Review - The Suicide Squad

You may remember, five long years ago, a film came out called Suicide Squad. It was a complete mess of a movie that was cobbled together from multiple cuts, hated by many (myself included) and still somehow made almost $750 million worldwide. It was a weirdly large cultural moment, everyone was dressing up as Harley Quinn that Halloween and mocking Jared Leto's Joker. A lot has happened in the past five years, including a Harley Quinn spin-off and James Gunn being fired and rehired over at Marvel, both of which helped get us here, to The Suicide Squad. It's a sort of sequel to Suicide Squad, as well as a sort of sister piece to writer and director Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films, but it's not nearly as complicated as it all sounds.

It's not exactly an intricately woven story, but it feels somewhat refreshing when compared to other recent superhero films.

The basis of the story is, similar to the first film, that a gang of misfit criminals are offered the chance to decrease their prison sentences by performing dangerous missions that could (and probably will) result in their death. In this case, that mission is Project Starfish, an attempt to prevent a recently overthrown South American nation from using a strange intergalactic weapon against countries like the USA. The odds of survival are low, but what other chance do the squad have? It's not exactly an intricately woven story, but it feels somewhat refreshing when compared to other recent superhero films, as it builds from a low stakes story to a story of only slightly higher stakes. There's escalation, but only ever in ways that feel manageable. That's good for me. Either stick small like this, or go into gonzo timeline shattering stuff, the middle ground is of little interest!

Our titular squad is quite expendable and therefore absolutely stacked full of acting talent. There's too many to list in full, but it's a cast who (in the nicest way) well suit the rejects and freaks they inhabit. That applies to everyone from the returning Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, to newcomers Daniela Melcior as the adorably disgusting Ratcatcher 2 and Sylvester Stallone (yes, that Sylvester Stallone) voicing King Shark. They all flesh their characters out for as long as they have flesh to inhabit. A quick mention should go to a wonderfully cast John Cena as Peacemaker. The guy inhabits all that is douchey and gross about America in ways that play brilliantly into and against his star image. It's not as funny as the work he did in Blockers, or as entertaining as his role in F9, but it's a note perfect piece of casting that only works more as the film progresses.

However, I think there are two characters in this film whose treatment is emblematic of all the things it does right. First is Harley Quinn, played of course by the wonderful Margot Robbie. Harley is a character I haven't been a huge fan of in her live action films. I find her often quite abrasive, being over-used to the point of annoyance in both Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey. Here though, Harley is a side character and she works great as that. She's never diverting the plot too long to be annoying, only serving to spice up the screen a bit and then blend into the background for the main squad to take focus. It's the most I've liked Harley Quinn in live action, it makes me not resent all the people who will once again dress up as her this Halloween. 

Polka Dot Man is a legitimate tragicomic character, hilarious because of all the ways he really isn't.

My absolute favourite character though is Polka Dot Man, played by David Dastmalchian. Dastmalchian is a character actor who has popped up in small roles in big projects throughout the years, always impressing. He's in The Dark Knight, in Ant-Man, he even stops by for a few episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. If you see him, you're usually in for a great few minutes. He has more to do here than I've seen him do before and he does so beautifully. Polka Dot Man should be a joke character. Often, he is, like in The Lego Batman Movie. Here though, he's treated seriously, in all his strangeness. Yeah, he shoots polka dots. Okay, so he also has to expel colour from his face at regular intervals. But he also suffers from serious depression after mistreatment from his mother when he was young. Polka Dot Man is a legitimate tragicomic character, hilarious because of all the ways he really isn't. He might now be one of my favourite comic book characters. That's what a good superhero film should do, make you care intensely about characters you've never met before. I want to read all his comics.

It's not all sunshine and blood spurts though, we're starting to run up against some of the problems of The Suicide Squad. Because while sincerity is often the films best suit, as Polka Dot Man proves, there are great stretches of the film in which it keeps its characters at a distance. You can also feel James Gunn's desire to make this film edgy and boundary pushing, simply because he can and he wants to. After all, this guy got started with Troma, it's in his filmmaking DNA. This balancing act between sincerity and snark kept me distant through the early part of the film. So much of the marketing surrounding The Suicide Squad emphasised the point that these characters are expendable, but in a feature length blockbuster film you need to work out which characters to connect to or you'll fade into apathy. It was a close call, but once frontrunners with characteristics and some heart emerged, I was saved from the jaws of apathy.

It has now been five years since Deadpool was released, [and] in that time we've evolved.

The issue of edginess also takes me to another quandary I had throughout. It has now been five years since Deadpool was released, a film that proved to movie studios that comic book movies aimed at adults were a viable and profitable market. In that time we've evolved from merely the excitement surrounding Deadpool of "superheroes but there's blood and swearing" to complex explorations of adult themes in TV shows like The Boys. It is no longer enough to just be gory and irreverent... Which is tricky because that's what The Suicide Squad is. There are gestures towards broader politics, but gestures alone they are, make no mistake. We've moved away from Disney but this is still a film produced by a corporate behemoth, no boats may be rocked in this harbour. Otherwise, it's like a version of Guardians of the Galaxy that avoided being polished by Disney and its sheen, choosing instead to bathe in bodily fluids and angst. The Disney sheen gave Guardians a feeling of being special though, it made it a better movie. I can't help but wonder if The Suicide Squad would be a better movie if it spent less time simply being giddy about existing and more time trying to expand themes or build characters. But then again, maybe I ask too much of a movie with a character called The Detachable Kid.

Regardless, I enjoyed The Suicide Squad. Our start together was rocky, but it won me over more and more as it progressed. It marks a checkpoint, from which moment violent irreverence will not be enough to make a superhero film notable, but it just about slips through. It's fun enough, it's dumb enough, it's probably the best blockbuster you could watch at the cinema at the moment, assuming you've already seen F9. It's all... enough. And that's enough, for me anyway. Compared to Suicide Squad, that feels like a minor miracle. That's why I give The Suicide Squad a