Some characters return — Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller, Joel Kinnaman’s Colonel Rick Flag — and they’re joined by a slew of D-list supervillains straight from your beloved comics pages whom you never thought you’d see on the big screen, like Bloodsport and many, many more.
Some of them — okay, most of them — don’t make it all the way through the film, or even past the first reel.
One of the things people didn’t like about the 2016 Suicide Squad movie, aside from dialogue like “That’s Slipknot — he can climb anything” and a central villain dedicated to destroying the world by vogueing, was its PG-13 rating.
To say it’s violent doesn’t begin to cover it — it’s a movie with a substantial body count, yes, but it comes with a surprisingly high amount of body horror that’s greater and gorier than what you’d expect from a summer blockbuster.
And that intent is to entertain everyone and anyone who is eager to see this film — that specific subset of humanity who have circled the film’s premiere date on their calendars.
Also: Anyone who’s even idly wondered what Guardians of the Galaxy would have looked like with an R rating will get their answer here.
The thing is, though, 11-Year-Old Me: It does what it wants to do without anything even remotely resembling restraint.
Overwhelmingly they’ve gone all grim and gritty, because at some point the culture willingly adopted the cynical, nihilistic idea that making superheroes dark and hyper-violent makes them somehow more relevant, more true.
So in one sense, the gleeful gore of The Suicide Squad is doing what a lot of other gritty takes on the superhero have been doing for decades.
Again and again, Gunn’s camera lingers over the mutilated bodies of main characters — not to mention the hundreds of innocent people that get sent through this film’s meat grinder – only to immediately play it all off for a big laugh.
The Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast panel is Glen Weldon, Daisy Rosario, Chris Klimek, and Ronald Young Jr.