Movie Reaction: The Suicide Squad

Formula: Birds of Prey / Suicide Squad

 

As a movie fan, one of the most frustrating things for me is when a mediocre movie gets to a good idea first. Sliding Doors is a great example of this. It's a RomCom following two versions of a story diverging from a single starting point. Terrific idea. Sadly, the movie is only OK, but any other movie that tries something like it won't feel as fresh. Sliding Doors has planted the flag, and anything else that tries something like it is "a Sliding Doors story".

The Suicide Squad is a surprisingly good movie in a world that already has 2016's Oscar-winning Suicide Squad, a Harley Quinn spin-off, and two Deadpool movies. No matter how effective The Suicide Squad is, the freshness is lost. We've seen the superhero hyperviolence before. We've seen movies poke fun at the tropes. Developing characters only for them to be killed unceremoniously has been done. There's no new ground.

 

I adore how quickly The Suicide Squad gets to the point. It offers the briefest bit of exposition, and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) sounds annoyed to even give the audience that much. The movie is almost all one big mission. It quickly assembles the team and doesn't bother with any mini-movies to establish them. The team is huge, because many of them are cannon fodder. I don't consider that a spoiler, because this happened in the first movie and only a fool would think they'd keep a dozen-person team together. It does make it a little hard to talk about the cast though. So, I'll focus on the people with obvious plot armor.

 

Viola Davis doesn't have as much to do this time, but her heartless Amanda Waller remain better than we should have any right to expect for the series. She's either having a lot of fun with this or using her frustration from signing the contract in the performance. Either way, she's vital to the franchise. There wouldn't be a movie without Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn. She's the obvious breakout character from the first movie. Much like Birds of Prey, she practically has her own movie within this ensemble movie. I'm completely fine with this. The fact that Robbie clearly enjoys playing this character so much really comes through. Idris Elba is playing a different character than Will Smith in Suicide Squad, but it's functionally the same character. Elba is a lot more natural in the role, although his casting doesn't feel like as much of a coup as Smith's. I enjoy John Cena's Peacemaker as a homicidal Captain America. It's a thin character, but Cena has found a sweet spot over the years playing comically strait-laced characters. The more of a tool he is, the better. Joel Kinnaman is still good playing "a guy from Predator who somehow found himself in this movie". I'll stop there, but let's just say that no matter how little other actors are or aren't used, director James Gunn has a lot of success finding what's weird or funny about them.

 

Like in his Guardians of the Galaxy movies, James Gunn has trouble mixing the cynicism with the sincere. He's great at pitch-black comedy. He relishes the oddness of the characters and every weird thing about this premise. Hell, the squad is fighting a giant starfish. Gunn and company clearly poured through all the weirdest ideas that have been featured in comic books to make a bonkers movie. The problem is that every time a character got sincere, I kept looking for the punchline. When Elba's Bloodsport says he won't let a character die, is that a setup for that person to die immediately or is it a sign that I should be investing in that relationship as an audience member? It's not clear, so the movie feels uneven. Those sincere moments also don't land as well as the jokes and comic observations. At the end of the day, I'll just remember the funny stuff about the movie, but getting the emotional beats right would've brought it to another level.

 

That's The Suicide Squad in a nutshell. Better than the first movie by a lot. Gloriously violent and irreverent. One of the better DC efforts. I do think it's getting a little extra praise because of how much improved it is from the first movie. While Gunn is great at finding the comedy in the chaos, he isn't as successful finding the heart in the starfish.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

 

After the Credits

Two thoughts here. The first is a spoiler. The second is a rant about the box office.

 

1) I wish all the deaths at the beginning could've taken me by surprise. After Deadpool 2 pulled that trick though, and when I realized how many of the trailer scenes we in those opening minutes, I expected a high body count. This felt too much like a course-correction after the first movie kept so many characters alive.

 

2) The Suicide Squad opened at 1/5th of Suicide Squad in 2016. Here's why it happened, why it's not the disaster that it sounds like, and why the WB was stupid to sink so much money into it anyway.

-COVID. You might've heard of it. While movie theaters are mostly back open in the US - this film opened in only 200 fewer theaters than the 2016 movie - attendance is still way down. Everything has opened smaller than it would've pre-2020.

-HBOMax. The Suicide Squad also has to combat with being available for free for HBOMax subscribers. This has led to all WB box office returns being down significantly this year. Directly tied to that is an increase in piracy of the movie. I don't know how much of the audience would've been from obsessives seeing it multiple times in theaters, but I suspect it would've been higher for a comic movie like this.

-R-Rated. The 2016 movie was PG-13. That makes it easier for more people to see the movie. And before you point to Deadpool opening huge with a hard-R rating, you are giving audiences too much credit. The 2016 Suicide Squad movie set the level with general audiences for the franchise. It's not clear enough that this new Suicide Squad movie is practically a rebrand.

-Will Smith. The 2016 movie getting Will Smith was a coup. It was out of character for him to join an ensemble comic movie. It certainly got me thinking there might be something special about that movie. Losing him hurts, not just because there are Will Smith fans out there. It also feels like a retreat. It always looks bad when a sequel loses its biggest star.

-People hated the 2016 movie. You can trick an audience to see just about anything once. The marketing and star package of Suicide Squad made it an undeniable hit. They didn't like it though. So the opening weekend of the sequel will almost always reflect that. WB needs to win the audience back, and Birds of Prey was too niche to rebuild them enough.

-Price Tag. Reportedly, the 2021 movie was actually more expensive than the 2016 movie. That's insane to me. Nothing about the response to Suicide Squad (2016) or anything else in the DC film universe indicated that audiences had the same level of interest. Wonder Woman didn't save Justice League. Harley Quinn wouldn't save this. I suppose they could've been emboldened by Joker's success, but I'd like to think they are smart enough to know why that's an apples and oranges comparison.