Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.
A team of prisoners are offered sentence reductions if they undertake a dangerous mission…
The first Suicide Squad film had been more or less a disaster. A muddled, muddy, moronic mess of a movie, which featured appalling acting, crude comedy and stupefying storytelling. There were also post-release complaints from writer/director David Ayer that his vision had been butchered by studio executives insisting on reshoots and a different edit. (Predictably, a #ReleaseTheAyerCut campaign began online.) But the film had been profitable, so a follow-up was soon planned.
For the sequel-cum-soft-reboot, which insouciantly adds a The to the title, the bigwigs at DC hired writer/director James Gunn. He had made the first two Guardians of the Galaxy films for rival studio Marvel – both huge successes – but then been temporarily fired from the threequel for some distasteful tweets. While Gunn’s take on Suicide Squad is undoubtedly an improvement over Ayer’s, we are talking fine margins here…
The film’s opening sets up a new Task Force X, run by a returning Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, still using a frown as a substitute for acting). This team has some members from the first Suicide Squad – tough-guy leader Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), pop-art-come-to-life criminal Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Australian thief Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) – but we meet newbies too. Michael Rooker’s combat expert Savant appears at first to be a new lead character; comedian Pete Davidson plays manic merc Blackguard; while Nathan Fillion shows up as TDK (The Detachable Kid), a mutant who can detach and reattach his limbs.
This crew is sent on a covert mission to storm the beach of South American country Corto Maltese, which has a new anti-American government. (Meanwhile, the boffins back at Suicide Squad HQ run a betting pool on which task-force members will survive.) However, in a switcheroo gag that establishes the groan-inducing tone of the film’s comedy, most of the team are massacred by Corto Maltese forces as soon as they land. We then learn that they were only ever a decoy. Waller has also sent *another*, more capable team, to attack a different beach…
Harley Quinn and Rick Flag actually survive the assault (because their characters were popular in the original film) and they now hook up the other team, which means *another* round of laborious introductions for misfits with comic-book aliases and abilities. There’s Bloodsport (Idris Elba), a mercenary in a gadget-heavy robo-suit; Peacemaker (John Cena), a conscience-free, reactionary killer with a lack of irony; Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchain), who… [sigh]… can create and fire deadly polkadots at people; Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchoir), a young thief who has the ability to… [are you still reading this?]… that’s right, control rats; and King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), a CGI humanoid shark who… [of course he does]… has a limited vocabulary. Each hero gets a maudlin backstory moment, as if they’re on The X-Factor and the producers have prodded them to build up their sob story, yet you never care about them on any resonant level. (Long-time viewers of superhero movies will also note the lack of new ideas here. Bloodsport is suspiciously similar to the character he’s replacing, Will Smith’s Deadshot from the first film – even down to the troubled relationship with a daughter – while Peacemaker and King Shark often remind you of the much better Drax and Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.)
The team’s mission is to destroy a scientific research facility called Jotunheim, which was once used by Nazis and has now fallen into the hands of the Movie-Cliché Central Americans who have taken over Corto Maltese (even down to casting the same actor to play the same type of sleazy military general as in Bond film Quantum of Solace). Something mysterious called Project Starfish is going on at Jotunheim, and Waller thinks it’s a threat to the good old US of A. So the team track down Project Starfish’s top scientist, the Thinker (Peter Capaldi, wearing sci-fi make-up and trying not to look like he’s taken a desultory role for the money), and coerce him into helping them.
Comedy dominates, but unfortunately this boils down to gags about how flamboyant comic-book superpowers are actually useless, sarcastic dialogue that’s empty observational comedy without any deep understanding of the situation, and OTT violence (faces are blown off, scalps are sliced off, Bloodshot and Peacemaker massacre a camp’s worth of soldiers in a sequence that plays like a videogame Rambo… but only afterwards learn that the soldiers were good guys). James Gunn had *excelled* at likeable, warm, smart comedy with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which remembered to tell the story via character interactions and believable emotions. But The Suicide Squad is childish and snide. The film thinks that saying fuck or pointing out a trope is enough. It really isn’t. It’s soulless and cheap; a corporate, American-network-TV idea of what radical and rebellious looks like.
Thank the superhero gods, then, for Margot Robbie. The manic, bubblegum character of Harley Quinn is actually off-screen for long stretches (perhaps a necessity due to Robbie’s top-end career), but the fantasy sequences, gleeful violence and smart music choices of her solo subplot are a hoot. Here, thanks to Robbie understanding the cartoon tone and always making Harley sympathetic, the film actually sings for a while. After arriving on Corto Maltese, Harley is captured by the rebels running the country. She soon falls in love with Silvio Luna (Juan Diego Botto), the handsome rebel leader, and their twisted romcom courtship is dramatised via a playful montage scored by The Fratellis’ whimsical pop hit Whistle for the Choir. The rest of the movie can’t even dream about this level of panache.
Six freaking kaijus up in this shit out of 10
Ian Farrington 