I appear to be one of the few people who is still willing to say a good thing about David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (and without endlessly pleading for a #AyerCut to make it “good”). Yeah, it’s definitely flawed and more than a little messy, but on the strength of the characters, I had a lot of fun with it. However, if anyone was going to give that concept a second try, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone better suited for it than James Gunn. He’s already proven his worth with elevating lower-tier comic book characters with his work on the Guardians Of The Galaxy, and for a team on a similar moral standing, he should know how to deal with the material. And I gotta say, even as an apologist for the 2016 film, this honestly blows it out of the water.
For a start, even with how much the 2016 characters won me over, Gunn goes the extra mile to really make the audience engage with and care about the new team roster. Margot Robbie and Joel Kinnaman return as Harley Quinn and Rick Flag respectively, and they’ve definitely gotten a upgrade here. Harley might be the single biggest badass of the entire group, since she’s given the best action scenes to work with, and Flag is once again the token human, but that’s now been amplified with him being the moral compass as well, adding some muscle to the film’s bigger statements.
Speaking of muscle, John Cena as Peacemaker is an absolutely fascinating and fun addition to the team. He’s basically a pastiche of the uber-patriotic, nationalistic, ‘ends justify the means’ brand of superhero; the kind that Chuck Dixon would have written for back in the day. Not only does he sum up a lot of the film’s attitudes regarding American military interference, his buddy act with Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is top-notch. Elba himself, while portraying a character with similar paternal leanings and murky morality, is easily separated from Deadshot in the 2016 film, and his role as the de facto leader and regular proclaimer of “What the fuck?!” at his surroundings works really nicely.
Daniela Melchior and David Dastmalchian as Ratcatcher II and the Polka-Dot Man respectively… yeah, once again, Gunn is giving the spotlight to lesser-known characters, and they add a lot to the overall group chemistry. Peter Capaldi as The Thinker is a very welcome entry, and it helps that his brash mad scientist is like his turn as the Twelfth Doctor in a more mature feature, which I am all kinds of here for. But honestly, though, my favourite has to be Sylvester Stallone as King Shark, the dopey cannibal with a dad bod. There’s just something so innocent about him that makes me smile.
And since we’re talking about regular cannibalism, I might as well get this out in the open: This is easily the goriest comic book movie I’ve ever watched, and possibly the goriest I’ve ever reviewed on this blog. In the intersection of old-school war mercenary cinema and superpowered capeshit, he finds all manner of excuses to paint the screen red with human blood-balloons. Even knowing Gunn’s background in this kind of exploitation nonsense, I was still taken aback at just how graphic this film can get. But where that gets weird is in how, despite all the gratuity, there is never even a whiff that Gunn is trying too hard to get that kind of reaction. The way all this blood and exploded body parts and casual chewing on human heads like apples is portrayed, it’s so matter-of-fact as to be like second nature. Coming from the filmmaker behind Slither, this makes all kinds of sense.
Of course, splatstick spectacle is far from the only thing this film has going for it. It also continues Gunn’s knack for complex family dynamics and making the audience care about the most unlikely of characters. Apart from Viola Davis returning as Amanda Waller (retaining her crown as the biggest bitch in the DC universe in the process), just about everyone here has their sympathetic side. Whether it’s the result of fucked-up relationships with their parents or past lovers, their begrudging respect for each other, or just being brought out of their natural habitat by forces outside of their control, even the supposed big bad of the film might just make you feel sorry for it by film’s end.
It also builds on the reluctant soldier angle of the 2016 film and the source material and, refracting it through the typical by-line for these kinds of ‘government hires mercenary group to settle some accounts in another country’ stories, ends up saying a hell of a lot about the role America has played in foreign affairs. While managing to avoid hypocrisy in its main statements, it points the finger right at the bureaucrats and politicians that regularly send in soldiers to wreak havoc overseas to serve their own ends, just as Waller is doing here. It’s incredibly brazen in that point too, frequently bringing up how literal children are caught in the crossfire of these missions, and openly questioning how stupid it is to be sending trigger-happy mercenaries to try and ‘fix’ other countries.
But more so than anything that strictly political, the main point here is something shared by both the 2016 film as well as the Guardians Of The Galaxy films. Put simply, it acknowledges that every member of the team is broken in their own way. They’re either driven mad from trauma, fractured due to their relationships with their families, considered a joke in this world of Supermen and Wonder Women, or any mixture of the three. Gunn never shies away from their respective damage, and the damage they regularly inflict on others in turn… but in doing so, he bolsters his own perspective on these characters as real heroes. And as driven home by what might be the single greatest use of Taika Waititi in a film to date, it shows that no matter how broken, how jaded, how ridiculed, or how conflicted, everyone has that chance to be a hero.
This is the kind of messaging that keeps me coming back to superhero fiction, and it being delivered in this kind of extremely bloody packaging just makes me all the more appreciative of it. It’s an example of how there’s more than one way to be a hero, both in the film’s universe and in our own, and considering the kind of stories James Gunn gravitates towards, it’s exactly what this film needed to be. It’s all kinds of bombastic fun, with the right framing and smarts to still make a salient point in-between the blood spray, and even with my fondness for the 2016 film, there’s no contest: James Gunn has done it again.
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