It may sound strange, but we can never thank the Trump fanatic trolls enough for airing a shitty James Gunn joke on twitter a few years ago. If that led to being fired from Marvel and DC giving him carte blanche to do ‘The Suicide Squad’ (The Suicide Squad, 2021) is a coincidence of fate too fortunate since we are before best action and fantasy blockbuster of the year, maybe for many years.
Gunn’s check of $ 200 million and no restrictions has managed to bring together the best of both worlds in today’s ratings-limited cinema. On the one hand he has enough money to put on a great show on an epic scale, and on the other the freedom to include everything that we are never allowed to see in those kinds of movies. Blood, corrosive humor, more blood, wild sexual jokes, tacos and most important of all, seamless visual eloquence.
Gunn doesn’t use black comedy and gore just because he can, in the style of a movie like ‘Sausage Party,’ which seemed to want to be wrong with a myriad of childish jokes that were tiring at 20 minutes because he had that option to the letter, but elaborates his own language thanks to the unusual situation as a creator in which he finds himselfIt’s like a liberated painter who has just found inspiration, like a dog without a muzzle or a gorilla out of the cage, being able to do wild things in his big budget film becomes a canvas.
The Birds of Prey Challenge
Creativity is inexhaustible in details such as that same initial Warner Bros logo made with spilled blood, and at the same time it becomes a meticulous journey through all the blockbuster situations to which we are accustomed in which he removes the blindfold and invites us to see what lay beyond, exploring wild, unpredictable, fresh and biting possibilities. It is as if he showed us for the first time how to fuck without a condom and reminded us that the cinema is more than the four walls that they have / have imposed on us.
It’s easy to think about the first ‘Suicide Squad’ and think about what it could be and wasn’t, but it’s unfair to think that because this sequel is not just the comic book adaptation that we deserved but one of the best superhero movies for many years. years. In fact, the genres are intoxicated here with each other and it can be seen as a modern war film, even the ‘Inglorious Basterds’ (Inglorious Basterds, 2009) what we thought (and wanted) it was going to be when we saw his trailerAnd although it turned out to be a great movie, it wasn’t the one we had in mind.
Since its inception there has been a mission film, like the initial foray of ‘Predator’ (Predator, 1987) for more than two hours, with a commando full of morons, freaks and evicted, in the style of ‘Kelly’s Violent’ (Kelly’s Heroes, 1970) or ’12 of the gallows’ (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) whom we get to know with a few strokes with an emotionally very alive script that knows how to reach the heart while it rains bullets, severed heads and creatures similar to the facehuggers of the ‘Alien’ saga.
Actually the tone is more like that of an installment of ‘The Expendables’ (The Expendables, 2010) only here Silvester Stallone is a man-eating shark accompanied by the toxic Avenger, Snake Plissken, Willard and even a Norman Bates who throws colored warts . ‘The suicide squad’ is an insane cocktail of brutal gore, grime, fury, adult humor (don’t even think about taking your child to see it) and dessert with sci-fi horror ultrabody and kaiju, with the star of ‘Assault on earth‘revamped, which goes far, far beyond superhero movies.
The balance of marvel and DC is broken
The dynamics of the characters erase the lines of Marvel and DC, because it is still a variation of the idea of ’Guardians of the Galaxy’ (Guardians of the Galaxy, 2014) within the DC universe, in general both are very connected to Gunn’s style, but this is more like what I was doing a decade ago with ‘Super’ (2010), returning to the same themes to explore them without budget limits and the same ability to create aberrant, histrionic and (good) bad taste moments .
‘The Suicide Squad’ is the movie James Gunn was born to. It is a kind of autoremake of ‘The Specials’ (2000) to which he has been adding with all the best of his later films, from’ Slither ‘(2006) and its cosmic terrors that connect people to the very undervalued’ The Belko Experiment ‘(2016), another bloodbath that exposed secret experiments in South America in an office building like the one we also see on occasions in the suicide mission.
Beyond the gore and outbursts of all kinds, his timing for black comedy it is typical of a master of perversion and takes the opportunity to infiltrate an acid commentary on America’s silent colonialism that uncovers the hypocrisy also of the government and of the “class A” superheroes, serving as a celebration of the marginalized, the different and the imperfection not alien to his filmography but more polished and honest than ever.
The transgression goes inside
It is not the first time that we see a wild and foul-mouthed superhero film, but cases like ‘Deadpool’ (2016) rely too much on their condition as a hooligan toy and show a self-awareness that gives them a certain expiration date. ‘The suicide squad’ is not only a tart of viscera to the face, but it is by itself a great movie in which we see the constant improvement of an author capable of writing leaving a hundred seeds that hatch later, rounding out a colossal collection of disposable characters that you end up worshiping.
Not only is it outrageous because of its incorrectness, but it is also an insane explosion of creativity from a James Gunn strewn with gags, comic book visual storytelling and the spirit of B-series horror and monsters He takes his Troma origins so deeply into account that he brings back Lloyd Kaufman for a hilarious cameo. He also opens his film with Johnny Cash and the Jim Carroll Band theme from the credits of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (2004), perhaps a subtle message of self-affirmation or just a nod to his partner Zack Snyder.
‘The suicide squad’ shows that you can be a transgressor without having to force it all the time, showing how cinema can be when you do not put limitations on your imagination, postulating itself as one of the most subversive large studio films, not because of swearing and the severed members flying, but because it puts the very subgenre that has reigned on the screens for more than a decade in front of the mirror, opening new limits that tend to infinity. James Gunn has made a manifesto of color, gunpowder and punk rock, and it’s outrageously brilliant.