Like the puckish adolescents (and the adolescent at heart) it is perhaps intended for, The Suicide Squad (in theaters and on HBO Max, August 5) desperately wants to flout authority. Not just its internal structures of commanders and the commanded, but the film’s own elders—particularly 2016’s Suicide Squad, loudly positioned as a gnarly, anarchic rebuttal to The Avengers but mostly playing by the same formula rules. The new Suicide Squad, directed by Guardians of the Galaxy mastermind James Gunn, wants to show its misbegotten predecessor how it should be done, ramping up the gore and the irony in the hopes of becoming that elusive thing: a genuinely transgressive superhero (or, villain) film.
The Suicide Squad is front loaded with those intentions. A cold open introduces the film’s merry nihilism, its eagerness to shock and titillate with gruesome, though cartoonish, violence. It’s slightly iconoclastic, too, readily dispatching some characters (played by recognizable actors) with whom we thought we’d spend the whole movie. Even the opening credits begin as a bloody joke, Gunn happily asserting his lighter, more free-wheeling approach to the material.
In that introductory stretch, The Suicide Squad almost does feel like something different, clever and sordid and—within its genre’s deceptively narrow parameters—inventive. The film’s look is scrappier, its performances goofier and more self-aware. There’s a big, dumb half-man, half-shark who eats people. There’s actual sex! It’s fun, I guess is the word, which is not something many can say about the 2016 Squad.
Is Gunn’s film a sequel, or a reboot? Technically, I suppose, it is the former—there seems to be some continuity between what came before and what’s here now. But in most material ways, The Suicide Squad feels like a do-over, a correction of past mistakes that is better adapted to the realities of the superhero economy. The film might be setting up a whole new universe, or it could just be a contented one-off. It doesn’t much care about doing careful franchise duty; it’s too busy giving all that pious worldbuilding the finger.
Well, it seems that way for a while. Eventually—as is the entropy of so many superhero films—The Suicide Squad stops surprising and settles into a familiar rhythm. Gunn works hard to keep things fresh, throwing in all manner of zany set pieces and morbid gags to cover up the film’s template construction. But it grows too easy to see the window dressing for what it is, and the film’s straining to transcend its station becomes a strain for the viewer. One begins to question how actually bold or revolutionary any of this really is, or if we’re being served the same old meal with a little extra spice.
There have, after all, been several gleefully gory superhero stories before The Suicide Squad, most recently on Amazon Studios’s The Boys, which is close to The Suicide Squad in hue and temperament. Though that series is far more concerned with the political than is Gunn’s film. The Suicide Squad gestures toward satire of the brash, witless muscle of American adventurism, even going so far as to depict a bungling mass murder of relative innocents. But then it has to reframe most of its characters as heroes again, undoing the dark insinuations of what we’ve just seen. The Boys, by comparison, mostly lets its bad guys stay bad, though it does care enough to humanize them with complex pathology.
The perhaps inescapable conundrum of the Suicide Squad property—which is about the worst of the worst comic book villains becoming mercenaries for a shadowy branch of the U.S. military—is that it wants its characters to be dangerous psychopaths, or at least unfeeling killers, but to be cool, too. Cool in a specifically studio-approved sense, which means no one can transgress too far without some executive note pulling them back toward likability, reframing their bad-assery as heroic. The Suicide Squad walks about as far up to the line of the indecent as is perhaps possible for a film of this size right now, which makes portions of it genuinely exciting. But we get inured to its provocations too quickly, and then the movie tries to soften itself and add emotional dimensions that aren’t exactly earned.
That’s not for lack of trying from the film’s cast. Pretty much everyone involved—Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, Daniela Melchior, David Dastmalchian—takes a refreshingly lo-fi approach to their characters, making them appropriately weary veterans rather than wisecracking hard-chargers aggressively trying to sell themselves to the audience. Robbie is doing her third stint as former Joker moll Harley Quinn, playing her more seasoned and serene than before. This version of Harley Quinn is a watchful observer, in a way. She gets her own defining action sequences, but her figure still drifts through the movie as a Zelig type passing by on her way to the next whatever. That puts her in interesting contrast to the other squad members, who seem more closely contained by this one film.
You can see why they all figured the outing was worth it. Gunn shakes up the sandbox just enough to nearly sell the notion that this film is some kind of upheaval, that it is tearing down paradigms and building something shaggy and idiosyncratic and odd in their place. It’s not, really, in the end. But maybe it is its own triumph to have at least stretched a rigid medium into new shapes for a little while. The Suicide Squad can’t hold the pose for long, but while it does, it’s an enjoyable flex.
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