For various reasons I don’t have the opportunity to see The Suicide Squad in a theater but it’s being heavily promoted on HBO Max. The fact that this movie is distinguished from its predecessor only by a The article means that DC Comics is clearly intending this to be a reboot from David Ayer’s Suicide Squad film, even though Viola Davis and Joel Kinneman are reprising their characters. Thing is, the premise from the comics is that the Suicide Squad stories are an inherent reboot: Other than government agents Amanda Waller and Rick Flag (Davis and Kinneman) the Suicide Squad is a reset every mission because all the other characters are hardened super-criminals who volunteer for missions that they may not come back from on the assumption that time will get taken off their sentences. I liked the David Ayer movie a lot more than some people did, apparently. It was a murky, dimly-lit affair clearly designed to fit in with the “DC EU” (aka the Snyderverse) but for some reason it actually worked. Maybe that’s because when you want your characters to act like hardened criminals in a grey prison environment, it works better when the characters actually ARE hardened criminals in a grey prison environment as opposed to four-color superheroes in Metropolis.
But in addition to the aforementioned actors, Suicide Squad also featured a true breakout performance by Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, former sidekick of The Joker, and while Jared Leto’s Joker was way too Juggalo to be tolerable, Robbie was so great that her performance immediately guaranteed a sequel to the movie as well as a solo project that’s already come out. That meant DC just needed to repeat the formula of the core characters doing another violent mission with a bunch of misfits who would never be mistaken for superheroes. So they got James Gunn (temporarily canned from Marvel Studios) who made a successful franchise out of the Guardians of the Galaxy, a team composed of a grim assassin, an even more grim and not-too-bright warrior, a walking tree, a cyborg raccoon and a guy played by Chris Pratt, which automatically made the tree and the raccoon look more serious.
So with this movie, Gunn starts off with a covert mission in a faraway island including Flag, Quinn, survivor of the first movie Captain Boomerang, Pete Davidson and a giant weasel (these last two are not the same character). However none of them knows that Waller has assembled them to be Team Fuckup and distract the beach garrison so that a far more competent team can infiltrate the island. This team is led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) a ruthless killer who becomes the focus of the story, at least until the team rescues Flag and Quinn (neither one of whom needs rescuing). And things proceed from there, and the number of exploding bodies is probably equal to or more than the number of F-words in the dialogue.
And given the whacko nature of the final boss, The Suicide Squad fulfills its promise of “What if James Gunn got to do Guardians of the Galaxy with an R rating?” Including putting Michael Rooker and Sylvester Stallone in for no particular reason. I’m pretty sure you’ve already seen this by now, but if not, please: Go see The Suicide Squad.
You will believe a shark can talk.