Intelligence officer Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) decides to assemble a team of dangerous, incarcerated supervillains for a top-secret mission. Figuring it has nothing to lose, the U.S. government supplies weapons to Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and other despicable inmates. Dubbed the Suicide Squad, the united criminals must defeat a mysterious and powerful entity while contending with the antics of the diabolical Joker (Jared Leto).
Release date: August 5, 2016 (USA)
Director: David Ayer
Executive producer: Zack Snyder
Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov
Distributor: Warner Bros.
What’s funny is that Suicide Squad didn’t even begin life as a DC Universe movie. There was still a point just a few years ago where Warner Bros figured they could have all their DC-related films live separately, a notion that went out the window after Man of Steel. While I have heard rumors that some properties in development are being seen as ‘set apart’ from the main DC movieverse, I would bet that by the time they come to the screen (if they do) they’ll have links to the other films.
At any rate, Suicide Squad was never intended to be the big expansion piece for the DC movieverse, but here it is, bringing in a whole slew of new characters and kicking down the doors of magic and mysticism in a world that has been, until now, fairly grounded. Even Wonder Woman’s business in BvS is not ever presented explicitly as magical, but Suicide Squad goes there fairly early with the introduction of Enchantress, a 6000 year old demonic being inhabiting the body of an archeologist who stumbled upon her tomb. It’s big magic, crazy magic, weird magic, and it’s truly unike anything we’ve seen in the DC films or, for that matter, the Marvel movies, which have tried to keep their magical elements as a mysterious extension of known science and quantum physics.
Suicide Squad 2016 Exploding the boundaries of the DC movieverse would be enough pressure for a film that is based on an obscure comic and that features obscure characters, but now it has to do that in a climate where a lot of people didn’t like BvS. The film is saddled with the need to course-correct the DC movieverse, to present a vision for the future of the franchise that isn’t as grim and po-faced… and it has to do it in a film filled with murderous villains! My review is embargoed until tomorrow, but it is surprising how much more heroic the villains in Suicide Squad are then the “heroes” of BvS.
