Review of The Suicide Squad (2021) by Piglordofallham — 06 Aug 2021

Only James Gunn was capable of injecting some very necessary humor, emotion and actual energy a.k.a. more violence into these movies- and that's exactly what we got. A balls-to-the-wall, well-crafted, well-paced feature film with a surprising amount of emotional depth that I was not prepared for whatsoever. The fact that the only decent DC animated adaptation for "Suicide Squad" was tied into what was essentially a long Batman movie with hardly any Batman, just sort of tells you that it wasn't easy to even make that live-action transition, which is probably why the original is so absolutely dreadful. Now that the "The Suicide Squad," has come out, it is finally the "good" version of what already had an excellent premise to begin with, take a bunch of loser C-list tier villains and throw them in a ridiculous situation. Of course its a dumb idea when you have what are essentially "regular people" with no super powers and super heroes themselves being mysteriously absent, but its done in a tongue in cheek kind of way so as not to rattle the cage too hard seeing as "Superman" or "The Flash" could literally solve everything in a second in every scenario the Suicide squad could ever be tasked with. The twists and turns are much more believable, characters actually have some weight and are very well developed, but not in a way that bores the audience. In fact, some of the highlights are those typical "James Gunn" touches that have found him so much success with the equally less super star-powered, as well as less popular comic book characters found in "Guardians of the Galaxy." The violence, though considerably more than a teenage summer blockbuster's worth, seems to finally bring the series up to speed when compared to its comic book brethren (as well as the DC universe line of animated adaptations).

All in all, this is an excellently casted film, with a very solid and competent script that only barely dips its toes into rare drops in quality, but still leaves itself plenty of space to breath. On one or two occasions there are those few off beat moments, yet they're unmistakably less agonizing than the original films on every level. Its easily one of the best anti-hero films to come out in a long time, and that should frankly embarrass DC's less than stellar efforts of late like the infamously poorly received Wonderwoman sequel and the "Justice League" disaster. I'm not typically a fan of these kinds of films and didn't like "Guardians of the Galaxy volume 2," as much as the original, but I'm glad to see Mr. Gunn behind the wheel now for anything related to "Suicide Squad" in the near future.