The Suicide Squad Review (Patreon)

Saw this a few days ago at a movie night in my new dorm, so it's not exactly fresh in my mind. Still, I figured I should give y'all a movie review when I've seen a movie recently enough to properly give my thoughts on it. This may have a spoilers, but it may also not. I didn't sleep well last night so please don't ask me to discern that.

With regards to the DCEU: I have a soft spot for Snyder's hot messes, I didn't like Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman, and until watching The Suicide Squad I hadn't seen any other movies in the franchise. Blessedly, The Suicide Squad didn't seem to expect me to have seen any of its predecessors, as a lot of the cast is new and a number of survivors of previous movies get their shit fucked. It's sort of the Haunting of Hill House/Bly Manor approach: pluck interesting stuff from various source material without worrying too much about continuity (while not directly challenging anything prior either).

But yeah, The Suicide Squad is okay. It's dumb, fun trash. It knows that, which places it above, say, some MCU films that seem convinced they're actually saying things (the fact anybody thought Endgame had themes rather than being as a 3-hour fanwank baffles me to this day). James Gunn does his James Gunn thing and does it pretty well. There are anemic moments of sentiment to give characters the illusion of emotional complexity alongside a cute chick with rats, Idris Elba playing Idris Elba, and a Sylvester Stallone shark. There's a genuine weirdness to this that Guardians of the Galaxy motions at when it's trying to be the most purple-looking film ever made, and a color palette (wow! the DCEU is branching out), and a giant starfish in the climax. It's a million miles from profound, but it's quite nice to see a superhero movie doing things people haven't seen before, such as having Peter Capaldi probably be the first man in screen history to be ripped apart by a giant starfish onscreen.

Margot Robbie is of course everything a cinematic Harley Quinn should be. Peter Capaldi's turn as "the Twelfth Doctor but a supervillain" is an amusing showcase of how Capaldi's bag of tricks works in a broad variety of contexts. Quite rarely for one of these movies, everyone onscreen is having fun. It's not radically exuberant or transgressive or anything - indeed, it's basically a superhero movie that's not pretending its protagonists are virtuous. But for once it's the genre bothering to look different, and that's not nothing.

The plot itself is obviously a complete trashfire. To an extent, who gives a fuck, but given the things the movie attempts the trashfire plot is a bit worse for it. The initial CIA-fucks-around-in-South-America premise is in itself a bit tiring, and having a bunch of supervillains work on behalf of a shady government ensures the status quo will still be set in stone by the end of the day. This isn't a problem in itself - it's endemic to the superhero genre, which we already know is an American exceptionalist genre.

But the midgame twist where it turns out the non-CIA sending prisoners to destabilize South America is villainous is... well, if you phrase it like that, you can see the inklings of the problem. But the real problem is how poorly integrated the twist is. It doesn't meaningfully change anything - the South American government is still evil, the Suicide Squad are still fighting them, the mission is largely the same, and the US-backed rebels ultimately overthrow the corrupt South American government (led by a man named Silvio Luna. Hmm, what South American president does that name remind me of?). The problem with the plot twist is how little it means. Basically everything stays the same, and the film calling attention to its own attempt to be different from the genre while at its core being the same "team of mismatched heroes saves America" formula as all superhero crossovers largely deflates it.

Still, it's a fun movie. It has Margot Robbie and Peter Capaldi and Idris Elba and a cute girl with rats. A man made of polka dots has an absolutely amazing death scene. And there are rats and a giant starfish (the rats make it out okay, which is good because it would have been a dealbreaker for me. Protecc the rats). Tedious politics and weak plotting and all, this is still one of the better entries into this particular over-inflated genre. 

Now give me a rat girl show where she's gay and fights the CIA.