MANILA, PHILIPPINES — For the past decade plus, movies made by Marvel Studios have been hits at the box office, generating millions of dollars worldwide as they brought characters and stories from Marvel Comics to the big screen. While there have admittedly been several missteps in DC Comics’ attempt to catch up, tapping a director from Marvel to helm a bunch of z-list heroes has resulted in the most ridiculously fun DC Comics film yet.
Task Force X Director Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) once again assembles a ragtag team of supervillains to perform tasks that superheroes would never be caught doing. Tapping miscreants like Savant (Michael Rooker), TDK (Nathan Fillion), Weasel (Sean Gunn), Mongal (Mayling Ng), Javelin (Flula Borg), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) under the command of Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the so-called “Suicide Squad” has been tasked to invade the island of Corto Maltese after its government is overthrown by an anti-American regime.
There is actually another team that Waller deploys on the other side of the island nation in hopes of covering all her bases. That squad is led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and includes other miscreants like the brutal Peacemaker (John Cena), the fish-human hybrid King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), the very strange Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and the thief Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior). All the villains are forced to join the mission with a promise of lighter sentences if they survive. If they betray Waller though, each of them has been implanted with a bomb in their necks to ensure obedience.
When one team is betrayed as soon as they land on Corto Maltese, it’s up to the remaining Suicide Squad members to complete the mission of destroying the Nazi-era laboratory Jotunheim and stop the experiment only known as “Project Starfish”. If they don’t live up to their name, the Suicide Squad will be doing the US government a huge favor, that is if they don’t kill each other in the process.
In his previous stint with Marvel Studios, James Gunn succeeded where few thought he could; he turned virtual nobodies in the Guardians of the Galaxy and made them into superstars. There have now been two Guardians of the Galaxy films made, the characters were prominent in the last two Avengers films, a third Guardians film is on the way from Gunn, and the characters will again appear in the next Thor film as well. Credits Gunn’s quirky sense of humor, his love for the downtrodden characters, as well as his own sensibilities in turning Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket Raccoon, Mantis, and Groot into household names.
DC and Warner Bros. clearly wanted the same for their own characters and jumped on Gunn when he was temporarily canceled for an old tweet he made some years back. There was a previous Suicide Squad film released in 2016 and although the film’s concept had potential, that movie directed by David Ayer was obviously tinkered with too much by Warner Bros. and DC executives, so much so that it became incoherent at the end. After dealing with so many disasters at the box office, DC desperately wanted to turn their fortunes around and handed the reins over to Gunn.
In Gunn’s hands, The Suicide Squad actually becomes a fun film to watch. By using characters that even the most ardent DC Comics fan might have a hard time remembering and casting several aside in the first 15 minutes of the film, Gunn sets the stage for the ridiculousness and chaos that goes against what superhero films have become in the past few years. The blood flows and the gore is everywhere but that’s perfectly fine because this movie is definitely not aimed at children.
Elba’s Bloodsport could easily have been Will Smith’s Deadshot from the 2016 movie but Smith supposedly wasn’t available for the sequel. It doesn’t matter in the end because Elba brings some pain and anguish to the character and Bloodsport is like a blank slate, hardly used in comics or DC multimedia since his debut in the mid-1980s.
Robbie is dangerously close to being overexposed as Harley after the 2016 film, and last year’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), but she’s so good as the psychotic clown, and she clearly enjoys playing the character that she’s actually one of the film’s essential characters.
The breakout star of The Suicide Squad, though, is Polka-Dot Man, long a joke among comics fans, Gunn and Dastmalchian make him a tragic character with a backstory of an abusive mother who experimented on him as a child. His powers still seem laughable but when he explains why he needs to release his polka-dots, there’s unexpected pathos there that nobody sees coming.
This marks Cena’s second blockbuster of 2021 following F9: The Fast Saga, and his portrayal of the ruthless Peacemaker has already led to a TV show with him in the lead. He’s following Dwayne Johnson and Dave Bautista’s path of leaving wrestling for Hollywood and time will tell if he can be as big a leading man as either of those men.
Some have said that Stallone providing only the voice of the not-very-intelligent King Shark is his best performance in years. That’s not necessarily a knock on the former Rocky Balboa and John Rambo as he makes the shark-god sympathetic with an almost childlike innocence (when he’s not biting down on the bodies and arms of bad guys).
There is no clear indication that The Suicide Squad will be followed by a sequel or that these characters will return. After all, it’s in the team’s name that many are expected to not survive. However, by injecting some much-needed humor, sadness, character development, and actual fun into this film, Gunn has already exceeded the film that preceded it.
