The Suicide Squad is the most entertaining movie of the summer. Warner Bros., the shepherd of all DC Comics characters, has given writer/director James Gunn creative carte blanche to produce a supremely confident, self-assured, hilariously violent romp. Warner Bros. spent much of the last decade clumsily playing catch-up to Marvel Studios’ runaway success. While Marvel has refined an assembly-line style of interconnected storytelling, Warner Bros. regularly disregards that stable uniformity and gives filmmakers an open canvas, interconnected film canon be damned! That chaotic, scattershot strategy of Warner Bros. throwing everything at the wall has led to some of the best superhero films of the genre: the earnest optimism of Wonder Woman, the campy grandiose of Aquaman, the tongue-in-cheek energy of Shazam! These are all movies with distinct styles and tones, and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad may just top them all. Gunn cut his directorial teeth making low-budget Troma films, a studio famous for stylized, hyper-violent B-movies. The Suicide Squad pairs perfectly with Gunn’s absurdist sensibilities. It’s, in a word, great.
The squad itself is an ever-rotating roster of expendable C- and D-list supervillains, given a chance by the penal system to shave off some prison time in return for going on dangerous missions. A bomb implanted in their heads prevents them from escaping while on assignment. It’s actually just the The Dirty Dozen with ostentatious, dispensable super-criminals.
This isn’t the Warner Bros.’ first attempt at bringing the squad to the screen, but this is by far a superior effort. In the embryonic phase of starting their rival cinematic universe, they assembled a dour, visually-muddled Suicide Squad in 2016, directed by David Ayer and starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie. It’s a mess of a movie—an unsurprising result of studio meddling and a cynical response to the needle-drop fun of Guardians of the Galaxy and the silly mayhem of Deadpool. (Not to mention a laughably misguided interpretation of the Joker.) When Gunn was temporarily dropped from directing Marvel’s third Guardians of the Galaxy film, Warner Bros. immediately hired Gunn and gave him any project of his choosing; he chose to resurrect the Suicide Squad. It’s clear the roadblocks and interference that contributed to 2016’s Squad have been removed for Gunn. That creative freedom translates well to the big screen. As the assembled host of second-tier villains embark on their covert operation, it’s immediately clear that any character can die, and many do. It gives the entire enterprise a risky excitement, as action sequences result in deadly consequences for our team of criminals.
Part of Squad‘s appeal is bringing sillier, lesser-known characters to the big screen as canon fodder. Gunn relishes the immense silliness of Golden Age comic book creations, born from underpaid comic writers with tight deadlines in need of gimmicky, one-off villains for superheroes to swat down. One such character in the film is a dimwitted, anthropomorphic shark, voiced by Sylvester Stallone—and his charmingly confused (and violent) antics often steal the show. Another is Polka-Dot Man, who shoots polkadots. And Weasel, a laughably-unsettling, man-sized weasel. The movie doesn’t water down how wonderfully stupid some of these characters are, and goes further than hanging a lampshade; it gleefully embraces the stupidity. But while the metahumans are often beautifully lame, the movie never feels mean or punches down. Gunn imbues petty, one-note characters with surprising heart and humanity. Gunn leans into his Guardians experience to craft compelling team dynamics, effectively setting up and paying off inter-team conflicts that parallel individual character arcs. He also adds just enough narrative verve to keep those generic arcs from ever feeling stale. For example, this is the best-utilized outing of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, who was underserved in the 2016 Squad and frankly too front-and-center in last year’s Birds of Prey. This film has the perfect balance of Harley, letting her play off the rest of the team, but also landing a giddy, offbeat side story that provides surprising character growth.
Complementing Gunn’s confident visual style and panache is his involvement with previsualization teams. With so many wheels spinning and the time required to bring visual effects to life, a team of previsualization artists will often receive direction on action sequences from the filmmakers or studio, and go about putting them together. This can often mean that directors who are unfamiliar or inexperienced with big-budget filmmaking will rely on previs teams to create the visuals and shot composition of the sequences in question. If you’ve ever found movie action stale or generic, the culprit could be the limited involvement of the director. Gunn has talked about working directly Marvel’s previs teams for his two Guardians films, personally crafting the visual language and pacing of his set-pieces. The Suicide Squad is no exception. Gunn’s voice and engaging visual style are felt in every sequence—some small-scale and sardonic, others grand and operatic. One particular highlight has Harley Quinn at the center of a vibrant and fantastically-realized escape from a government compound. Its emblematic of the film’s action in general: funny, inventive, and in service of the characters.
Oddly enough, The Suicide Squad is one of the few theatrical releases in the last 18 months to actually make its originally-intended release date. Despite signs of returning pre-pandemic Box Office receipts, The Suicide Squad has opened with a financial whimper. There are a several reasons why—poor reception to the 2016 film, the simultaneous streaming release to HBO Max, and the rising rates of the Delta variant—and one worries that Warner Bros. and others will take the wrong lessons from the film’s financial reception (the critical reception is through the roof). Let’s hope precious blockbuster IP will always be given to offbeat filmmakers like James Gunn, with latitude to take creative risks. That’s not a fool-proof formula for success, but it would result in more brazenly-confident, visually-distinct films like The Suicide Squad.
The Suicide Squad is currently playing in theaters and available to HBO Max. It runs 132 minutes and is rated R for strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use and brief graphic nudity.
