In a Real Switcheroo, You Voted For Me to See a Good Movie, Namely 2021's Delightfully Demented The Suicide Squad
I sometimes forget just how fucking much I love movies. I’m crazy about them! I’ve devoted my life and career to exploring their wonders and horrors. I write about movies that are not just bad but soul-crushing in their awfulness. That can’t help but color how I see cinema as an art form.
You simply cannot see as many obscure Nicolas Cage and John Travolta movies as I have and still hold onto your faith in a benign God of cinema.
That’s why I started The Great Catch-Up anywhere from a few months to a year ago. I honestly don’t remember.
I created the column to give myself an excuse to finally watch and experience all the great movies that I have inexplicably not seen during the seven years this site has been my online home.
My neuro-divergent brain finds life overwhelming and confusing. To make it seem more sane and manageable, I break it down into a series of tasks that I must perform.
Some of these tasks are given to me by my wife. As a house husband and father, there are lots of things that I need to do, and I can’t keep track of any of them on my own. That’s why it helps to have someone neurotypical, with strong executive functioning, to help you navigate a scary and uncertain world not made for the neurodivergent.
The other set of tasks is professional in nature. Some of them I give myself, and some of them you give me by voting in polls and choosing movies for me to watch and write about for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0.
I try to break everything down into manageable parts, but my brain just won’t follow the program. It’s got a gremlin inside that pushes constantly and relentlessly toward chaos and self-defeat.
Y’all gave me the enviable assignment to watch and write about The Suicide Squad by voting for it over Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in a Patreon poll.
There is no reason that I have not covered The Suicide Squad except that it was not on my big mental list of tasks to accomplish before the sweet release of the grave, and my dumb mind has difficulty doing non-tasks because there’s always some part of me whispering, “Isn’t this a waste? I have a rough list of 4000 things you need to do, and this isn’t on it. You’ll get in trouble if you continue to go off-task.”
You know what? I HAVE gone off task. And it has gotten me into trouble.
So, I tricked my brain/enemy by making something I already wanted to do into a task that I must accomplish.
I’m glad I did! As I suspected, The Suicide Squad was very much my thing. It aimed squarely at the Nathan Rabin demographic and hit a bullseye, not unlike the popular comic book supervillain Deadshot.
I love James Gunn. I’ve read his autobiographical novel The Collector and the memoir he ghost-wrote for Lloyd Kaufman. One of the first movies I wrote about professionally was Tromeo & Juliet, his breakthrough screenplay. He gets me, and he gets comic books. That’s why he was put in charge of the crumbling castle that is the DCU.
If anybody can save the DC Cinematic Universe other than Zack Snyder, a faultless hero whose masterpieces are beloved by everyone, with the prominent exception of the sizable contingent of fans and critics who hate him, it’s Gunn.
Gunn had a bold vision for his supervillain team-up movie. Where David Ayer’s 2016 film of almost the same name did everything wrong, The Suicide Squad does everything right.
Suicide Squad had a lot of problems. The Suicide Squad fixes them while savvily holding onto the few aspects of Ayer’s fiasco that worked. Most importantly, Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn.
Robbie made Joker’s gal a force of nature at once utterly insane and blessed with a child-like innocence. She’s out of her goddamn mind, a killing machine who is not just likable but lovable.
Robbie’s mesmerizing performance made her an outlier in Suicide Squad, but Gunn set out to give the rest of the movie the energy and warped humor of her performance and succeeded.
Viola Davis returns as the earlier film’s other highlight, Amanda Waller. Amanda Waller is the brutal pragmatist who put together Task Force X, or the Suicide Squad as it is more commonly known. Davis is intimidatingly tough as someone who will do anything to achieve her objectives, including killing underlings if they fail her.
Last and certainly least, the dependable Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney return unnecessarily as Colonel Rick Flagg and Captain Boomerang respectively.
But before Gunn can get at least part of the band together, we’re treated to an elaborate bit of misdirection involving the introduction and early demise of a Suicide Squad, but not the Suicide Squad.
Introducing heroes who shock audiences by dying early and en masse is a sturdy pop culture trope. There’s a particularly inspired version in MacGruber.
Ever the geek, Gunn delights in being able to play with a whole different set of absurd super-villains in the form of the feral Weasel (Seann Gunn), Nathan Fillion as T.D.K, AKA The Detachable Kid, comedian Flula Borg as Eurotrash supervillain as Javelin, Michael Rooker as Brian Durlin / Savant, a veteran who looks like an albino Tommy Wiseau, mass-murdering alien Mongal (Mayling Ng) and Richard "Dick" Hertz/Blackguard (Pete Davidson).
This initial Suicide Squad’s name proves accurate and prescient. So, it falls upon a backup Suicide Squad to travel to the jungles of fictional Corto Maltese to destroy a mysterious laboratory operation known as Project Starfish, which is housed in a Jötunheim laboratory overseen by Gaius Grieves/The Thinker.
The dirty half-dozen criminals turned crime fighters are led by marksman Bloodsport (Idris Elba). Elba makes his bad-guy-gone-good exhausted on an existential as well as physical level from a frenetic life, traveling the world and killing people for money. He gives Bloodsport a very dry and British sense of humor and a tough and tender relationship with a teenage daughter who appears to be the only thing he cares about.
He’s joined by Christopher "Chris" Smith/Peacemaker, whom John Cena makes a blunt instrument of a man, a deadpan, stone-faced man of violence; Sylvester Stallone as the voice of King Shark, a humanoid shark with a limited vocabulary that reflects his unimpressive intellect; Polka Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior).
Polka-Dot Man and Ratcatcher 2 have superpowers so ridiculous that they feel parodic, like jokes rather than actual abilities, but Gunn’s screenplay and Melchior and Dastmalchian’s empathetic performances as, respectively, a dude who can throw killer polka dots and a woman who can control vermin elevate their misfortune to tragedy.
Polka-Dot Man’s backstory is particularly harrowing. He’s the son of a mad scientist who tried to turn her children into superheroes by subjecting them to an interdimensional virus that affected them in unexpected and unfortunate ways.
Poor Polka-Dot Man is in perpetual war with his own body. To survive, he needs to expel the polka dots twice a day, which are simultaneously his gift and the bane of existence.
Dastmalchian is achingly sad and all too human as a tortured soul with a power that’s more of a curse. Rat Catcher 2 gets her name from being the daughter of the first Rat Catcher (Taika Waititi, history’s greatest monster) and her ability to control rats.
The original Rat Catcher saw his gift as a curse. He led a hard life and died of a heroin overdose after giving his powers to his beloved daughter.
Suicide Squad sends its heroes/villains/anti-villains on a jungle adventure while Harley Quinn, who survived the massacre of the first Suicide Squad team, has a side-quest where she romances a dashing leader who turns out to have a massive downside.
Robbie is the film’s heart and soul. Liberated from Jared Leto’s corrupting influence, she dominates a movie filled with scene-stealers and breakout characters.
The Suicide Squad realizes the limitless capacity for pitch-black comedy endemic in a story about monsters pressed into service as heroes. Gunn’s film works as a wild comedy and as a superhero movie of a different stripe, but it also works on an emotional level. It’s full of gleeful ultra-violence but also unexpected moments of whimsy and beauty, like when Harley goes on a rampage, but when she stabs bad guys, they bleed flowers and birds instead of blood. Gunn makes us care about these ludicrous oddballs and their unique dilemmas.
If The Suicide Squad is a taste of what Gunn has in store for the rest of the DC Cinematic Universe, then I am one hundred percent on board.
At the risk of being heretical, Gunn does superhero movies even better than Zack Snyder, and that was his whole deal.
I quite enjoyed watching a good movie for a change. I’ll have to do that more often, in part by putting good-ass movies in Great Catch-Up polls to ensure that it’s not all hot garbage from here on out.
Oh, it’ll be mostly garbage. I know my brand, but I will go out of my way to write about better movies for this site because it needs more balance. It also turns out that these “good” movies are “fun” and “enjoyable” to watch, even if the laughter they produce is overwhelmingly and regrettably of the intentional variety.
Nathan has expensive but life-changing dental implants, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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