Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is mostly stuck playing straight man, but he is never less than engaging, doing far more with the role of ‘master assassin who genuinely cares for his teenage daughter and reluctantly emerges as team leader’ than Will Smith did in 2016.*** Joel Kinnaman also returns as Rick Flag, and is given enough solid material here that he is not only a real character but a likeable one. Margot Robbie is once again excellent as Harley Quinn: her performance here complements her work in the criminally underrated Birds of Prey (2020),** and together the two movies cement the sense that this role belongs to Robbie. From then on, the threat of violent, bloody death is ever-present, generating the tension that can be so sorely missing from more conventional comic book movies.ĭespite all this, viewers will still find themselves growing to love many of these characters. A gory, splatter-soaked opening shows us in no uncertain terms that no one is safe, no matter how much they might seem like a protagonist. Gunn knows this, and his movie plays with our unfamiliarity to produce surprising twists. This means that few audience members will come in with attachments to or expectations of them. Gunn revels in the D-list nature of his team – from martial-arts expert Savant (Michael Rooker) to the abused-child-turned-living-weapon Polka Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), none of these characters is a particularly big name. Indeed, this is where The Suicide Squad truly shines. While globetrotting is all well and good, confining the characters to one island enables Gunn to focus more fully on their interactions. More than this, setting the action almost entirely on Corto Maltese grants The Suicide Squad a sense of place.
In this context, it makes perfect sense that Waller – and by extension the US government – would want the deniability that comes with using supervillains. The mission requires the squad to manoeuvre around protracted power struggles, and their goal gives them little time to indulge in altruism. Where superheroes tend to save the world, a gang of super-criminals would be ill-placed to do so. It’s the perfect setup for a Suicide Squad movie.
To say any more would be to spoil: suffice to say, things do not go to plan, and the squad finds itself embroiled in a messy melange of mendacity and moral murk. Corto Maltese has recently been through a revolution, and Waller wants to ensure that the new leaders, hostile to US interests, cannot use a powerful weapon hidden on the island. Here, the squad is gathered together to infiltrate the (fictional) Latin American nation of Corto Maltese. The core conceit of the Suicide Squad property remains the same: shadowy government operative Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) puts together a team of super-criminals to do the sort of work too shady, sticky, and downright suicidal for even the blackest of black-ops teams.
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