The Suicide Squad

Task Force "Ecch!"

or

"Here's Hoping I See You in 3 Hours"

 

David Ayer's Suicide Squad was a sad affair. The trailers looked great, and the fan response was so positive to them that the Warner Brothers team took the movie away from Ayer and tapped the trailer team to re-cut it. There may have been two cuts and some "genius" mixed and matched, but the sum total was not as lively as it should have been, and a lot less anarchic as it was called out to be. It was glum with the sole high point being the introduction to Margot Robbie's version of Harley Quinn.

 

So, now, here's the 2.0 version, with a "The" adjective inserted to tell them apart (the next "Batman" film is "The" Batman), and the Warner Bro's do what they usually do when they think one of their tent-poles is in trouble—hire a director with ties to Marvel to re-do it (because that's worked so well in the past!). In this case, it's Troma director James Gunn, who directed the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films for Marvel, and got fired by Disney for some "bad tweets" he'd made in the past. While Disney got their mouse-knickers in a bunch, Warner grabbed him for the next "Suicide Squad" before Disney/Marvel turned tail and asked him to come back.

It was Warner's gain. Gunn's "take" on "Task Force X" "works".

There isn't a lot of set-up. We're are introduced to the super-villain Savant (Gunn crony Michael Rooker),sent to Belle Reve prison for blackmail. He is made a deal by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, national treasure and who is put to good use here) to become part of "Task Force X"—The Suicide Squad. An explosive charge is put in his neck (amusingly by the comics' creator James Ostrander) and is told that if he deviates from his mission that the device will be detonated, killing him instantly, but if the mission is accomplished and he survives, ten years will be taken off his sentence.

 

He is put on a plane to the South American Island of Corto Maltese, which has just had it's American-friendly government toppled by a new regime of cut-throats. The team consists of Savant, Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman from the original film), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, ditto), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, ditto-ditto) as well as new members Blackguard (Peter Davidson), Javelin (Flula Borg), an alien warlord called Mongal (Mayling Ng), TDK ("don't ask" and played by Nathan Fillion) and Weasel (Sean Gunn). Things do not go well once they make land-fall as their landing has been leaked to military on the island. As some of the posters say "Don't get too attached." More on this section later.

That assault was just a diversion; another team, comprising of Bloodsport (Idris Elba—he's great in this!), Peacemaker (Jon Cena), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), King Shark (Steve Agee and voiced by Sylvester Stallone), and The Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchion) land elsewhere and have a considerably easier time of it. How these guys got mixed up in this is done with a flashback as their mission is to infiltrate the capital and destroy all vestiges of what is called "Operation: Starfish," a super-secret project that has been under wraps for years and is in danger of being misused by the current junta. Oh, and their mission gets revised to also rescue Flag and Harley, who have gone missing.

Sounds simple enough, but there's still quite a few characters to juggle, and unlike Ayers, who gave back-stories to Quinn and Deadshot—and that's about it—Gunn manages to weave back-story in without having to build a whole new sequence around it, interrupting the story-flow. Oh, he jumps around in time a bit, but in the service of planning a surprise with a well-timed "gotcha" at moments of extreme duress for the team. "How will they get out of this one?" Well, just wait, we've got some 'splainin' to do.

Now, those who've seen the Marvel "Guardians" movies will be surprised at the difference between a "PG-13" James Gunn movie and a Hard-"R" James Gunn movie. Those who remember his unrated comics spoof, Super, will be more prepared. In the battle sequences, faces get blown off, people are ripped to shreds, blood spurts copiously, bodies set aflame, and limbs come off—intentionally and unintentionally—in a way that feels more like a visit to a triage unit than it does a comic-book fight. At one point (when Harley Quinn is single-handedly making an escape from the island El Presidente's stronghold) the blood-splatter is replaced by flower-petals and chirping birds, which can be explained away that she's crazy, but more probably it's to avoid an "X"-rating. 

And it's persistent. Parents should be warned: "It's a super-hero movie" is not an excuse and taking your kids to this is like taking them to Taxi Driver.

That being said, the movie also goes out of its way to be goofy. Gunn has picked comic-book characters whose power ratings are very low in the D&D deck—"Polka-Dot Man?" The Disconnected Kid?" "Ratcatcher 2?" "Weasel?"—but very high in the disposability category. That also includes two characters we meet later: "The Thinker" (played by an emaciated—but no less sharp—Peter Capaldi), and the movie's "Big Bad," one of the original villains of DC's "silver age"—appearing in the first appearance of The Justice League—"Starro, the Conqueror."

Yes, folks, he's a giant starfish. But, an intergalactic giant starfish. (Okay, that's still not impressive...) An intergalactic giant star-fish, who can squirt little starfish that will latch onto your face and take over your mind (except in the movie, they kill people dead and re-animate them as zombies). Well, yeah, it's still silly as all Hell, but...ya know...canon, copyrighted, merchandisable DC property...all of that.

A starfish throws a shark into a building. Yeah, tell me you've seen that before...

 
Okay, it's still silly as all Hell—especially when Gunn has stuck a google-eye rolling around in the middle of it—but, for me, it's a little bit of the charm. I liked the Pacific Rim movies, even though my rational brain told me that giant killer robots are a really ungainly system of defense (like the AT-AT's in the "Star Wars" movies, "just go for the legs and let gravity sort it out"), but it's still something of a hoot to see. And look, you can go as grim and gritty as you want to in the quest to make your movie "bad-ass," but in the end it's still a comic book movie. Real junta's flood countries with cocaine or hack computer clouds, they don't launch giant starfish (although I bet they would if they could).

What I'm saying is the goofiness off-sets the carnage, crossing that bridge between tension and comedy, which, although I say it's a bridge it is actually more of a tightrope. The greater the tension, the greater the release, whether it be shock or laughter. Gunn has always had that sensibility, but the allowance to go "R" just gives him permission to push the boundaries, not unlike the original Deadpool (but without the fourth-wall breaking "meta" quality that quickly wears out its welcome). It's fast, it's funny, and it's more than competent. Recently, I've been decrying the loose/lame action scenes these movies have been sporting, but Gunn lets you know where people are, how they got there, and what the big picture perspective of those sequences are. With so many characters that takes some doing.

Casting helps that process a lot. Fortunately, the film is chock-full of good actors who can pull off the drama and the comedy. Davis, Robbie and, surprisingly, Kinnaman pull this off amazingly well. But, Idris Elba comes off with one of the best star-turns he's ever done, Cena shows a flair for straight-faced comedy, Melchior becomes the heart and soul of the movie, and Dastmalchion takes a lame part and turns it to an advantage. You care if these guys make it through the movie, and, as it lives up to the title and original concept, that is never a sure-thing.

 

It's a savage/silly romp, not afraid of making fun of and celebrating the silliness of the four-color world.