Rated R for strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use and brief graphic nudity.
Now Playing In Theaters and Streaming on HBO Max Until September 5 Intelligence officer Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is the head of Task Force X, a project that uses the world’s most powerful and dangerous super-villains for global missions in exchange for lighter sentences. Because of the dangerous missions and their expendability, the degenerate criminals have nicknamed themselves the Suicide Squad. Now, the squad is sent on their deadliest mission yet. On a South American island nation, a totalitarian regime is working with something known as Project Starfish, involving a malicious, extraterrestrial creature. With the project threatening to cause a global catastrophe, Waller sends super-villains Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) to put an end to it. Probably the biggest question everyone will have about The Suicide Squad is, “is it better than the first movie?” Yes, we all know the first Suicide Squad from 2016 was a terrible movie, plagued with bad, exposition-heavy dialogue and forgettable characters. While it did have some good performance, specifically from Margot Robbie and Will Smith, their charismatic presences weren’t enough to save the movie overall. Now this sequel, which acts more like a reboot rather than a sequel, brings in the talents of writer/director James Gunn. It’s actually kind of hilarious how much of a middle finger this movie is towards Disney. It’s like Gunn saying, “you want to fire me from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3? Fine, then I’ll go to your biggest rival and make the least family-friendly movie possible.” The high ratings this movie is currently receiving almost reinforce this standpoint. Unfortunately, while I appreciate Gunn’s efforts to give this movie its own flavor, I didn’t enjoy the film overall. I joked that it would be really hard for this movie to be as awful as its predecessor, but turns out it wasn’t that hard at all. And while this movie is certainly not as bad as the first one, it’s sadly not much better, and suffers from some of that movie’s same flaws as well as a series of new ones. Let’s tackle what’s good about the film. Once again, the cast is the major highlight. I have to give particular praise to Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, and John Cena. Robbie continues to be the most consistent, and arguably best, part of the DC franchise, and Cena continues to show that he has a lot of range as an actor. I’ve alway been a fan of Elba, and it was nice to have his particular charm within the cast of mostly newbies. I also appreciate James Gunn’s personal style with the film. It’s clear that Warner Bros. gave him full creative control here, and it gives a lot more personality to the material when compared to the first film. Every frame oozes and life, color, and charm. The movie is allowed to be its own thing instead of being stylistically in service of the rest of the franchise. It’s this individuality that makes me love the DC franchise more than the Marvel franchise. While the film gets off to a promising start, it isn’t long before it begins to run out of steam. There’s only so many juvenile jokes and people getting torn to pieces I can take before it starts feeling tedious and unnecessary. I’ve never been a fan of gross-out sexual jokes or graphically killing someone just for the sake of laughs. So for this movie’s sense of humor to rely fully on this meant that I didn’t get much out of it. But it’s not just those jokes that didn’t work. Many of the film’s other gags fall flat due to bad pacing and just being really obvious. For example, there’s the joke in the trailer where the squad is preparing to launch an epic rescue mission for Harley Quinn, only for her to show up unexpectedly, having escaped without their help. Without spoiling anything, the way it plays out in the film completely butchers its potential and the whole bit ends up largely laugh free. In fact, the story as a whole feels very disjointed and badly paced. There are multiple sequences where we jump back and forth between different perspectives, which end up stunting the movie’s progression. There’s also a series of subplots and setups that in the end never get the pay off they tease. There’s really loads of moments in the film where Gunn seems to think he’s subverting our expectations, but really just leaves us feeling cheated. It’s kind of annoying that, as the DC universe expands into R-rated territory, the characters are starting to devolve as a result. The way the characters act in this film make them feel less like redeemable villains and more like violent psychopaths. The characters we actually get invested in are often killed off unceremoniously, and the ones that survive are the ones I kind of wanted to see get killed instead. It’s hard to like the movie when the characters aren’t worth rooting for. While definitely an improvement over its predecessor, The Suicide Squad suffers from a whole host of new problems that make it a different kind of unpleasant experience. Maybe I’m just not a fan of James Gunn’s style, but I don’t get much joy out of his giddiness to wring laughs from consistent dick jokes and graphic kills, or his ensemble of one-dimensional murderers. I still isn’t as bad as the first film, but it’s still not as fun as the concept might suggest.
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