Suicide Squad
Starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, Jai Courtney, and Peter Capaldi
Directed by James Gunn
Rating: **
Weird coincidence—though nothing as weird as what we get to see in this flat-out gory super-hero tripe—is the fact that on the day Neeraj Chopra won the Gold for us,Margot Robbie was busy throwing the Javelin at her enemies and saving the world from twisted minds and their diabolical designs.
I loved Ms Robbie’s bonding with the javelin. She coos to and cajoles the rod to do her will. And if there is anything sexual in her attitude I am not denying it. Robbie’s Harley Quinn is a sexed-up mess. At one point she is busy having wild s*x with a despot, and then massacring him mercilessly.
This is not your average wholesome family-first super-hero film. It’s filled with filth, verbal and visual.And it has scant respect for the traditional audience of the super-hero genre.
If the middlefinger was a film it would be called Suicide Squad. Director James Gunn(he has directed the two Guardians Of The Galaxy films and is known to be quite a super-hero of the television-comicbooks-video universe. Gunn films Suicide Squad as a squelching spectacle. As the guns fly and the computerized monsters stalk the city of Corto Maltese(more of that later) humans are ripped into two perpendicular halves. In one distasteful subversion of culinary bliss a man’s head is seen in a talking shark’s mouth , his eyes still rolling(in disbelief?).
The squishy squad of superheroes include actors of resonant repute like Idris Elba who is to the black American acting community what Sidney Poitier used to be in the good old days. Elba plays a superhero named Bloodsport .He and Harley Quinn(Margo Robbie) share a queer kinship. Or shall we say, Quinn-ship?
The best moments feature Elba and Robbie, and there is a joke about a guy named Milton which had me chuckling.But I prefer Harley Quinn with her rod. Margot Robbie and her javelin are a hoot.More power to them both. As for the rest of the superheroes including a cannibalistic shark speaking in the voice of Sylvester Stallone, they left no impression at all, except a blotchy collective impression of a colourful chaos.
The film revels in bright colours, blood-red being the favoured shade. The confounding chaos takes the superheroes to a dictatorial country named Corto Maltese where the sack of screwed-up superheroes help restore the Government to the rebel leaders .
Don’t let the political undercurrents(including a reference to the US government’s dirty doings ) fool you. Suicide Squad is an out-and-out anarchic distasteful excursion vomiting blood and gore as though they were going out of fashion. It is not the kind of behaviour we expect from superheroes. But then, the world is changing fast.These may be the heroes of tomorrow.And that is not an idea we can live with peacefully.
The action scenes are superbly staged, though. Best to see the film on the large screen. Or not at all.