Having seen The Suicide Squad twice now, first on HBO Max and later in theaters, one question rang out and began to cohere the hundreds swirling in my mind: how did this get made? Funnily enough that is the same question I asked after seeing the 2016 film. How did writer-director James Gunn convince Warner Bros. to sign off on a purported $185 million budget, with an R-rating, for a movie based on some of the, perceived, most valuable IP in Hollywood? For context previous R-rated superhero movies like Deadpool and Joker were produced in the $60-70 million range. The film’s closest budgetary contemporary is The Jungle Cruise. Gunn’s new movie might have the budget and marketing heft of a Jungle Cruise, but it has the artistic sensibilities of David Lowery’s The Green Knight. This makes for a supremely weird blockbuster. The Suicide Squad is far from perfect and maybe drags a little, but I appreciate that Gunn smuggled this one through.
The film’s R rating is more than justified and all the more surprising considering major studios fear of capping the potential market for this kind of film or anything that isn’t a play for prestige. The Suicide Squad is anything but presstigeous. It is a grotesque-beautiful black comedy that simultaneously dares audiences to invest in its cast as it spills and splatters red everywhere, even as it gives them plenty of reasons to invest. Grotesque-beauty encapsulates the film’s split dynamic, one that defies easy categorization as it juxtaposes multiple lenses against one another. On the macro level there is the hard juxtaposition of competing aesthetics, genres, and film style. On a micro level it is the best descriptor for Henry Braham cinematography. How else would you describe the serene way the light catches Harley Quinn and thousands of rats swimming through the eye of a giant alien starfish? The grotesque-beauty of Suicide Squad allows the film to hold all of its dissonant and contradictory elements in tension and mostly function as a film.
Squad is a strange cocktail of genre and film style. It is at once a basic b-movie staple, the men-on-a-mission movie mixed with the even lower rent sensibilities of a splatter film. That cheap genre categorization rests against the economic muscle of a major Hollywood film shot through cool digital Red Ranger Monstro 8K & Komodo 6K cameras. Of Gunn’s mainstream work this feels the closest to his Troma Entertainment, but that is a contradiction. For as much as it postures as outsider art it is the epitome of the inside. Instead it finds itself in the liminal space between John Hyams and Shazam!.
By holding all of these elements in tension the film as a work of bricolage is foregrounded, underlined, and highlighted, as it reflexively appropriates whatever it requires. Normally this excess of style would elicit a reaction about how obviously shallow the whole thing is. But this isn’t the nineties and postmodern reflexivity won decades ago. Except, in the superhero film genre! While there have been herks and jerks, the decades-long success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe means classical Hollywood style built around continuity editing holds strong, with some modern incorporations. Deadpool may have broken the fourth wall, The Suicide Squad never slows down for the snarky commentary it simply does it with constant visual and editing cues.
All of that style, however, doesn’t cover for what could rightly be seen as the shallowness of the film’s plot and emotional narrative. A more polite way to put it is that the film is straightforward. The plot of Squad is indebted to films like The Guns of Navarone and heist films like The Italian Job(2003). Those are films with straight forward plots from genres that prized functionality above all else. The latest mission for Task Force X aka the Suicide Squad is similarly straight forward. They are to infiltrate the island nation of Corto Maltese and break into the research facility known as Jötunheim and destroy everything pertaining to Project Starfish. A simple smash and grab. One beach massacre later and this straight forward mission is anything but a direct line to Jötunheim.
How Gunn and the editors structure that straightforward plot is somewhat complicated by his commitment to an episodic structure and some non-linear asides. Each episode is queued by a cheeky title card and is limited to a singular or group perspective; there isn’t all that much cross cutting. That lack of cross cutting is an interesting choice considering that technique’s ability to create suspense and its ability to push the plot forward. Instead at several points we take a step, or 8 minutes, back to see what was going on in another space. In these asides the film can feel like a bit of a drag at times having left a moment of peak drama for something else. These technical choices do have the positive result of making the action clearer, editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner don’t cut everything into confusing pieces as they juggle different locations. This is some of the cleanest action Gunn has done and easily tops anything he’s done at Marvel Studios. The battle against a kaiju sized Starro is some of the best kaiju action in the West since Godzilla(2014). As an action movie it delivers.
Continued belowThose previously mentioned films are rarely impressive character studies, character is function to them. Functionality is the name of the game on the Suicide Squad as Amanda Waller says everyone on Task Force X is chosen for his or her completely unique set of abilities. There’s Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2, she controls rats and might be the film’s real breakout. You have Robert DuBois aka Bloodsport played by Idris Elba, a man who doesn’t want to be there if it weren’t for Waller leveraging his daughter against him. His costuming is a pitch perfect translation of the 90s Image revolution and Elba’s star presence stops the character from fully reading as just a Deadshot knock off, but the obvious similarities abound. You have John Cena as Peacemaker, who is Regan era policy and masculinity rolled up into one deadly self-serious package. The commitment to his character’s singular note by Cena is commendable, but it is one note played over and over again. David Dastmalchian is Abner Krill, the Polka-Dot Man who shoots polka dots at people. The entirety of Task Force X can be summed up in one sentence. They are straight forward, functional, and carried by the ensemble cast.
With an eclectic cast of weirdos and outsiders that also includes an adorable rat, as well as an anthropomorphic sharkman demigod voiced by a major actor – who is once again treated as neurodivergent and infantilized – one could view this as Gunn repeating what he did in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Suicide Squad is in many ways the anti-Guardians, with no overt interest in finding characters who do a bit of bad and good and looking for redemption. Everyone in this movie is monstrous in some form or another. Evil is revealed to be endemic, not limited to just the work of a singular villain or individual; it is institutional from the Task Force X support staff enabling Amanda Waller and their deadpool’s to the Corot Maltese governments enabling of Dr. Gaius Grieves’ experiments. Just because everyone is bad, doesn’t mean they aren’t incapable of choosing good or showing small flashes of humanity. For all the tasteless edgelord humor that made him an easy target for aggreived rightwing actors, James Gunn has a sentimental heart. He can’t let anyone just be one thing, not even Amanda Waller or Starro. If you thought Zack Snyder’s choice to give Steppenwolf those big emotive eyes was “a choice,” wait until you see King Shark and Starro. He peppers throughout the film these small moments of humanity that sees characters let loose, no one is redeemed by these small kindnesses but it shows that they have the capacity to be more.
That sentimentality is what keeps the film from falling into the abyss it pours bucket after bucket of red into. Death is constant and brutal in this movie. I wouldn’t call the movie its violence or humor “mean” though. The cruelty in this film be it casual, ignorant, or thoughtful is often treated as the dark joke, the obvious line stepping that subverts our expectation. It’s not condoned it’s satirized. This movie is incapable of treating known characters and anonymous ones gruesome deaths as banal features even as it surrounds everything in this movie. Each gruesome death highlights the technical acumen and frank imagination necessary to execute it. That imagination is part of the charm to Bloodsport and Peacemakers multi-layered dick measuring contest over who can kill the most, and with the most style. Even when these moments don’t land as well, such as when someone splatters across a window, it becomes another element of foregrounded film style that denies the easy categorization.
With its constant emphasis on film style The Suicide Squad forces a consideration of the formal how of meaning making. What are the formal elements of film and how do they work together to create “deeper meaning” over a frame that is textually shallow and stylistically reinforced. The Suicide Squad is at once function forward action movie, but also a dark joke about American foreign policy in multiple eras, institutional neglect, and many other things that features thrilling action to sight gags out of Looney Tunes. It is disreputable and low and yet not nearly as base as you’d think it is. The ability to evoke a sense of depth and deny easy categorization to be “both/and” is James Gunn’s best trick in The Suicide Squad, one of the more interesting studio blockbusters in years.
