The Suicide Squad (2021) Spoilers

 

So, I want to give everyone a warning, there will be a lot of spoilers. I normally try to avoid them, but there is a lot I want to address. First off when I heard that James Gunn was the main driving force behind this movie I got really excited, he both wrote the script and directed it. I was excited because of the great job he had done on Guardians of the Galaxy. Then I remembered how bad the second movie was…but then again the first Suicide Squad movie was good… so maybe it’s just that he has issues creating second movies. This movie there were many choices of his that I questioned.

 

The first is that there are some jumps in time back and forth. These do nothing to help the story line and they do not even make artistic sense. They just make the first part of the movie seem disjointed. Start spoilers, I’m sure that he will defend that choice by saying that he did it so that people would not know that one team was a diversion while the other was the actual strike team. I think it would have been more meaningful if the audience would have known that Amanda Waller was sacrificing a team just because she could. By the way, why has some one not killed this crazy horrible lady. In the last movie she killed a whole bunch of non-criminals that were working for her and in this movie she is nearly as bad. I was cheering when she got hit in the head with the golf club. To bad the fix was not permanent. I will give Viola Davis credit for this acting skill. She seems like such a nice woman in real life and to be able to pull of such a horrible person is a real feat. Anyway, back to  James Gunn.

 

Assault Team 1

Then there is the characters. He was given full run of what happened and over what characters lived and died. He made some very bad decisions with this. Spoilers: First off he killed the first team way to fast. Many of their deaths he could have spaced out better for us to have longer to get to know each character. The cool thing about the Suicide Squad in general is getting to see a lot of random characters or less well know characters. By James killing them as quickly as he did we missed a lot of what could have been great character development. We got the smallest example of what I am talking about with Michael Rooker’s Savant. We had a little bit of good character development before he was killed. This was needed with the other team members as well. This would have also helped to develop the Amanda Waller character into even a more hated person because some attachment could have been developed for those characters. He lost a lot of opportunity to make something great there. Then why did he have to kill Boomerang so quickly. I was looking forward to seeing more character development with him in this film. The one character I was really wanting to see was the Weasel. I was thinking of all the weird things they could do with that character and then I just got massively disappointed. I say this because we think it drowned as part of the first assault and then it isn’t there for most of the rest of the movie. Only at the end of the movie do we see him wake up and run off into the woods. At least this character can be used again in the future and I hope that if Gunn is a part of it he won’t mess that up. Then there was the whole Polka Dot Man issues with his mom. The first time they show the other characters as his mom it was find and it made sense, but they carried the joke too long and too far. It got old fast. The cool thing though was the special effects they did for when his polka dots were building too much in his system. Then there is the characters that either nearly made it to the end or did live. One of the characters they did a lot of character development on was Ratcatcher 2. She did have a lot of audience draw by the end, but she could have died instead of Flag. Flag was the perfect foil character to Amanda and killing him was just a waste. He was the heart of the team with a good heart and they killed him through the heart with great detail. This is one of Gunn’s worst decisions.

Then the movie itself…let’s kill characters, have a sex scene that does little for the plot, and then toss in a Kaiju. I will admit that one of the best special effects of the movie was as the rats were eating the eye from the inside how they showed the eye dying. The face hugger thing had been done before, but could have been cool if they would have had the characters talk more to the monster through the hosts. The Melton thing was way over done and not as funny as what Gunn was probably hoping it would be.

This movie had so much potential and Gunn just dropped the ball. After seeing this movie, I am very concerned with both the up coming Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and the 3^rd movie in the main series. I just don’t have a lot of hope if Gunn keeps on the same track. Over all 3 stars out of 5 or a low C.

 

As a side note before the movie I got to see the preview for the new Dune movie. I had known that a new one was in the works, but had thought, “why are they doing this again?” After seeing the preview, I may actually look forward to it. The special effects look good on the worms, but I wonder how it will look when they ride them. Also, it has a strong cast that actually made me excited. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Here are a few other images that I just liked the graphic art for:

Picture 1 from:https://www.wonderwall.com/entertainment/movies/whos-playing-who-in-the-suicide-squad-movie-james-gunn-cast-of-characters-480046.gallery

Picture 2 from: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-suicide-squad-who-lives-and-dies/

Picture 3 from: https://m.imdb.com/video/vi605208601

Picture 4 from: https://www.polygon.com/movies/22545213/suicide-squad-starro-powers-project-starfish-dc-comics

Picture 5 and 6 from: https://nerdist.com/article/suicide-squad-2-everything-we-know/