If there’s one thing that is clear about watching Suicide Squad back-to-back with The Suicide Squad, the latter certainly feels like a James Gunn movie. Not to get side tracked into auteur theory, film is a complex and collaborative medium with hundreds of decesions made at all levels, but the biggest issue I have wiith Suicide Squad is that it didn’t feel like a David Ayer movie all the way through. Sure it looked like it in fleeting frames but the sum total did not add up. This is not the case with The Suicide Squad which feels like the writer-director was able to get away with what he wanted to make. It makes you wonder how Gunn managed this act.
Look at what he did: this is a film with a reported budget of $185 million (before marketing spend) that is rated R. Most R rated studio films operate on about a third of that budget and even rarer based on valuable intellectual property. Admittedly it’s a fairly tame R mainly due to gore, because in America you can have all the violent spectacle you want just don’t show the actual physical effects. The gore is a little excessive as it is the medium by which the darkly humored point being made about the lack of value being put on the bodies and lives of everyone on Task Force X. A nihilistic disregard for human life that certain members of the Squad perpetuate as they go to “rescue” Rick Flagg.
Rescuing Flagg begins on a fairly standard bit of body horror-comedy as King Shark (motion captured by Steve Agee and voiced by Sylvester Stallone) vores an unsuspecting rebel.* It’s centerpiece is the manliness measuring contest that goes on between Christopher “Peacemaker” Smith (John Cena) and Robert “Bloodsport” DuBois (Idris Elba). They run through this camp committing increasingly heinous acts of murder. Some of the comedy is found in how the sound mixing highlights the disparity between visual spectacle and lack of sound. After following Peacemaker stealth their way through the camp like a slasher villain, hilariously shanking a sleeping man with the pointy end of their ax at one point, we discover Bloodsport just has a flame thrower and lit two people ablaze. It’s all so horrifying and noisy but isn’t that loud. The film’s sound team and director are riffing on classic horror form. As a genre, American horror is more often effectively driven by sound mixing than scary visuals.
This mashup of genre also helps to establish the other comedy that is going on in this murderous mayhem. It’s not just the act of killing that is humors, there is an excessiveness mixed with nonchalance that is effective and creates a tonal clash that can be read as comedic. That particular segment of comedy, however, is all hollow spectacle. There isn’t a point being made in this montage of violence. It’s only in retrospect once the Squad reaches Flagg that the sateric edge begins to come through. Rick Flagg is not being held hostage by rebels he is being healed by them! And the Squad just murdered everyone of their would be allies. Bloodsport, Peacemaker, King Shark, and Abner Krill, the Polka-Dot Man, all have a certain level of culpability in this massacre. However, the object of mockery isn’t Bloodsport or Peacemaker but the systems that formed them: The US Government, toxic masculinity, and 80s Hollywood action movies. The Government for giving their soldiers bad intel and looking from a thousand miles up and away on a computer screen removed from the material reality and effects their decisions have. They prefer to shoot first and ask questions later. Toxic masculinity in both characters need to be dominant and reflexively prove themselves through brutal punishments to other bodies. The reflexive spectacle of this sequence is tied to the visual past of films like The Predator and the like, which often featured hard bodied soldiers blowing away anonymous people of color in the name of jingoism. Bloodsport and Peacemaker are symptoms of a greater disease. That perspective is what gives Squad a satirical edge.
Continued belowThe film holds these characters responsible for their actions but also understands that they are not the byproduct of an ahistorical existence. Gunn can’t hate these characters and fully condemn them. He grants them their humanity and with that their reasons, even if it is an awful thing. In refusing to fully condemn them, the film also grants the potential that this rag tag group of people society labels as villains can still choose to do something heroic. This hope isn’t limited to the field members of Task Force X but is extended to the bureaucratic support team a thousand miles away removed from all potential blowback and danger. When Starro goes on a Kaiju rampage they rebel against Waller and choose to do something good for a change instead of callously taking bets in the office deadpool. Gunn’s sentimental view isn’t limited to the human and humanoid, Starro is given several lines expressing their own reasons for conquest after being a lab experiment for the Thinker on the behalf of the U.S. Government.
This always humanizing view of the cast is what seems to put Gunn’s iteration of the Squad in conversation with John Ostrander’s run. Both understood audiences had to maybe not “love” but understand this crew of antiheroes. For Ostrander, Yale, and the artists that meant giving issues and pages to the support staff and developing the phantom pie facer. Both are also aware of the inherent power imbalance and fascist nature of the Suicide Squad, mking it an always-already corrupt enterprise. In retrospect it’s not that surprising that Gunn was able to take this perspective and use it to turn Peacemaker into a character capable of carrying a largely successful series on HBOMAX.
The various iterations of Task Force X after Ostrander-Yale an Co. have never quite captured the same long term stability and heart of their run. And that’s fine, instead what it has given us is plentyful examples of what a Suicide Squad can look like and the stories they are capable of telling.
