By now the saga of Suicide Squad and The Suicide Squad is well-documented – why it’s a sequel but not titled like a sequel, why it has reboot qualities while being a sequel, and of course David Ayer’s thoughts on how the studio influenced his vision of Suicide Squad, which was critically maligned. Given this, James Gunn had a lot to do to get the movie series (if you can call it that) back on track and I’m glad to say he’s done it really well. This new movie, titled The Suicide Squad is funny, charming, irreverent, and terribly violent just as he advertised. While there are issues with the movie, notably in pacing and story construction these are not very significant issues. What works well about the movie is very good, and shows the kind of balance Gunn typically has to strike in his films, imbuing characters with heart while never getting too cynical.
The plot is straightforward – Amanda Waller sends two “Suicide Squads” to a country named Corto Maltese and everything goes wrong very, very quickly. The survivors have to continue on their mission, to get into a lab called Jotunheim to destroy evidence of a secret project called Project Starfish, led by a man named the Thinker.
It won’t be a surprise that Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) is the best part of this movie. She gets a hilarious side quest by way of meeting the gorgeous dictator of Corto Maltese, provides plenty of irreverent humor, and gets much of the movie’s best action. Even though this is an ensemble movie, Harley stands out. That’s not only because she is an integral part of the DC universe of movies, but it’s also a testimony to Robbie being a fantastic actor. She clearly enjoys the role and brings a lot of gusto to it and it allows her to carry a significant portion of the movie and calibrate her performance and build upon her arc. In Birds of Prey she learned how to rely on friends rather than lovers, and here she subtly builds on those lessons, albeit with violent ends. I also appreciate Harley’s costuming, which is interesting (she wears a beautiful, floofy red dress) and not overly sexualized.
Though there are connections across movies if you spot them (Captain Boomerang also appears, for example) it’s refreshing that this is absolutely not necessary. The Suicide Squad doesn’t dwell on needing connective tissue to the rest of the cinematic universe it’s in, it doesn’t need you to understand a lot of background information from the comics, and it doesn’t even encourage you to google. But this also creates limitations because when you don’t require the audience to remember much, there is also no need to understand what Corto Maltese is other than as a setting, which means that its people are mostly generic and nameless cannon fodder for violence committed against them. A tangential subplot with the country’s resistance fighters and Alice Braga as their leader could have been integrated far better into the main story, giving Braga more to do and giving Corto Maltese some representation on the band of misfits.
Speaking of the misfits, Gunn’s writing enables everyone to stand out. An early joke about how Peacemaker does the same thing Bloodsport does (use weapons with deadly accuracy) still shows two characters with very different approaches. Idris Elba gets plenty to do and a lot more characterization than was really even needed, but it helps ground his decisions. David Dastmalchian is always a welcome sight. It seems like I can’t watch a single science fiction thing on screen without him showing up at some point, and he’s become one of my favorite actors to watch. No matter what he’s in, he always brings good work. His quiet, almost mousy demeanor as Abner is a funny contrast to his colorful superpowers and he has some of the more dry humor of the movie, particularly when the group infiltrates a camp to save Rick Flag.
Though Rick Flag is a returning character, it’s my first time watching him and Joel Kinnaman is a lot of fun to watch. Rick seems to casually embrace the weirdness of his team, allowing him to be the straight man and the guard trying to literally control the inmates. King Shark AKA Nanaue is also a standout, vicious but also kind of a sweetheart as long as he isn’t trying to eat you (he developed a taste for human flesh).
Sylvester Stallone is a great choice to voice Nanaue. Some of the funniest lines and most violent moments are with Nanaue, particularly his love of reading and ability to learn Spanish.
John Cena has been a nice surprise in a lot of movies in his career, in that he’s an interesting actor with good comedic timing and can play a muscled hero just as well as he can play a dangerous doofus. I’m not totally sold on a Peacemaker television show since he wasn’t my favorite, but it’s not his fault he isn’t Ratcatcher 2, who is the real heart of the movie. Daniela Melchior can do so much with body language and tone, delivering a story about her father’s flaws and the origins of her ability to control rats without making it maudlin or rote. At her side is a rat, Sebastian, who wears a little backpack with an “S” on it. Sebastian gets some good moments of his own, and if you didn’t know that you needed Idris Elba reacting to an adorable rat offering him a big leaf, you do. You really, really do.
One of Gunn’s greatest strengths as a filmmaker is how well he balances big and small.
He knows how to center his characters even when the spectacle ramps up. In the case of the movie’s stunning villain (if you can call him that), Starro the Conqueror, Gunn does both. Starro is enormous and terrifying, a flashy starfish creature with a hunger for human faces, but it doesn’t appear on screen enough to wear out its welcome.
I felt a genuine shock at seeing Thinker’s lab, which shows how elaborate and full of texture even dingy sets can be. If you told me a lot of the movie’s budget went exclusively to designing the lab set, I would believe you.
It is viscerally unpleasant to watch at times because Starro is so gross to look at.
Overall, the movie is well made. The action is clean and inventive, the plot is clear, and the characters fairly well-defined.
The jokes don’t always land and the pacing suffers slightly in the third act but it never suffers enough to be a real issue. There’s are several moments throughout The Suicide Squad where things nearly click into place, and getting that close to perfection is so immensely difficult that it’s hard to say James Gunn didn’t wholly succeed at making a killer movie. My issues with it are relatively minor, and I think they speak to the limitations of the type of movie Gunn set out to make.
