The Suicide Squad Review

The opening is a statement of intent: assemble a team, put the marquee names in the front rank, and slaughter them on the beach in a chaotic mess of bad intelligence, while the camera stays with the people who were never meant to survive. From there Gunn makes the film the 2016 version was sold as, a grubby, blood soaked mission picture in a fictional South American dictatorship, with a genuine anti imperial anger under the jokes about a man who fires polka dots.

Idris Elba plays Bloodsport as an exhausted professional, John Cena's Peacemaker is a superb comic creation whose punchline is fascism, and Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher 2 gives the ensemble a heart that never turns saccharine. The Harley Quinn escape, staged with cartoon flowers blooming from every kill, is the best action Gunn has ever shot. The weaknesses are real. Some of the deaths land as shock rather than meaning, Peter Capaldi's Thinker is wasted, and a finale against a hundred foot starfish is a joke the film commits to at the cost of tension.