Recommended watching, maybe.
The DC Cinematic Universe has a well-deserved reputation for being a gigantic dumpster fire. While there have been a few worthwhile movies to come out from Warner Bros. in recent years, in general, movies based on DC comic book properties are just not in the same league as the competing Marvel/Disney products or even the Marvel/Sony products. The reason for this at first seems a mystery. Is the Marvel cinematic universe really that much richer? Why, this is DC we’re talking about! They have Batman and Superman, and… and Batman, and Superman, and yet another reboot of Batman, and some more Superman…
And then all those other guys.
It seems a shame that so many other good characters are so completely overshadowed by the Big Blue Boy Scout and the grumpy guy in the cave. If you haven’t yet seen Aquaman, you should consider it: it’s easily the equal of any of Marvel’s standalone Thor movies. Definitely see Wonder Woman, and Wonder Woman 1984 is actually much better than the reviewers said. After that, another one worth tracking down is Shazam!, as it’s a lot of fun, and isn’t that what a comic book movie is supposed to be? Fun? (Okay, we’ll leave Dredd out of the conversation for now.)
But after that…well, then we’re down to all those “other guys,” and that brings us to Harley Quinn and The Suicide Squad.
The 2021 movie The Suicide Squad fits into an awkward place in the DC Cinematic Universe. To begin with, it has almost the same title and many of the same characters as the 2016 bomb. Suicide Squad, so it’s starting out with a major disadvantage.
Secondly, the focal character is Harley Quinn, as played by Margot Robbie, and it follows hot on the high heels of her playing the same character in 2020’s Birds of Prey, which was just plain awful in just about every way that it’s possible for a movie to be bad.
As concerns The Suicide Squad, though, the good news is that you can completely ignore both Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey. There is zero continuity between the three movies. Pretend that the previous two movies never existed. I’m sure there are plenty of people at Warner Bros. who feel the same way.
The better news is that while Harley Quinn remains the focal character, Margot Robbie doesn’t have to try to carry the entire film herself, as she did in Birds of Prey. She is surrounded by an excellent supporting cast.
The best news is that Warner/DC apparently gave writer/director James Gunn permission to go really deep into DC’s giant cesspool of “other guys” and to do whatever he wanted with them, and he turned up some true delights. Idris Elba as Bloodsport? (Will Smith wasn’t available to return as Deadshot; no great loss. Elba is much better.) Sylvester Stallone as King Shark? Nathan Fillion as The Detachable Kid? Peter Capaldi as Thinker? David Dastmalchian as The Polka-Dot Man? (One of the more ludicrous super-villains in DC’s pantheon.) Starro the Conqueror? Above all, John Cena as The Peacemaker—and he was so good in the role he got his own spinoff TV series on HBO Max, which is getting great reviews and has just been renewed for a second season.
Be forewarned, though, this movie is not merely violent; it’s ultra-violent. It’s Deadpool-level violent. It is so over-the-top violent the violence itself becomes cartoonish and ludicrous. So this is not a movie for the squeamish or to watch with your young children.
But if the violence doesn’t bother you, then The Suicide Squad is well-made, well-cast, well-acted, and just all the way around a great big, loud, colorful, noisy, impossible, and at times laugh-out-loud mess. It’s got action, excitement, plot twists, villains who think they’re heroes, heroes who turn out to be villains, villains who actually are heroes in the end, and it climaxes with an enormous boss fight that puts the final battles in pretty much every other recent DC or Marvel movie to shame.
Isn’t that exactly what you want from a comic book-based movie?
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