The Suicide Squad: James Gunn Recharges the DC Franchise as a Nihilistic Orgy of Brightly Coloured Gore and Violence

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

It’s said one definition of “crazy” is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results. 

Conversely, director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), given the reins of DC’s Suicide Squad franchise, has done something very different and the result is bat-guano crazy.

The Suicide Squad, Gunn’s sequel to David Ayer’s poorly reviewed first try at the tale of a group of super-villains forced to be good guys, is a nihilistic orgy of brightly coloured gore and violence apparently envisioned while on mushrooms. If you’re sitting near the front of an IMAX theatre, it plays like being in the “splash-zone” of a GWAR concert.

Harley Quinn, Ratcatcher 2, Bloodsport, King Shark and Polka Dot Man prepare to do battle.

The Suicide Squad boasts an ambulatory Great White Shark whose feelings are easily hurt, but who happily eats humans whole, a mama’s boy infected with extradimensional polka dots which he can fire as weapons, a girl who can summon an army of rats and a giant star-fish that fires tiny brain-eating offspring out of its underarm.

The did-I-just-see-that? factor of over-the-top carnage and hallucinatory violence (picture a guy’s decapitated head in a shark’s mouth, his eyes still darting back-and-forth) certainly puts this sequel on an entirely different plane from the original.

But what really sets this franchise back on course is the commitment to the title. They are the Suicide Squad, not The A Team - lifetime convicts who accept almost-certain-death secret ops assignments in order to shorten their sentences. Death should be a real thing in their world.

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Gunn shows he is serious about his characters’ slim chances almost as soon as the movie begins, when an invasion of a fictional Caribbean island dictatorship goes badly South and there are numerous casualties. Some of the characters along for the ride for the beginning at the movie – and even ones from the first – will not make it. It’s one reason new characters must come off the bench.

This starts with Idris Elba as Bloodsport, a trained killer who once nailed Superman with a kryptonite bullet. And John Cena as Peacemaker, an assassin with a superhero complex, who thinks he’s killing people to make the world a better place (at times his self-righteous derangement carries echoes of Homelander in Prime’s The Boys).

It includes the aforementioned Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) and King Shark (voiced/grunted by Sylvester Stallone in a role he may have been born to play), and David Dastmalchian as Polka Dot Man..

And then there are the Suicide Squad alumni Col. Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman), merciless operation boss Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the latter of whom has since honed her charismatic/psychopathic charisma in a standalone movie, and without whom, this one would definitely lose wattage.

The plot? Sure, there is one. Seems there’s been a coup on the island of Corto Maltese, with a junta that’s unfriendly to the U.S., and, um, an alien kept in captivity who’s capable of turning whatever city it’s unleased upon into a population of zombies. Let’s just say the last act is like the climax of a Power Rangers movie writ large and gory. 

All of this comes naturally to Gunn, who came up from the Midnight Madness world of Troma films and was mentored by its founder Lloyd Kaufman. What worked small is even more outrageous in IMAX with bigger toys.

The Suicide Squad. Written and directed by James Gunn. Starring Idris Elba, Margot Robbie and John Cena. Opens in theatres Friday, August 6.