Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: James Gunn
Starring: Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney, Viola Davis, John Cena, Sylvester Stallone, Idris Elba, Peter Capaldi, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Michael Rooker, Alice
Braga, Pete Davidson, Nathan Filion
Hollywood has been heavily mining the 1980s in recent years. I guess it's
an attempt to appeal to people of this writer's generation, those of us who
were kids in that most over-the-top of decades. But what Hollywood doesn't
realise is that if you were a kid in the '80s your media consumption
memories don't just revolve around the blockbusters of Spielberg and
Zemeckis. As an '80s kid there was nothing less cool than being into movies
that were made for kids. No, we wanted to watch slashers, ninja movies,
18-rated sex comedies and the sort of action movies where bodybuilders and
bimbos were always rocking up to some fictional Caribbean island to
overthrow some mustachioed dictator, mowing down scores of goons in the
process.
If The Suicide Squad is anything to go by, writer/director
James Gunn seems to have had a similar childhood. Somehow he's
convinced Warner Bros. to afford him a massive budget to craft a gore and
gag heavy love letter to the sort of movies Gen-Xers discovered rotting on
the bottom shelves of video stores. Where
David Ayer's po-faced predecessor
was a slog, Gunn's sequel commendably understands that it's a live action Saturday morning cartoon.
What Ayer failed to understand is that guys on a mission movies are about
the guys, not the mission. Gunn never allows his film to get needlessly
bogged down in plot, and it's refreshingly free of exposition regarding the
sort of macguffins viewers couldn't care less about. Instead he focusses on
creating characters that may be cartoonish but never feel
one-dimensional.
Like the 2016 Suicide Squad, this sequel is another riff on the Dirty Dozen template,
with a new squad of criminal misfits assembled for a mission.
Margot Robbie returns to what I guess is now her signature role of
homicidal dingbat Harley Quinn, along with Jai Courtney as Boomerang.
This time they're led by Idris Elba's Bloodsport and
John Cena's ironically named Peacemaker, who both possess the exact
same set of skills, leading to an ongoing rivalry that produces some of the
movie's best comic beats. Also aboard are a Sylvester Stallone voiced
shark; Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior), a young Portuguese woman with
the ability to command rodents; Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), a
polka-dot throwing weirdo with Mommy issues; and various other
oddballs.
Half of the cast is massacred in the opening 10 minutes, and various others
fall in battle as the movie progresses. This gives
The Suicide Squad an advantage over most of its superhero
rivals in that anyone can die at any time. This lends Gunn's film the sort
of stakes absent from your average superhero movie where you know the
costumed heroes are in no real danger.
While Gunn leans into his edgelord tendencies, with some jaw-dropping
moments of gore that are genuinely unexpected in a mainstream studio release
in 2021, his movie never feels mean-spirited. Amid all the guts, there's
genuine heart here too, much of it provided by Melchior's Ratcatcher, as
endearing a character as you'll find anywhere in modern blockbuster cinema.
In Gunn and Melchior's hands, Ratcatcher is a rare female action hero that
comes off as a feminine action hero rather than a masculine figure lazily
reconstituted for a female performer. She performs a dual function of acting
as a maternal figure for some of the squad members and a daughter substitute
to others.
The Suicide Squad is the rare comic book movie that feels
directed rather than designed by committee. Every frame of the movie feels
like Gunn's vision. Crucially the gags don't stop whenever there's an action
sequence. Rather the action set-pieces are often elaborate gags themselves.
I won't spoil it, but there's a punchline to one particular action sequence
that is a thing of comic genius and shows that Gunn knows exactly what he's
doing here.
Like all of these movies, The Suicide Squad could shave off
20 minutes or so. But unlike most superhero flicks, I was never bored
because Gunn creates a feeling that anything can happen here, and it often
does. Some characters don't quite live up to their billing (Stallone's King
Shark and Peter Capaldi's villainous The Thinker feel particularly
undercooked), but the key crew members are as fun a bunch of sociopaths as
you could hope to spend a Saturday night at the movies with.
The Suicide Squad is on Netflix UK/ROI now.