The Suicide Squad

The Beautiful Chaos of the Expendable

I never entirely bought the superhero-industry habit of taking second-tier villains and insisting they can save the world if you squint hard enough, but James Gunn’s *The Suicide Squad* made me realize the premise maybe wasn’t broken. I’d just been watching people who didn’t know what to do with it. David Ayer’s 2016 version felt hacked to bits and embalmed in studio notes. Gunn’s film, sequel on paper and reset in spirit, is something rowdier and much more alive. It’s vulgar, soaked in blood, and—somewhat to my surprise—actually pretty great.

Part of the fun is how little it seems to care about brand management. After his brief Marvel exile, Gunn was handed DC toys and apparently decided to spend the budget on a giant alien starfish and a humanoid shark in cutoffs. The opening beach assault, where half the marketed cast is slaughtered almost immediately, feels like a dare tossed straight at franchise logic. It’s funny, nasty, and genuinely destabilizing in a way superhero movies rarely allow themselves to be.



The movie definitely has soft spots. The second act gets bogged down in its own machinery and loses momentum exactly when it ought to be flooring it. Harley Quinn’s detour with the Corto Maltese dictator has some striking imagery, but it also feels like the script pausing to fulfill the required Margot Robbie quota. Once the film settles back with its central pack of weirdos, though, the rhythm clicks again. Gunn cuts to music with real purpose. The soundtrack doesn’t feel like a panic button pressed over dead space. It feels embedded in the film’s bruised sense of humor. Katie Rife at *The A.V. Club* got the sensation exactly right when she wrote that the movie’s giddy charge "is akin to sucking on whippits while doing donuts in a grocery-store parking lot."

What I like most is how much the actors use their bodies. Idris Elba makes Bloodsport less cool than tired, which is smarter. In the early scenes with his daughter, his whole frame sags with the knowledge that he has failed her and knows it. John Cena goes the opposite direction as Peacemaker, moving like a military action figure ratcheted one click too tight. He’s funny, yes, but also unnerving in how totally he has outsourced conscience to ideology.



There’s one tiny moment near the end that sums up why the film works better than it should. Peacemaker has Ratcatcher 2 in his sights. Cena has spent the whole movie barking jokes and slogans with dead-eyed confidence, but in that close-up, right before he tries to protect an American secret by shooting a kid, something flickers. Shame, maybe. Self-disgust. You see that he hates what he is about to do and is going to do it anyway. That’s better character work than you expect in a film where someone weaponizes polka dots.

(And yes, the politics are about as subtle as a brick through glass. Gunn openly dunks on American interventionism and on the fantasy that Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller represents any moral authority at all. Then again, a movie about a skyscraper-sized blue starfish probably doesn’t need to whisper.)



Gunn asks you to laugh at bodies getting pulped and then, seconds later, to care deeply about damaged people and their pet rats. Somehow he gets away with it more often than not. I left the theater exhilarated and a little wrung out. It’s too much movie in the way fireworks are too much sky. But after years of slick, interchangeable superhero products that look like they were color-graded in an underground garage, Gunn’s grimy, garish sincerity feels like oxygen.