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Scene from "The Suicide Squad": Many heroes fall by the wayside in overkill
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Warner bros.
An inmate sits in the courtyard of a prison and plays with a small rubber ball. He throws it against the walls and catches it again with fabulous reflexes. At some point he lets him jump in such a way that he flips back and forth across the courtyard, from wall to wall, and at the end meets a little bird that has lost its way in the courtyard. This is nasty. But it can be much worse. Some time later you can see a bird sitting on a split human skull in the sunset and gleefully pecking small pieces from the brain.
In the film "The Suicide Squad", director James Gunn goes with his humor to the limit of tastelessness - and beyond. That makes this superhero spectacle about a squad of psychopaths and felons recruited by the secret service to save the world - or at least the United States - very entertaining. The film is like its heroes, who actually have nothing to lose and can therefore take everything out of it. Gunn goes to great lengths to get his filthy dozen as filthy as possible.
The new film is the sequel to David Ayer's comic book adaptation "Suicide Squad" from 2016. Ayer had big problems with the Warner Bros. studio and claims it maimed his film. To this day he is fighting for the publication of his cut version. Gunn, on the other hand, concentrates on mutilating the characters and destroying any form of heroic pathos in the beginning. In the first few minutes he sends a special unit of killers with a big halali on a suicide mission - and then lets it fail terribly. For the pleasure of its audience.
Gunn had already shown in 2014 in Guardians of the Galaxy, probably the funniest Marvel adaptation, how to weld a gang out of Misfits, which at first glance are hardly suitable as heroes.
He managed the feat of making the fans happy and at the same time entertaining all those who think superhero films are nonsense.
In 2018, around ten-year-old tweets in which Gunn had made dubious jokes about pedophilia, among other things, became public again.
Disney shot him, but entrusted him with the third "Guardians" film the following year.
Those who brood lose their heads
So Gunn knows what it feels like to be rehabilitated for doing an important mission. But now he has first worked for another client, Marvel's direct competitor: DC Entertainment. In their films there was usually a greater seriousness than in Marvel, especially Christopher Nolan made Batman an always darkly clouded hero who is at least as busy with himself as with the bad guys of this world. Gunn boldly puts an end to that. His motto: As soon as you start brooding, someone else has already blown your brain out.
He lets characters such as Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) reappear, who in 2020 had its own spin-off with »Birds of Prey«, and introduces new ones like the murderer Bloodsport, embodied by the always great Idris Elba . Together, as the Suicide Squad, they are supposed to destroy a former Nazi research laboratory in a banana republic, where a terrifying monster is being bred. Gunn gives all of his characters their moments, even if in general heroic overkill they often leave the film much earlier than expected.
The gags of the director, who also wrote the screenplay, are deeply witty and at times extremely cynical, but often original. Because Gunn sets no limits to his imagination, neither moral nor aesthetic, because he lets colorful birds fly through pictures in the middle of the slaughter as in the cartoon and gives the voice of Sylvester Stallone to a shark on shore leave, he can surprise his audience again and again. He takes the audience into his grotesquely exaggerated bloodbaths and, strangely enough, gives them the feeling of stepping into a fountain of youth.