I think James Gunn is chocolate ice cream. I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy well enough but found Vol. 2 to be overly laden with Gunn’s trademark gross-out schoolboy humor, a fascination with bodily functions and jeering insults. Vol. 2still had the Marvel heart, but The Suicide Squad has boasted that it is Gunn’s unvarnished foray into the DC (Extended) Universe. If this is Gunn undisguised, it is crude, and it is cruel, and it is certainly not my favorite flavor of ice cream.
In The Suicide Squad (not to be mistaken with its predecessor, Suicide Squad), Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has assembled another crew of miscreants to undertake a top-secret mission with clandestine ill intent. She sends the assassin Bloodsport (Idris Elba), the fanatical Peacemaker (John Cena), the depressive Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), young Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) and King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone) into the island nation of Corto Maltese to find mad scientist The Thinker (Peter Capaldi) before his Project Starfish is exposed. Meanwhile, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Squad leader Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) are stranded on Corto Maltese, with Harley doing her Harley thing while Flag tries to get control of the increasingly manic situation.
From its opening scenes, The Suicide Squad is aiming for a fun and zany tone, but instead it lands somewhere just south of virulently misanthropic. If audiences complained that Zack Snyder’s comic book movies boasted too high a body count, wait until they get a load of The Suicide Squad, in which human life does not matter while the film regards each death as a punchline, an opportunity to convince the audience that Gunn’s sick, bloody nihilism is something to be cheered. As a comic book fan, I was over the moon at the cast list, scraping the bottom of the barrel for characters like Mongal and Savant, The Thinker and King Shark (never mind that the latter two had already been on the CW show The Flash). After all, Gunn had successfully introduced audiences to Z-list Marvel characters like Groot and Yondu, and we fell in love with them.
Not so here. At every turn, each time a character debuts, someone else on screen verbally assaults them, calling them names and mocking them. Only Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is spared this unpleasant introduction, likely because it would beggar believability to think that anyone might get the drop on Idris Elba. There is nothing redemptive like the “We are Groot” moment and nothing heartfelt like Yondu’s remark, “He wasn’t your daddy”; the only thing that comes close is the clear and predictable relationship that forms between Bloodsport and his proxy daughter Ratcatcher 2, who is herself carrying her father’s complicated and tragic mantle.
When the film is not actively ridiculing its protagonists or treating them like mere cannon fodder, The Suicide Squadcontinues that Gunn tradition of kneecapping its emotional moments with lowest-common-denominator humor; worse yet, just when the characters get a moment in the sun, they’re often exterminated in brutal, abrupt fashion – and these moments are, again, so predictable, lacking only the subtlety of a bright neon sign to announce a character’s imminent mortality. It is hard to imagine any of these faces becoming breakout characters because the film doesn’t often seem to care if they live or die. In a sense, Gunn might seem to have the most in common with Amanda Waller, who sees her Squad draftees as expendable grist for her own manipulative mill, yet Gunn appears to have some degree of loathing for Waller too, especially given how the film treats her in its third act.
But I didn’t hate The Suicide Squad. There is so much in the movie that works. Elba is a gem, and Daniela Melchior is the closest thing the film has to a real protagonist, even wading her way with aplomb through a film school student monologue about her origin story. King Shark is the closest to the film’s Groot, though Gunn makes the curious decision to write the character, the comic book son of a sea god, like a brain-damaged toddler deserving of his colleagues’ derision. Capaldi is perfectly cast as The Thinker, even though the film never gives him an opportunity to flex his augmented brain. And of course, Margot Robbie continues to be a light in the darkness as Harley Quinn, a spot-on interpretation of an unapologetic if errant feminist. It’s only too bad that the film never quite knows whether it wants to be a true Suicide Squad movie or another Harley Quinn movie (in the vein of the delightful and underappreciated Birds of Prey).
But as much as I wanted to like the film, and as much good material as there is somewhere in The Suicide Squad, there is a core ugliness at the center of the film, an underlying contempt for its source material and its characters. There should be zaniness and joy, especially with a cast of misfits like this. The Suicide Squad was an opportunity to tell the schoolyard bullies that they were wrong, that Polka-Dot Man isn’t proof positive that comics are inherently stupid. “This is dumb,” the film says, “and you’re an idiot for liking this.” There is nothing redemptive about The Suicide Squad, nothing but condescending spite and scorn until an emotional climax that is never really earned.
And yes, I am aware of the delicious grim dark irony of complaining that a movie like The Suicide Squad is mean-spirited. If you put a crew of supervillains on a helicopter together, they probably wouldn’t get along; they’d cuss and sneer and betray each other. But as much of a mess as David Ayer’s Suicide Squad was, studio interference or no, there was always a sense that Ayer liked these characters and wanted us to like them too. Gunn’s Suicide Squad is like a serving of ice cream at the Abuse Café, and it is not for everyone.
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