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August 8, 2021

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Turning a superhero myth on its head

One little article separates James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” from David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad.” But, oh, what a difference a word makes.

Just five years after the train wreck that prompted Warner Brothers to retool its DC Comics universe, James Gunn’s nearly wholesale redo exists in an entirely different movie galaxy. “The Suicide Squad” may go down as one of the greatest, and quickest, do-overs in blockbusterdom.

Like Gunn’s two “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, “The Suicide Squad” is a chaotic, freewheeling inversion of much of what’s expected in a comic book movie. Here, heroes die (a lot of them). Most aren’t really heroes, either. Some aren’t even human. But they’ve been sprung from prison for a kamikaze mission on behalf of the United States government. In this motliest of crews, no one has anything like a sleek shield or a clean caped suit.

Gunn came to “The Suicide Squad” in a brief window opened by a social media scandal. Disney fired him from Marvel for some old, dug-up tweets, only to, after the protests of his “Guardians” cast, be rehired to direct “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” But in the interim, Warner and DC poached the writer-director, one of the few filmmakers in the genre with the nerve and talent to not exactly buck the system but deconstruct it, and turn superhero myth into slapstick farce.

Gunn has said he was initially offered the chance to direct a Superman movie, but it’s telling that he turned down the crown jewel of DC for the likes of Polka-Dot Man, Ratcatcher 2 (who communicates with rodents) and Nanaue, a cartoonish walking shark in jams.

But if most mainline superhero movies ultimately exalt American ideals like justice, individualism and might, Gunn goes exactly the other way. “The Suicide Squad” is the anti-Superman, a madcap rejoinder to Captain America. In Gunn’s hands, the America superhero is grotesque, brutal and ridiculous.

Like Gunn’s previous movies, “The Suicide Squad” boasts wall-to-wall needle drops (the Pixies’ “Hey,” Louis Armstrong’s “I Ain’t Got Nobody”), yet leaves out maybe the most fitting song, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”

Early on in the movie, we get a sense that the mission is dubious. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) summons a bunch of prisoners for the Task Force X program.

Exactly who will be the main characters and who’s head is about to be sliced like a melon takes some sorting out. But in a clown-car of a superhero movie, the most central protagonist is Idris Elba’s Bloodsport, a mercenary only coaxed into joining the team when Waller threatens prison time or worse for his teenage daughter (Storm Reid, who is very good).

With him are Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior, a standout), a warm-hearted millennial with a very polite pet rat named Sebastian on her shoulder. The skills of Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) are initially hard to decipher, but the shy, stunted Abner proves surprisingly capable, even if he sheepishly apologizes for having such a “flamboyant” power.




 

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