THE SUICIDE SQUAD (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

One of the best things about bad movies is that they sometimes engender good ones. For instance, I gave the 2016 SUICIDE SQUAD movie a positive review on the basis of its being a summer popcorn movie that managed to be moderately diverting, though I made no bones about the fact that it was largely a bad rendering of a generally above-average comics-original. At the time the film's greatest asset was the vivacious portrayal of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, though this virtue was largely cancelled by the lame rendition of another strong comics-character, Deadshot, by an apparently lazy and disinterested Will Smith. Now, however, I would say that the best thing about the 2016 film was that, for whatever reasons, it pleased its audience enough to make fair money-- and without that earlier success, there might not have been a 2019 SUICIDE SQUAD, though ironically, this one did not enjoy good box office for a host of exigent reasons.

Gunn's title THE SUICIDE SQUAD suggests something of a soft reboot away from the earlier film, though this might have been harder to sell had Will Smith been available to reprise his shitty Deadshot. His happy absence made certain that all of the performers got equal treatment in the ensemble. Said ensemble ranged from the "old guard" (Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joel Kinnaman as "villain-wrangler" Rick Flag) to such newbies as Idris Elba's Bloodsport (more or less a Deadshot "type"), Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher, David Dastmalchian's Polka-Dot Man, John Cena's Peacemaker, and King Shark, played by a combination of CGI and the voice of Sylvester Stallone. Also returning was the devious Amanda Wallace (Viola Davis), who sends her unwilling pawns into the field for yet another "black ops" mission. 

This time the mission requires the characters to infiltrate the government of a Caribbean island, Corto Maltese, which is now controlled by a ruthless dictator hostile to the United States. A separate contingent of Squad members (including Jai Courtney's Captain Boomerang) are sent to the island to be slaughtered by soldiers, purely to distract from the real operation, which by itself shows that we're not dealing with some benign MISSION IMPOSSIBLE scenario. In fact, when the real operatives make their way into the wilderness of Corto Maltese, they encounter a force of armed men and wipe them out-- only to learn that the dead men were members of a revolutionary group that the Squad was supposed to contact.

James Gunn, who both wrote and directed SQUAD, includes a lot of moments of black comedy like this one. Polka-Dot Man gained his "dot-powers" because his mother experimented on him to give him super-powers, so that the miserable super-villain frequently sees his mother's image superimposed on anyone he fights. Ratcatcher, whose motif is controlling hordes of rats, clearly relates to rodents better than to people, again thanks to parental issues. Yet Gunn avoids the smug irony of an anti-superhero screed like Amazon's THE BOYS. Whereas the 2016 film shoved the characters together and faked forming an "esprit d'corps," Gunn succeeds in making these disparate characters relate to one another. A particular favorite scene involves Harley Quinn escaping the dictator's prison, only to witness Flag and Bloodsport about to enter the prison to break her out. Deeply touched, she offers to go back inside so they can rescue her.

But it wouldn't be Suicide Squad if there wasn't double-dealing, and Waller has her own double-agent inside the group, ready to protect the interests of her intelligence agency. More importantly, though, the ostensible point of the mission-- to investigate a hidden weapon inside a Corto Maltese complex-- turns out to be a real threat based on one of the weirder DC Comics villains: Starro, a gargantuan starfish-alien. Whereas the first SQUAD movie had the villains unite against a common threat in a phony manner, Gunn's malcontents make believable saviors, precisely because they are outsiders starved for empathy, and so the villains become temporary heroes. Ratcatcher's role in defeating Starro with her rat-army might even be said to offer an apologia for rodents. The one exception is Peacemaker, who betrays the group and is slain for it, though a last-minute "save" preserves him for his own HBO series.

Though Gunn works in some shots against conniving American intelligence, SUICIDE SQUAD only uses politics as an motive to play a couple dozen bizarre comics characters off one another. In that, Gunn's film is more true to the history of the American comics-medium than Hollywood's brief vogue for the superficial "realism" of the Nolan/Snyder-verse.