So this is technically a sequel to the 2016 film that confusingly shares the same name but as it was terrible I don’t regret not watching that one. Thankfully it’s the Suicide Squad which means their team members change all the time and continuity isn’t that important. I fully agree with all of the critics that this truly is an outstanding superhero action movie on all counts with almost no flaws. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have a good director like James Gunn who actually seems to like comic book stories instead of looking down on the genre and of course this wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been allowed to let loose on the violence with an R-rating.

Amanda Waller assembles inmates of the Belle Reve prison for metahumans into a deniable task force. Their mission is to infiltrate the small island nation of Corto Maltese which has been taken over by an anti-American regime after a coup and to destroy a tower housing dangerous research. The team lands on the beach at night but learns that they have been betrayed by one of their members and are surrounded by the nation’s army. Waller orders them to attack anyway on pain of being remotely executed with explosives implanted in their heads and almost all of them end up being killed. It turns out that this is all part of Waller’s plan and the first team is just a distraction while a second team makes a stealthy insertion. Led by mercenary Bloodsport and counting among their members King Shark who as his name suggests is a large, anthropomorphic shark, they rescue Colonel Rick Flag, the US military officer who was part of the first team, and discovers that the laboratory was actually built to study an alien life form.

It’s really tough to write much about this without spoiling things and the little twists in this film really is part of the fun. I’ll assume that the film has been out long enough that some spoilers are okay because the inclusion of Starro the Conqueror as the big bad is too awesome not to rave about. Most of the characters in here are so minor ones that even I have never heard of them but that’s alright since it just means that Gunn has more room to play with their character development. As he proved in Guardians of the Galaxy, Gunn is able to take a large cast of characters and give each enough scenes and interaction with each another to make them distinctive. They mostly don’t have superpowers or have relatively weak powers so this helps make the action feel more grounded and real as well. Like all superhero movies, this one ends in an epic fight, except in this case the fight doesn’t take place in some generic North American city but in a South American one and that too helps make it look and feel new. Gunn just keeps making the right decisions at every juncture including the humor of Harley Quinn being able to escape herself while the rest scramble around trying to rescue her and the little glimpse we get of how her insane mind perceives the world.

About the only nit I have to pick is that Idris Elba as Bloodsport doesn’t quite have the comedic chops to play up his character’s fear of rats. Plus what’s up with the sci-fi weapons that pops out of his suit for the final fight but nowhere else? But mostly I just love this film to bits. It even struck me how the casual violence shown here so aptly encapsulates some of the anti-American arguments commonly thrown around in the current invasion of Ukraine. When the team comes across a military camp, they casually murder everyone in it, with Bloodsport and Peacemaker even making it a competition between the two of them. But then they realize that these are rebel soldiers fighting against the government and so are ostensibly their own allies, they half-heartedly deny everything and finally are all “oops, my bad”. That’s such an American thing to do. On the other hand, the Russian attitude would be to insist that this was the plan all along and there was no mistake as they all deserved to die. So while such American mistakes are callous and frequent, there is still a difference in the degree of evil. In any case, if you ever need to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys, the good guys are usually the ones willing to denigrate and make fun of themselves.

Anyway I rate this as a top notch superhero film, perhaps the best out of the DC lineup so far. I even love that’s it’s standalone and self-contained so we don’t have to watch the rest of the DC stuff at all. I’m really looking forward to Gunn returning to Guardians of the Galaxy and it’s great how he can freely switch between DC and Marvel. He is superlative at handling a large ensemble cast and is a director who actually respects the superhero genre.