YNOT at the Movies

Even though Covid is having another surge and the theaters have not fully returned to normal yet, the superhero and comic book adaptations have begun to pop up on the big summer screens. The latest is the writer-director James Gunn's humorous and gory "The Suicide Squad" (USA 2021 | 132 min.), a reboot of a few underdog characters in the DC Universe.

Just a few minutes into the movie, the film already handsomely pulls off its first joke on the audience. I won't reveal what the joke is about, but that basically sets the movie's playful and humorous tone, with plenty of quirky dialogues that are often hilarious.

The characters in this movie are unlike those typical superhero movies, which are usually grand and showy and ready to be made into toy action figures. Instead, they are mostly expendable criminals and underdogs: the cheerful Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the brutal Bloodsport (Idris Elba), the muscular Peacemaker (John Cena), the hardcore soldier Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the mentally damaged Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), the mouse-commanding Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), the powerful King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), among many others.

They make a deal with the stone-faced Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to form a suicide squad, aka Task Force X, in return for reducing their prison sentences. Their mission is to go to an island nation called Corto Maltese in South America to retrieve and destroy evidence that the United States sponsored the human experiments led by the super villain The Thinker (Peter Capaldi). The Thinker has created a giant alien-looking starfish, which has become a threat to the world.

Will these lowlifes save the world from the monstrous starfish?

The director James Gunn's imagination runs wild with his colorful characters. He crafts many spectacles as grand as any other superhero movies, plus a creepy mice scene which might give you nightmares. But the most entertaining part of the movie is when he lets these characters deliver hilarious one-liners with straight faces while taking a break from slashing flesh or blowing up bodies. You may also have a hard time trying to stop giggling when you see how he composes his zombie scenes with each baby starfish attached to a human host's face.

Although quite superficial and preachy, the movie takes a few stabs at America's foreign policy and the gun culture. But obviously that's not the movie's focus anyway. It just wants to have some bloody fun and generates some laughter. Well, it succeeds in providing some much-need comic relief when there is still no end to Covid in sight.

Let's hope the next movie won't bring back the scary looking Weasel (Sean Gunn). Like those mice, he freaks me out.

"The Suicide Squad" opens on Friday, August 6, 2021.