The Suicide Squad Movie Review

 by Karl W.

    Well, second time's the charm, eh? We've had a Suicide Squad movie not too long ago when DC was just starting to branch out into their own cinematic universe ala Marvel, and while the general consensus on the movie was definitely mixed at the time, and while it accrued its fair share of fans...I'm sorry, the movie was awful. A product of studio interference to the upmost degree, the movie suffered from a terrible script, bad sequencing, and some of the worst editing I've seen in any movie, regardless of genre. Still, that was five years ago, and now nearly everyone has written off the movie as a failure and now, we're trying it again. The DC movies of today are definitely a step above the movies they made from 2013 through 2017, and it seems like they are doing a better job at giving the screenwriters and directors a fair bit more liberty in how to make their movies. Enter James Gunn, whose style they were definitely trying to emulate for the first Suicide Squad movie (and failed at). Now, he has been given the creative decisions he needed to make this new Suicide Squad movie as intense, gory, and action-packed as possible, and one that promised a large cast that had a good chance of biting the bullet at any minute. So, it was pretty inevitable that this would at least be a step up from the 2016 movie...but by how much?

    Well honestly...yeah, it's not a contest. The Suicide Squad (despite the rather lousy title), is the definitive Suicide Squad movie experience. DC has had a rather uneasy track record with their movies, but with the creative liberties given to James Gunn and the all-stop cast and crew on hand here, this could very easily be the best DC movie in this modern crop of DC movies. The Suicide Squad offers a high-octane action flick that is high in gory fight scenes with a great deal of character interaction all throughout. 

    The talking point with this movie from the get-go is it's high ensemble cast. While there are returning actors from the previous movie such as Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, and Joel Kinnamen, the movie has its fair share of knock-out performances, mainly coming from Idris Elba's more grounded assassin character Bloodsport, or John Cena playing his foil, Peacemaker, to the douchiest caliber you could imagine. You also get great performances from Daniela Melchior as the youngblood to the team, Ratcatcher 2, or Sylvester Stallone playing the dumb, yet incredibly endearing King Shark. This is the first big stepping stone for this movie: making the actual Suicide Squad feel like a true unit, one that felt like a family, something that the original Suicide Squad tried to do, but failed. Here, the characters play off each other well, the dynamics are strong and the characters are flawed to a point where the personal and emotional conflicts between two characters can spell doom for the entire mission. The movie also focuses on the mission control team as well, helmed by Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, playing a character willing to go to whatever extremes are necessary to get the job done. The characters are all very fleshed out with their fair share of morally grey actions to make the movie consistently entertaining. To put it another way, it's not often that you could make a generally silly character concept like Polka-Dot Man as endearing as it ended up being.

    With that all said, this movie is very true to the movie's catchphrase: "Don't get too attached." This movie gets deadly and gory, where main characters can get killed in pretty brutal ways, sometimes with little fanfare too. It helps encapsulate the stakes of the mission and the movie as a whole, something that isn't seen in, honestly, most other blockbuster movies, as the squad in this movie are mostly mercenaries or petty thieves. Compare this to the last gorefest blockbuster I reviewed: Mortal Kombat. That movie felt rather low in the stakes as fights felt less dire as the movie nears the finish. In this movie, the stakes ramp up, as the secret experiment in the movie becomes apparent, and threatening on a world scale rather than to the Suicide Squad as a whole, and characters die throughout the runtime and even take some sizable damage throughout. This is what happens when you give the director and the screenwriters the creative liberties to do whatever you want with whatever characters you want. Again, this is a movie that has a legitimate character named Polka-Dot Man, whose abilities include shooting out corrosive polka dots out at enemies.

    That being said, the movie has a bit of a pacing problem. Sometimes the movie could hard brake from  high-intensity action scenes with characters mowing down enemy forces to slower exposition scenes for setting up the characters that feels like they could meander for a bit. It's not a deterrent, of course, but sometimes the disparity could be apparent. Still, the movie is an incredibly entertaining romp throughout. This isn't even going over the other aspects of the movie, such as the great shot composition with unique and stylish titles cards, like going through the chapters of an actual comic book. Not to mention the movie has an organic and varied score that feels like the actual choices of the scriptwriters and not the most cliché song choices picked out by a committee board (don't mind me, just one more jab at the 2016 movie). It makes for the most enjoyable comic book movie experience since the Infinity War/Endgame event from Marvel a few years ago, and easily the best DC movie since The Dark Knight. It's brutal but oh so entertaining throughout and definitely a go-to movie experience for those that desire a straight up enjoyable bloodbath of a movie.

9/10 (Amazing)