This would never happen at Marvel: “Guardians Of The Galaxy” director James Gunn was allowed to really let off steam with the DC film “The Suicide Squad” and thus delivers one of the most brutal, funniest and best superhero films of recent years.
The name James Gunn should be familiar to at least one superhero-savvy audience by now, after all, he directed two of the most popular MCU blockbusters with “Guardians Of The Galaxy” and “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2”. Originally, however, Gunn started his career with far less youth-friendly and mass-market films, be it at the trash film company Troma, with horror films like “Slither” or the unwieldy (and incredibly brutal) superhero satire “Super”.
But what a real James Gunn superhero film from the budget class of a “Guardians Of The Galaxy” looks like can also be admired – in “The Suicide Squad”, which you can stream now with a Netflix subscription.
“If ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ was 50% James Gunn, ‘The Suicide Squad’ is now 100%,” writes FILMSTARTS editor-in-chief Christoph Petersen accordingly in his review of “The Suicide Squad”. By the way, this film is not to be confused with “Suicide Squad” (without “The”) from 2016 – “The Suicide Squad” is a loose sequel in which some characters from the first part appear (such as Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn), but the predecessor is otherwise largely ignored.
To make the confusion complete: “Suicide Squad” is also currently available at no extra cost with a Netflix subscription.
WACKY COMIC BLOCKBUSTER
Whether “The Suicide Squad” is for you, you will notice right at the beginning of the film. Because the first 20 minutes are among the “sickest, craziest, funniest, most brutal, weirdest, most surprising, all-round most wonderful things you’ve ever experienced in a comic book blockbuster”, as our review says.
Thus Gunn creates a pleasant counterbalance to the overpowering Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which, for all its quality, is far too well-oiled a machine to produce a film as whacky and revolutionary as “The Suicide Squad” – genre experiments like the black-and-white horror homage “Werewolf By Night” or not!
THE PLOT OF “THE SUICIDE SQUAD “
The US government has a problem: There has been a coup in the fictional island state of Corto Maltese. Because of this, the US-backed regime is no longer in power and a well-kept secret threatens to be exposed: an alien secret weapon stationed in an old research facility. Therefore, Task Force X (also known as the Suicide Squad) is sent out to solve the problem. But the mission goes anything but smoothly…
