You can tell that much of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad was written from a place of frustration, if not genuine anger, with the gilded cage of Marvel and the entire status quo of popular cinema as it’s currently manifested. By taking an unloved and unknown property and outfitting it with the heart and emotional resonance of his prior film Super and the low-fi aesthetic of a Corman cheapie like Galaxy of Fear or Space Truckers, Gunn became one of the few directors who managed to make Marvel work for him rather than the other way around, and the receipts showed what a winning combination that was. He was a joyous soldier for the company, a ceaseless defender of its practices, until that all collapsed for him (insert joke about thoughtcrime here) and he was poached by the Distinguished Competition who gave him a blank check to make and say whatever he wanted, provided that he was able to rehabilitate the image of Task Force X, whose reputation suffered after the much-maligned David Ayer adaptation hit theaters in 2016. We’ll take off the chains, unlock the gate, Warner Bros. said, and, sure enough, Gunn went hard, indulging every single Troma impulse he’d buried in his time at the House of Mouse, gleefully flaunting the conventions established by stuffed shirts (or stuffed ballcaps and fleeces) like Kevin Feige. With The Suicide Squad, Gunn has delivered the ultimate Anti-Hero poison pill, slipped from inside studio walls to a public looking for their next sip of untainted Flavor-Aid, a riff on Troma’s War with a budget in the hundreds of millions that goes to places nearly as wild as that film does. It’s a miracle that this thing exists, and it’s an even bigger one that it’s this much of a good time.
You know the basics at this point, I’m sure. Imprisoned minor-league supervillains get a once-in-a-sentence opportunity to serve their country using their particular set of skills, which, if completed, they’ll receive a number of years of their sentence. If they run away or disobey orders, well, that’s what the bomb implanted in the back of their skulls is for, and, trust me, they will want to run away — that’s why they call it the Suicide Squad, after all, because if it were the “Serve Your Sentence In Peace Squad,” it’d just be called “Jail.” Anyway, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has recruited a large team of villains to storm the beaches of a small island dictatorship, having recently been seized by an anti-US faction, which houses a facility holding some precious deep-science assets that, if they were to fall into the wrong hands, could really fuck stuff up for Waller and the US at large. These villains include Bloodsport (Idris Elba), an assassin with an impressive series of transforming weapons; Peacemaker (John Cena), a thicc and thick mercenary whose only conscience is what he deems to be in the interest of “peace;’ Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), who, along with Captain Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnamon) is the only holdover from the first film and whose deal you probably already know; Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchor), a girl with a tragic past who can control rats; Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who was infected by an interdimensional virus that causes him to shoot annihilating energy Polka-Dots, lest they build up under his skin and kill him (a cool effect!); and King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), a Shark-man who can barely talk and likes to eat people. Sounds like a real functional team.
What’s important to understand about the dynamic here is that Gunn is working in Troma archetypes, a sort of shotgun-blast style of horror satire that’s directly meant to undermine all of the straight work that comes to satisfy the studio heads’ needs for image management, which is a perfect aesthetic pair for John Ostrander’s conception of the Squad. Everyone here is an irredeemable psychopath, and what little good comes from their actions has a huge human cost attached to it, no matter what, the latter being true of most American misadventures in the third world. Gunn doesn’t shy away from that criticism, either: Our big bad’s origins are shaped by the backchannel pipelines between Nazi scientists and American spies endorsed through Operation Paperclip, and it never quite manages to leave our heads that our protagonists are essentially hyper-fascist slaves drafted into service to ensure that the government is never connected to their work, which was a key element missing from Ayer’s film. Waller’s character, one of the few holdovers from the DCEU era, is reshaped here into something a little less Nick Fury-like and closer to an impotent Allen Dulles, whose goals are to protect American interests at all costs, even if it means, you know, killing a man’s daughter or wiping out an entire continent to do so. And the consequences of these actions are clear: you will be horribly mutilated, and, if you survive, perhaps eaten by a giant shark-man or mind-controlled by a giant Starfish. The film’s first minutes feel like a truncated episode of One Million Ways to Die provided it was written by Grant Morrison during the Doom Patrol era. If you live outside the shadow of someone like Superman, the DC world is a bleak and awful world to live in, regardless of which director’s fingerprints have molded the particular iteration, and I think The Suicide Squad comes closest to articulating that it’s the Real World, only with its problems blown up to the size of a building due to the Red Kryptonite.
But that’s not to say it’s a drag, and the specific political nihilism here manages to prevent the film from rolling off the rails in the same cloying way that something like a Deadpool would. It often feels like Gunn is writing his dialogue in that way to mock that film series’ well-exhausted sense of ironic humor (I’ve seen Free Guy, and I have some thoughts about it, but I will say that Ryan Reynolds has to find a new lane within the next five years if he wants to avoid being branded low-class populist by the intelligentsia, where he’ll join up with his countrymen, Nickelback, on passe social signifiers), but he’s also got legitimate top-tier talent serving out his bon mots. Cena is, once again, incredibly funny, who plays Peacemaker as if he were plucked from the same universe as MacGruber, provided that character’s self-doubt was replaced by an eternal self-righteousness without an ounce of intelligence added to the concoction. Much like Will Smith, Elba’s cool, but the key difference is how he’s cool — Slick Willy is smooth, but Elba’s a badass, and this allows him to be genuinely amoral in a way that the Fresh Prince could never get away with (see him scream profanities at his teenaged daughter in a scene that feels like Gunn’s pointed barb at forced family contrivance in these pictures). Robbie’s really good here, which makes me think that Birds of Prey was its own minor miracle, given how much her Harley thrives off of being around other repellant characters, and Gunn also gives her a scene that is, perhaps, closest to what Paul Dini imagined when he dreamed her up, provided he was able to continue writing her character after Quinn’s “liberation” from the Joker. The rest are solid as well: Dastmalchian’s quiet performance allows the film to land its single-funniest visual gag, Stallone, as King Shark, is a great rejoinder to Groot, and Melchior is the film’s conscience, which is funny enough in its own right, given that she’s a woman who controls rats. Also, props to Gunn for casting Peter Capaldi, as the villainous Thinker, in a role well-suited to his talents.
The R-rated superhero film is already sort of a joke at this point — it was probably right around the time that Snyder announced that Batman V. Superman would get that rating, had the original cut been released, that the mob decided that the shit was for kids — but it’s a necessary rejoinder to the family-friendly vision of the entertainment future that Marvel has envisioned, one unthreatening to the bottom line and, more importantly, our international interest (which, funnily enough, I imagine the anti-US slant in this will be received well around the world more so than The Continuing Adventures of the Military-Industrial Superhero). The Suicide Squad takes that respectability and blows it up, chops it up, shoots it to pieces, stabs it in the heart with a javelin, sprays burning polka-dots at it, and chews on its desecrated head for good measure. It’s a swell tribute to Gunn’s origins as a genre filmmaker while demonstrating his essential skill as both a writer and director of populist blockbusters, and I’m genuinely bummed that he’s going to return to the big Marvel tent for one or two more outings with the Guardians because it feels like his specific voice and style is needed as a counter to the ouroboros as it absorbs prestige filmmaker after prestige filmmaker and sucks the life out of them. Yet at least we have this, an assertion of what identity remains outside of the machine, to offer as proof that it is possible for one to escape the void.