I don’t know if I’ll ever be a connoisseur of kill-shot comedy, but director James Gunn at least makes it somewhat palatable. After helming Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, he moves from Marvel to the DC Comics universe—and R-rated material—with The Suicide Squad, a do-over of 2016’s disastrous Suicide Squad. The comic callousness is still here (and even amped up), as most of the killings are delivered as punch lines, but at least the character humor hits and the overall narrative is coherent. Once again we follow a team of imprisoned supervillains who are sent by a covert American agency on a top-secret mission in exchange for lighter sentences. Gunn almost always finds a clever, comics-inspired place to put the camera (including a throwdown between John Cena and Joel Kinnaman that’s reflected in a helmet), while newcomer Idris Elba ably anchors things as the team’s gruff leader and straight man. Returning are the two best elements of the first film: Margot Robbie’s delightfully deranged Harley Quinn (her own kill-shot comedy, Birds of Prey, was a tick more palatable than this) and Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller, the brutal, bureaucratic mastermind behind the Suicide Squad program. There’s a fair amount of hypocrisy in the way Waller is treated this time around (as an exercise in anti-heroism, The Suicide Squad pulls a lot of punches), but Davis is sublime as usual. Also on the plus side: a climactic battle with a giant cyclops starfish from space (yes, you read that right) that plays like a combination of Godzilla, Alien, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Funnily enough, the creature’s kill shot (please, that’s not a spoiler) might be the film’s only poignant one.
