The Suicide Squad – A Review

Wow! I watched James Gunn’s rated R reboot of DC/Warner Bros. Suicide Squad, now titled THE Suicide Squad. The short and sweet of it is, I really enjoyed it… mostly. The movie is ridiculous and violent and foul and has moments of heart-felt sympathy.

Most of us got our introduction to director and writer James Gunn through Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies where he took a collection of zany but lesser-known anti-heroes and made them box-office superheroes and household names. Gunn uses his talents in a very similar fashion here but the PG-13 rating and Kevin Feige’s creative restraints are removed here. Warner Bros. studios evidently gave Gunn full creative control and let him run wild. The end result proves to be exactly that: creative and wild… but not always better, in my opinion.

The violence is off the rails, mostly for shock value and genuine laughs, if that’s your taste. The movie certainly earns its R rating just in the amount of faces we seen blown off or bodies dismembered. The language earns the R rating as well with enough F-bombs to make Scorsese proud. The movie could have done with cutting the foul language by half and I don’t think anyone would have noticed a depreciable difference. But, I’m always a stickler for over-used foul language. At a certain point, your characters sound less like adults and more like a 12-year-old kid that just learned a new bad word and won’t stop saying it in front of his pals just so they think he’s tough.

I will say the pace is quick and just right for this explosive day-in-the-life of the eponymous Suicide Squad. There’s plenty of satisfying thrills and plot twists and, by the end, you hope to see more of these characters in subsequent movies (John Cena’s Peacemaker evidently has a TV show in the works for HBOMax).

HIGHLIGHTS

·       Harley Quinn’s character is given much more respect and kick-butt moments in this film than she’s been given in any other previous outing. Several scenes of hers were a treat!

·       Polka Dot man is the surprise dark-horse character who held my attention in every scene he was in. Job well done to actor David Dastmalchian for bringing this strange and tormented character to life.

BONES TO PICK

·       James Gunn has a talent for marrying high-octane tales of losers forced to play heroes. And he successfully adds moments to tug at the heartstrings. But, The Suicide Squad didn’t do this as well as, say, the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise (Think of the “We are Groot” moment in the first movie or Yondu’s funeral scene in the second movie). Gunn certainly wrote moments like this in The Suicide Squad but they just didn’t pay off as well. That’s not to say these moments weren’t full of heart… they just felt more contrived and they didn’t land the same way. I genuinely think this is where artists need creative controls to do their best work, and I say this from the perspective of a writer and actor myself.

SUMMARY

              If you’re up for a ridiculous cast of characters in a ridiculously violent romp, this might be for you! It’s not as accessible as MARVEL’s line up of PG-13 hero stories. So, be warned the violence and the language and some scenes of brief nudity, used for comic effect, may drive some audiences away.

I give The Suicide Squad 7 out of 10 boomerangs!