- UK release: July 2021
- Director: James Gunn · Writer: James Gunn
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; DC Films; Atlas Entertainment; The Safran Company
- Genre: Superhero war-mission comedy · Runtime: 132 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Margot Robbie (I, Tonya, Birds of Prey) as Harley Quinn; Idris Elba (Luther, Pacific Rim) as Bloodsport; John Cena (Blockers) as Peacemaker; Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2
- IMDb: 7.2 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 90% critics / 82% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Five years ago, Suicide Squad was the film that proved a great cast, a famous logo and a soundtrack full of needle-drops could still add up to a mess. Warner has now done something close to admitting it: hired James Gunn off the back of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, handed him the same title with a definite article bolted on, and let him spend an R-rated budget doing whatever he liked. Gunn briefly lost his Marvel job in a public flap and was free to take the call, which is the kind of accident that occasionally produces a much better film than anyone had a right to expect. This is one of them.
The setup
Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) runs Task Force X out of Belle Reve prison, where the worst people in the system trade jail time for missions nobody is meant to survive. The job this time is Corto Maltese, a small island state that has just had a coup, and a fortress-laboratory called Jotunheim, home to a Cold War experiment the new regime would very much like to keep and the Americans would very much like to erase. Waller assembles a squad of the expendable, drops them on a hostile beach, and waits to see how many of them last the morning. What they find inside Jotunheim is worse than the briefing let on, which is the part I will leave alone.
The cast
Gunn loads the squad with people he is happy to kill off, which keeps the stakes honest in a way superhero films usually dodge. Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is the reluctant centre, a marksman with a grievance and a daughter, and Elba plays him with the weary competence of a man who would rather be anywhere else. John Cena’s Peacemaker is the find: a flag-waving zealot who will murder for peace and means it sincerely, and Cena commits to the joke so completely that the character becomes the film’s funniest and most unsettling presence at once. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn returns lighter and stranger than before, given a solo set-piece escape that is the best thing the character has had on screen. The surprise is Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2, who walks in with a sackful of rodents and quietly becomes the emotional anchor of the whole thing.
The craft
Gunn shoots the violence as cheerful spectacle. Bodies come apart in bright daylight, Henry Braham’s camera lingers on the gore with a cartoonist’s glee, and the comic timing never lets the carnage curdle into the grimness the 2016 film mistook for maturity. John Murphy’s score and a wall-to-wall song selection do the propulsion, and the design work, from a giant alien starfish to a rat-controlling teenager, is committed without ever winking too hard. At 132 minutes it moves like a war film with the safety off, structured as a mission with chapter cards and a body count, and the surprising thing is how much feeling Gunn smuggles in between the decapitations. The squad earn your investment, which is why losing them lands.
How it stacks up
The obvious reference is Guardians of the Galaxy, and the lineage shows: a misfit ensemble, needle-drops, and a sincere streak under the irreverence. But the film Gunn is really remaking is The Dirty Dozen, the expendable-criminals-on-a-suicide-mission template, run through the splatter and satire of Starship Troopers. It shares Deadpool’s licence to be rude and bloody, though it is warmer and less pleased with itself than that film. Set against its own predecessor it is barely the same species: where the 2016 Suicide Squad was a studio committee in a trench coat, this is one director with a clear voice and nothing to lose.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are enthusiastic, sitting around 90%, and the line is that Gunn has rescued a franchise everyone had written off. Audiences are warm but a touch cooler at 82%, and the gap is easy to read: this is a hard 15 with severed limbs and full-frontal nudity, and some of the family-superhero crowd plainly did not sign up for that. The wider worry is that it opened day-and-date on a US streaming service, which has not helped the box office. None of that touches the film itself, which delivers more than its troubled marquee suggested.
Verdict
I came to this expecting to tolerate it and came out grinning. It is funny, it is genuinely gory, and it does the one thing the previous film could not: it makes you care which of these awful people make it home. The cost of entry is a high tolerance for chaos and viscera, and if that is not your thing nothing here will win you over. For everyone else this is the most fun DC has been at the cinema in years, with a strong rewatch pull thanks to the cast, the songs and the gags you miss first time round. It loses a little for being content to be a very good romp rather than anything deeper. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now. Worth the big screen for the daylight carnage and the soundtrack.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: John Cena’s Peacemaker proved popular enough to carry his own series, Peacemaker (2022), with Gunn writing and directing, which extends the film’s tone into television and is the natural next watch. Gunn went on to take charge of DC’s film slate outright, making this look in hindsight like an audition he passed. The film is now on disc and digital and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong bloody violence, gore, language, brief drug misuse. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Frequent scenes of violence include shootings, stabbings, slashings, decapitations, limbs being cut off, people being crushed, melted, torn apart and exploding. Much of the violence has a darkly comic tone, and results in bloody detail and gory images.
Threat and horror: Scenes of threat and horror include people being controlled by alien creatures and experimented on.
Language: There is frequent use of strong language (‘motherf**ker’, ‘f**k’), as well as milder terms including ‘dick’ ‘pussy’, ‘bloody’, ‘shit’, tits’, ‘butt’ and ‘hell’.
Sex: Occasional crude references are made to sex, including to sexual positions.
Drugs: A man is briefly seen injecting heroin.
Suicide and self-harm: There are verbal references to suicide in song lyrics.
Injury detail: There is occasional focus on gore, including blood, innards and severed body parts.
Nudity: There is brief full frontal male nudity.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
