The Suicide Squad (2021)

I saw this movie when it first came out and was highly entertained. During this last watch, I was just mildly entertained, which is still rare air for DC movies.

James Gunn does a great job of recognizing that the Suicide Squad is better off as a comedy than as a serious film, which makes this version so much better than the 2016 version. The only problem is that James Gunn only knows how to do comedies, and has a pretty recognizable style. It works better here than his most recent job with Superman, but there were so many times in this film when I had to try not to think about similarities to the movie that put Gunn on the map, Guardians of the Galaxy. With this blog I’m trying to ignore that sort of context, so I’m going to pretend this movie isn’t a hyper violent ripoff of Guardians.

Let’s start with the story – it’s pretty well done! It’s a mildly more complex version of the simple Superhero movie format, but I think all the complexities add to the movie. Great job so far. The humor is a little hit or miss, but for the most part a big addition to the premise of these rando supervillains going on a mission together.

Speaking of those supervillains, the characters in the film. There’s just so many of them that I stopped even listing all the actors. It’s impossible to care about so many throwaway characters, which is fine, but then there still ends up being anywhere from 5 to 10 main characters, depending on how you count them. When the director makes a stylistic choice to introduce and discard so many characters, of course the audience isn’t going to connect as much with the remaining players.

Overall, it is still a (pretty) good movie, so I give it a 7. I want to rate it lower for ripping off Guardians so badly, but it’s got a lot of good things going for it.