‘The Suicide Squad’ or — A 350ft ‘Meh’?

The biggest surprise of James Gunn’s ‘The Suicide Squad’ (2021) was, after hearing almost nothing but rave reviews about it, how underwhelmed it left me. There’s violence, profanity and spectacle aplenty so why did it do almost nothing for me? I think the answer is that so much of the action, character beats and especially the humour felt both off the peg and de rigueur. The film is excessive but not original in the slightest, almost as if it is scared of giving the audience something they aren’t familiar with already in some form of another.

For example — within the first twenty minutes or so there’s a gag about “sucking a bag of dicks”. I’ve kinda lost count of how many times in recent comedy shows, stand-up specials and films the line “suck a bag of dicks” gets mentioned. It feels like a handy, worn out and unfunny go-to but is a line that’s included precisely because of audience familiarity. Almost straight after that we see Peacemaker in his underwear and I thought to myself “Well, they now have to mention ‘tighty-whities’”, which the film then, obligingly (and compulsory) does. It just feels so rote. Is this a script or a collection of memes?

Same with character depth and arcs which all seem to revolve around parents and parental figures so, again, I found myself sitting there totally unmoved by any of it because all I was thinking was “off the shelf”. Do all superhero stories have to involve or be driven by bad/good parenting? I’m not saying it’s lazy screenwriting but it’s certainly uninspired. Some people claim this gives ‘The Suicide Squad’ “heart” but, to me, it felt like a check-list, and I tend not to be emotionally engaged by check-lists.

The action is serviceable but with so many competing tones — humour, sadism, “heart” etc — the one emotion I never felt was tension and a lack of tension in an action scene is a bigger problem to overcome than any alien antagonist can offer. I was also genuinely struggling to identify the action scenes as despite all the gore and mayhem it all feels sort of smooshed out through the movie so I never felt any real peaks or troughs providing contrast. This could be why the climax felt anti-climactic.

I know that the main problem here is me (although that’s also me being disingenuous as the problem is also the movie, being nowhere near as transgressive, innovative or outré as it thinks it is or needs to be) as I am somewhat sick to death of superhero movies as a whole and have been for the last ten years. I know most genres burn themselves out after several years, allowing for other types of films to take their place, yet I don’t see that happening to the superhero genre anytime soon, despite the fact it’s outstayed its welcome for almost a decade. The only future I see for it now is creative bankruptcy, if it hasn’t started already. Now that should be an enemy Hollywood studios should really be thinking of tackling.