For me, it was definitely a meh movie. Gunn tried to repeat his Guardians of the Galaxy success, but has been caught up in the dark web of DC’s “everything edgier and darker” vibe. For the good, Ratcatcher 2 and Harley Quinn were the absolute stars of this film. Both actresses do a stellar job with their roles, and I swear I’ve rarely seen someone whose face is so emotive as Margot Robbie’s is in this role. Also, King Shark was kind of stupid fun in a “if Groot ate everything” way. And I’ve never seen Idris in anything where I didn’t like him (other than that terrible Fast and Furious spin off, and I don’t blame him for that).
Beyond that… not much to like about this film. Cena is terrible in everything he’s in, I wish people would stop hiring him. The Rock he ain’t. The plot is a bit of a mess, and of course they had to make the south American island nation cartoonishly evil (redeemed a little by making it partly that way because of terrible American policies). And the gore stopped being funny after the first couple of minutes, it was just brutal and annoying.
Also, why does Gunn hate birds? Seriously… all those poor birds! (Note: I did like the use of a bright color pallet though… more super hero films need brighter colors and some of those birds were gloriously radiant).
EDIT: DC is falling down with its movies (still), and I’ve never much cared for their TV shows, but they are rocking it with this one and I’m glad to see the next season is coming soon!
“All the Marvel movies.” You mean all three of them? I keep seeing this complaint about the surfeit of superhero movies. There are upwards of a thousand movies made every year, and less than ten or so are superhero stories. There must really be “sensitive coming-of-age story” fatigue out there, too then, as well as “sophomoric comedy” bloat and “low-budget horror” ennui rampant.
Fair, fair. And I’d normally be right there with you. But this one had way too many moments where the “that’s dumb” factor so outweighed the “that’s cool” factor and pulled me out of the fun zone. I mean, if you’re filming a world where liquids follow the laws of physics, you don’t get to arbitrarily switch them off just for a cool shot. Bulletproof stuff doesn’t turn to tissue paper just because you pick up a stick. And that’s just one scene. Without at least a modicum of logical, internal consistency within whatever daffy world you’re creating, might as well just be a CGI demo reel. Which is what this one felt like to me, only a couple hours too long.
I assume when people talk about something streaming for free, they’re referring to services without a subscription fee. Which would be a while from now because I don’t think these blockbusters will be shared as readily as things in, say, Tubi’s library.
James Gunn cut his teeth on Troma films, so you’re probably not too far off. He was trained as a video shock jock.
And I do not, because few streaming services are free, and certainly not the ones that would show a recent film like this. I assume they mean “free” as in “a service I’m already paying for.” But admittedly, I might be wrong.
The term can also be used for films intended to make tons of money. Anyway, the success of the movie has been discussed earlier in the thread. Streaming and the most recent COVID surge have certainly mucked things up.
Now it was one thing when Final Destination’s 4th installment, 9 years after the first, was called The Final Destination. I even kind of got it when The Fast and the Furious’s 4th installment, 8 years after the first, was called Fast and Furious.
But the direct successor-sequel-ish film to the previous one, five years later, going from Suicide Squad to The Suicide Squad? Setting aside the fact that Suicide Squad is an established brand in comics, it doesn’t really have the same status in the film world, and the first film was hardly an earthshaker enough to warrant this treatment. The others could get away with this trick because they are franchises and the title riff is really playing off the name of the franchise, not the first movie per se. This just makes zero sense to me.
Quit whining that it isn’t a Dostoyevsky-scripted Peckinpah production.
I give it a thumbs up for unpretentious distracting end-of-summer entertainment. It’s better than the first installment, too.
But those ten superhero movies generate an outsized amount of publicity, compared to everything else.
I used to like superhero movies, but I’m getting sick of them because they remind me that Hollywood is primarily interested in generating a profit, not good story telling. The original Robocop is a great film, fun, full of action and biting sarcasm. The ensuing Robocop franchise films are horrible, they were made to capitalize on the original without adding anything, and weren’t even good stories on paper.
Thing is, I may very well see Suicide Squad, but @jlw’s non-recommendation sure sounds like deja vu all over again.
I saw most of the movie, but wound up turning it off at a particular scene (the rape scene). I never got around to watching the ending, although I know I should. The other James Gunn movies I’ve seen, I’ve liked; for several years, Slither was my annual Valentine’s Day pick.
I’ll get around to watching this Suicide Squad at some point, but it’s on my list.
Well, they require you to have watched all the previous movies. (Until now, the movies have completely ignored the Marvel tv series, and any references to things outside the movies aren’t really helped by familiarity with the reference material.) Which is part of why I think the MCU having a slight reset, where they introduce a lot of new characters (that don’t rely on the previous films) on top of the covid-created gap, will hurt them.
I wonder. Superhero movies are definitely one of the things that are best seen in theaters, but they’ve also been responsible for killing off almost all the movies with mid-range budgets. Which is creating a lot of serious problems for the industry on a number of different levels. And I think it’s doing weird things to audiences, too. I know someone who used to go to the movies all the time, but once the superhero movies showed up (which just baffle her), she stopped entirely. There wasn’t much else to watch, suddenly.
Five, technically, from Marvel properties. But yes, when they pump a billion+ dollars into those movies, they expect a high return that they’re not going to get right now.
Apples and oranges. There’s a relatively small number of movies that get shown in Western movie theaters - and far fewer now, thanks to the superhero craze knocking out mid-budget movies (i.e. most of what used to just be considered “movies”). So yeah, they’re quite dominant. And that doesn’t even get into the dozens of superhero tv shows that have popped up. Nor the non-superhero movies and tv shows that got restructured to imitate superhero media (e.g. the disastrous Universal monster movie “universe”).
It’s not like superhero movies are a remotely equivalent genre to “low-budget horror” etc. The formulae that superhero content has to fit with are substantial - there’s great restrictions on story, tone, characters, plot… and that’s before you get into the franchise nature of them, and the restrictions that puts on the movies. I’ve been at the point for a while now where, upon seeing a new Marvel movie, I feel profound deja-vu, that I’ve already seen this particular film, because it shares so much with their previous films. (I completely stopped watching all the superhero tv shows, because those were a thousand times worse in terms of feeling like I was watching the same thing over and over.) Movies like The Suicide Squad not doing well are just going to further constrain what kind of superhero movies get made.
