Roy Tang

First, the spoiler-free review:

THE SUICIDE SQUAD spoiler-free review:

• great, fun, violent, hilarious, possibly best of DCEU so far
• trailers have spoiled waaaay too much of this movie
• first act was ok, second act felt a bit meh, third act was great

• hard to comment on actor performances without spoiling things, but Daniela Melchior was great and Idris Elba took the role seriously
• there is a post-credits scene

Full review on the blog later

Second: I have to say, titling it “The Suicide Squad” is super annoying especially for anyone who does data processing/indexing, since “The” is what differentiates it from the 2016 word, and that’s usually ignored in stuff like search engines and such. Oh well.

Anyway, it turns out I don’t actually have very spoiler-y stuff to say though; the film is pretty straightforward. I guess I’ll try. It’s a marked improvement over the 2016 film in all aspects. It’s also visually a feast; James Gunn obviously had way too much fun with many of the shots. I am less a fan of the music/soundtrack choices here than in Guardians of the Galaxy though.

Some of the DC characters here are very strange choices, but most of them are used well. At least, the ones that survived most of the movie are pretty good. The rest were mostly cannon fodder who got killed off in like the first 5 minutes. King Shark was hilarious; Bloodshot and Peacemaker’s “rivalry” was great; you find yourself strangely rooting for Polka Dot Man; and Ratcatcher 2 was indeed the heart of this film, as promised. Also, I like how they straight-up just played Starro true to his comic book roots, and he’s just a giant kaiju starfish. He even walks around like Patrick Starr lol.

I am disappointed at how much the trailers have spoiled though. Specifically thinking of that scene where they’re about to go rescue Harley but she just shows up outside and are all “What are you guys doing?”, that would have been a great gag on first watch. Also I would’ve led with that scene first before cutting to “X minutes earlier” and THEN show Harley tearing her way through the building to escape. I actually didn’t like the “Harley getting captured” subplot too much though, as it felt like unnecessary filler that was added just because they needed to give one of the big stars more to do.

Still overall pretty good, and a welcome entry to the DCEU.