who has the same superpower as Bloodsport—a fact that both of them realize and that gives them both an ego-driven goal of trying to one-up each other in the killing department (A particularly gruesome sequence has the two taking turns eliminating henchmen—or so they seem—in increasingly inventive and grisly ways). Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) can control rats and wants to live up to her late father's example in some ways—and avoid it in others.

Another self-explanatory character arrives in the person of Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who shoots incinerating polka-dots and has some rather severe mommy issues. Clearly meant to steal scenes (on account of the oddity and because you can't miss him) is King Shark (voice of Sylvester Stallone), a walking, somewhat-talking, and man-eating hulk of a computer-generated shark (with "kind eyes," one character observes—unaware the shark just tried to eat her).

Generally, the humor here is hit-and-miss. Character-specific gags (the way Polka-Dot Man sees the world as a mother-filled nightmare, Harley re-asserting her independence after a whirlwind romance/assassination with a cartoon-flower-highlighted massacre, and the juxtaposition of King Shark's child-like and bloodthirsty natures) inevitably succumb to generic, juvenile bickering and wise-cracking.

In some ways, Gunn's devil-may-care attitude toward the material is refreshing amidst the abundance of self-serious, franchise-building-and-continuing superhero fare. The filmmaker gives the characters some sentimental back stories, although there's always something to amusingly undermine the sincerity of them, and it seems unlikely any other entry in this franchise would be willing to build upon the final, extra-terrestrial villain here.

In another way, though, the constant assault of gags, combined with the routine plotting and occasionally jumpy storytelling (The narrative has to go backwards a couple of times, lest Gunn miss the opportunity to give us more jokes), creates its own deflating sense of repetition. There are undeniable bursts of weird, wacky energy in The Suicide Squad—certainly more and far odder ones than the majority of superhero movies. They're not quite enough to serve as a narrative foundation or a distraction from how familiar so much of this is.

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