The Suicide Squad is fun, but not the next level DC film we were hoping for

The best thing about The Suicide Squad is how much writer-director James Gunn really cared about making it. It’s in the little details. There’s a character named Weasel, for instance; he only has a little bit of screen time, but his design is so funny — he’s a giant humanoid weasel with huge bug eyes — and his timing is so perfect that you have to laugh. They worked to perfect the bit where he’s licking the glass of his prison cell; it won’t change your world, but it’s good for a chuckle.

There are lots of fun details like this, like the way the air around Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) explodes into flowers when she’s mowing down a hall full of dudes; or the dancing, multi-colored fishies King Shark (Sylvester Stallone) encounters in Jotunheim, the top secret research facility the Suicide Squad is sent to destroy. I loved Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) dismissing the idiotic questions of the violent Peacemaker (John Cena) with infinite, contemptuous weariness. The Suicide Squad is a fun movie to watch minute-to-minute. The look is right, the lines are right, the delivery is right.

And if a nice, vulgar diversion (these characters have putrid mouths) is all you’re looking for, you’ll walk away happy. But I dunno, after seeing critics fall over each other to praise The Suicide Squad, I was hoping for something more than a hyper-violent lark. And I have nothing against a hyper-violent lark, but having seen Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films, I know he can aspire to something meatier.

Let’s talk SPOILERS for The Suicide Squad

The Suicide Squad wastes no time getting started: U.S. bureaucrat Amanda Waller needs a dirty job done, so she recruits a bunch of imprisoned supervillains to carry it out in exchange for time off their lengthy sentences. The lot of them are quickly dropped offshore the fictional South American nation of Corto Maltese, which has just gone through a bloody coup. Their mission: bomb a facility where the Thinker (Peter Capaldi) is experimenting on an extraterrestrial life form that could pose a danger to the world if it falls into the wrong hands.

In very short order, bullets start flying, heads start exploding, and minor characters start dying — RIP TDK. Then the movie kind of putzes around for a while before the principals reunite and actually get to that research facility for the climax. Harley falls for (and then quickly kills) one of the country’s new leaders, Peacemaker and Bloodsport (Idris Elba) compete to see who can wipe out a camp full of government soldiers the fastest (it ends up they were actually government resistance fighters), and so on. My favorite bit from this stretch is probably the awkward Polka Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) revealing that he can only kill people if he pictures them as his mother.

In retrospect, none of this middle section really goes anywhere. No one has a character arc, here or afterward. (Bloodsport gets over his fear of rats, I guess?)

And that’s fine — like I said, this movie is a violent romp, and those don’t need deep characters. But things get awkward when the movie suddenly decides that it needs stakes, so we have a strange section where the characters are torn over whether to reveal the truth about that extraterrestrial research project to the public, even though there’s no reason to think they care much about truth. We’re expected to be invested in a showdown between Peacemaker and Bloodsport even though they’ve mostly been defined by one-liners up to this point. Amanda Waller becomes the face of American imperialism, but her saintly employees are moved by the plight of the people of Corto Maltese; the supervillains’ hearts grow three sizes that day, and everything ends more or less peachy.

This sudden attempt at earnestness clashes with the cynical laughs the movie delights in (remember the bit where Bloodsport and Peacemaker mow down a village of resistance fighters for our entertainment?) and makes the whole thing feel unfocused and ungainly. The movie is set against a political conflict that deliberately evokes real-life revolutions in countries like Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, which is serious stuff; but it ends with a fight between the Suicide Squad and a huge colorful alien starfish, which is anything but. The movie wants to have it both ways — be an ultra-violent funny bloodbath and say something about American meddling in world governments — but it just doesn’t work, and comes off as pretentious.

But again, the movie is still fun while you’re watching it. The blueprint for future DC movies this is not, but it is a bloody good time.

Grade: B-

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