THE SUICIDE SQUAD: Gunn's Gambit

Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, John Cena, Daniela Melchior, David Dastmalchian, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, Alice Braga, Peter Capaldi, Julio Cesar Ruiz, Jai Courtney, Pete Davidson, Nathan Fillion, Jennifer Holland, Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn, Flula Borg, Steve Agee, Mayling Ng, Taika Waititi
Runtime: 132 mins.
2021

In 2014 Disney released James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy, which reminded everyone that superhero movies are supposed to be fun. The film was a smash hit and the smash caused ripples.

2016 rolls around, and competitors Warner Bros. are sitting on a brand new superhero flick called Suicide Squad. Unfortunately, what should have been designed from the ground up as a Fun Movie was instead given to David Ayer, a director known for his grim tone and hypermasculine sensibilities. This Suicide Squad sprung from the Zack Snyderian tradition of morose, overly self-serious stories of tortured heroism that had been the DC model since 2013's Man of Steel, itself a poor facsimile of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy.

So DC and Warner Bros. had a problem. Their gritty shared universe was crumbling, whereas Guardians just gave Marvel's franchise a shot in the arm. The solution? Marketing, of course. Warner hired trailer editing company Trailer Park to create a Suicide Squad teaser trailer that promised the same team-up fun that audiences loved in Guardians and craved from Batman v. Superman. You may remember the result, a poppy peppy teaser set to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Although early promo images and a disastrous Joker design put audiences off, this trailer piqued quite a bit of interest.

Which presented another problem: the trailer Warner Bros. released bore no resemblance to David Ayer's somber work-in-progress. So WB did something unprecedented. They hired Trailer Park, the trailer editing company, to re-cut the film itself so that it would more closely resemble their teaser. No cut of this film was going to be good, but the version we got focused on meager glimmers of style at the expense of substance.

Suicide Squad got panned hard, but salvaged quite a bit of money from the Hot Topic crowd. Meanwhile, back at Marvel, James Gunn reprised his success with another Guardians of the Galaxy movie, fully expecting to work on part 3 in a few years. Then, in 2018, Disney fired him from his own franchise.

Gunn has always been politically outspoken, and would periodically post garden variety anti-Trump tweet. A small group of reactionary right-wingers online got the bright idea to weaponize the asinine tenets of liberal cancel culture against Gunn. They resurfaced and recirculated some offensive Gunn tweets from years past, tweets that had been public knowledge and that Gunn had already apologized for. This whisper of scandal was enough for Disney to can one of their most valuable creative assets, despite the fact that they already had this information when they hired him. Not to mention that as a former Troma shock horror director, his filmography contains things far more offensive than found in those tweets.

In a nexus of cosmic hilarity, Gunn's departure from Disney was quickly followed by some new news. He had been headhunted by DC to right the ship of their Suicide Squad sub-franchise. Gunn was brought on to direct a soft reboot of the very film that had already tried and failed to style itself after Gunn's work, thus closing the loop in the rudest way possible. Gunn even had the gall to call his film The Suicide Squad, both confusing the audience and insisting on his version as the definitive one. It's a cheeky move, one that bespeaks his ability to metamorph anger into comedy.

Eight paragraphs in and it's finally time to talk about the movie itself. It's good! Gunn has a canny visual eye, and habitually wrings more visual spectacle out of scenes than we would expect possible.* He's also one of the only folks currently working in this genre to commit to actual fun rather than its facsimile. Case in point, the shocking screwaround of the opening 15 minutes, which include a series of gags that made me laugh harder than any film since Inside. (God bless Weasel.) Gunn is playing with the conventions of superhero cinema, a genre that is too tired not to be played around with. Unlike Guardians which uses humor to build a collective, The Suicide Squad is an angrier film, using comedy to tear things down. This means less of a focus on the human relationships of the main characters, and more of an emphasis on the biting satire (though both films contain both, to be sure).

*The most stunning example of this is (spoiler alert) a climactic aquatic moment of violence inside an eyeball-- an inventive and evocative sequence the likes of which I haven't seen in a cape flick in recent memory.

The dominant feeling is one of being pleasantly surprised by moments without much depth. One of these pleasant surprises is an explicitly anti-American colonialism throughline. The Squad (who are all delightfully designed and well-performed to the point that I feel no need to single anyone out) are sent to Corto Maltese to destroy an old Nazi laboratory that has fallen into the hands of the new anti-American regime. The lab contains a doomsday weapon designated Project Starfish, which the team learns is an American asset that has been developed by countless fatal experiments on the Maltesian locals.

It's audacious and refreshing for a superhero blockbuster to hinge on recognition of the United States' brutal global hegemony. Most such movies just provide a flimsy excuse for its heroes to mow down brown people. The issue is that, although The Suicide Squad knows what to say, it doesn't quite know how to say it. One scene features the Squad calmly and professionally decimating an encampment of the enemy military, only to later learn that they've murdered dozens of rebellion freedom fighters. When told that her comrades have been killed accidentally on purpose, the woman leading the rebellion scolds them before determining that it would be mutually beneficial for them to work together. This is a woman whose community just got murdered for no reason, and she doesn't bat an eye! You can see the nascent commentary here, confronting the way the American military and its agents operate on faulty intel to callously slay untold thousands of folks who may or may not 'deserve it.' The tragedy of this scene could have been cemented by the reaction of their leader, but Gunn pulls the punch, perhaps anxious to not make the audience despise the characters they have to spend the rest of the movie with.

So you have a film that calls out American global violence, but still uses foreigners as disposable cannon fodder for our enjoyment. Much like the rest of The Suicide Squad, this isn't good enough, but it's certainly better than we could have expected.

3 / 5  BLOBS