The Suicide Squad (2021) Review: James Gunn Fixes Everything
James Gunn's Suicide Squad is a genre masterpiece — R-rated, hilarious, brilliantly violent, and structured with the confidence of a filmmaker at his absolute peak. Everything the 2016 film wasn't. 8/10.
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🦸 This review is part of the The Old DCEU – Every Film Reviewed – watch every DCEU film from Man of Steel to the finale (2013–2023).
The Suicide Squad was made because James Gunn got fired. Disney dismissed him from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2018 over decade-old offensive tweets, and Warner Bros. — with something approaching institutional opportunism — hired him within weeks. He was given full creative control, an R rating, and the specific brief that made the 2016 Suicide Squad impossible: no studio interference. The result is one of the most purely satisfying superhero films of the past decade.
AdThe Suicide Squad (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)
The correct format for the Starro climax and the exceptional sound design. Every cent of the 4K upgrade is justified.
This is a film made by someone who has learned, from Guardians of the Galaxy, that superhero ensembles work when individual characters feel irreplaceable. Every member of the Suicide Squad in this film — even the ones who die in the first ten minutes, which Gunn deploys as a statement of intent — has a specific personality and a specific reason to be interesting. Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is the de facto lead: a weapons specialist with abandonment issues and a daughter in prison who doesn’t need his help and says so. John Cena’s Peacemaker is a hilarious, genuinely unsettling creation — a man who believes so completely in the importance of peace that he will commit any atrocity to achieve it. Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2 controls rats and is the film’s heart. Joel Kinnaman returns as Rick Flag and gets a better film than he had the first time. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, operating in a film that understands her properly for the second consecutive time, is magnificent.
The film opens with a beach assault sequence that is, structurally, a trick. It presents a group of Squad members as the film’s apparent ensemble, allows the audience to invest in them, and then kills most of them almost immediately — not as tragedy, but as the joke the title has always been. These are expendable people used by Amanda Waller as disposable instruments. The opening demonstrates that truth bluntly and then moves on to the actual story, which is a better team taking a second approach to the same mission. It’s a confident, somewhat cruel opening gambit that signals the film’s tonal register immediately: funny, brutal, specific, and deeply affectionate toward its characters even as it puts them in constant mortal danger.
Narrative Architecture: The Monster They Made
The film’s mission is to destroy evidence of an American-funded scientific experiment on Corto Maltese: Project Starfish, in which an extraterrestrial entity called Starro the Conqueror was captured and subjected to three decades of experimentation. As the Squad discovers, the experiment produced significant results — Starro can now replicate itself into subsidiary copies that control humans by attaching to their faces. The American government wants the evidence buried because they funded it. This is not a subtle political allegory.
Gunn handles the politics with the same light-but-earnest touch he brought to Guardians of the Galaxy: the message is there, it’s clear, and it doesn’t require you to think too hard about it to enjoy the film. The Thinker (Peter Capaldi, having an exceptional time) is the scientist who ran Project Starfish, and his characterization — a man who genuinely doesn’t believe animals or the controlled victims constitute meaningful moral subjects — is one of the film’s darker threads deployed with uncomfortable comedy.
| Character | Defining quality | Best moment |
|---|---|---|
| Bloodsport | Expert weapons operator, catastrophically bad at intimacy | His 'I'm not a hero' speech — while doing hero things |
| Peacemaker | Ideological conviction that justifies everything | Every scene — Cena is extraordinary throughout |
| Ratcatcher 2 | The rats love her and so does the audience | The final Starro sequence — completely earned |
| Polka-Dot Man | Deeply depressed, terminally unlucky, secretly crucial | His moment in the Starro fight — the film's best emotional beat |
| Harley Quinn | Free, lethal, and finally herself | The flower hallucination sequence — pure cinema |
The Starro Problem That Isn’t a Problem
AdPeacemaker DC Multiverse Figure (opens in a new tab)
John Cena's Peacemaker helmet design is now iconic. The figure captures the ridiculous-serious energy perfectly.
Starro the Conqueror is a giant alien starfish. The film knows exactly how absurd this sounds and uses the absurdity deliberately — building the horror of the creature slowly, from captured curiosity to mind-controlling monster to skyscraper-scale terror, so that when the Squad faces it in the third act, it is simultaneously completely ridiculous and genuinely frightening. Gunn’s horror instincts (buried under the comedy for most of the film) emerge fully in the Starro sequences, and the image of thousands of people controlled by parasitic starfish faces, walking in eerie unison through a Latin American city, is legitimately unsettling.
The film’s emotional resolution uses Starro in a way that recontextualizes its entire existence. Without going into specifics: the film gives the creature a genuinely tragic perspective that transforms the audience’s relationship to its death — making what should have been pure triumph unexpectedly poignant. It’s a Gunn specialty, this maneuver, and it works every time.
John Murphy’s score supports the entire film with the right combination of propulsive energy and emotional undercurrent — the sound of a superhero film that takes its characters seriously while refusing to take its premise too gravely.
James Gunn Takes Over DC
The success of The Suicide Squad, combined with his subsequent completion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, led to James Gunn and Peter Safran being appointed co-CEOs of DC Studios in 2022. The Peacemaker HBO series — which Gunn wrote and directed entirely — was the first product of that appointment’s creative logic: a continuation of this film’s characters, tone, and sensibility in long-form television. The DCEU’s eventual transition into the new DCU is, in part, a continuation of the creative momentum this film generated.
AdThe Suicide Squad (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)
Excellent in HD. One of the most rewatchable films in the DCEU.
Pros
- Every character is distinct, memorable, and purposefully deployed — the ensemble is impeccable
- James Gunn's direction is maximally confident — every scene is exactly as long as it needs to be
- The R-rating is earned and used intelligently — the violence is purposeful, not gratuitous
- John Cena's Peacemaker is one of the great comedic-serious superhero creations
- The Starro resolution is both absurd and unexpectedly moving — classic Gunn
Cons
- The simultaneous HBO Max and theatrical release significantly undercut the box office
- Some of the political allegory is gestured at rather than fully committed to
- The film's length (132 minutes) may feel slightly long in the second act for some viewers
Conclusion: The DCEU’s Secret Weapon
The Suicide Squad is the best argument for what the DCEU could have been if creative control had been consistently given to filmmakers who understood their material. James Gunn made, from a premise that had already failed once, one of the decade’s most entertaining superhero films — a maximally R-rated, frequently hilarious, genuinely moving genre achievement built around characters nobody asked for and nobody expected to care about.
Watch it. Then watch Peacemaker. Then acknowledge that the creative instincts that made both exist were the correct ones, and be slightly melancholy that more of the DCEU didn’t operate at this level.
The Final Word: Essential — arguably the most purely fun film in the DC Extended Universe. The 2016 failure makes this success even more satisfying.
Is The Suicide Squad a sequel or reboot?
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Disclaimer: This review and its visuals were created with the help of AI. Some links may be affiliate links – we may earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
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