132 min | R | August 6, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Amanda Waller straps bombs to the necks of death-row supervillains and drops them on a South American island to level a secret facility. The mission is suicide and the squad is expendable. James Gunn turns a throwaway premise into the bloodiest cartoon a major studio will let him make.
Amanda Waller runs Task Force X out of Belle Reve prison. She implants explosives in the necks of convicted supervillains and sends them on missions the government can deny. This time the target is Jotunheim, a laboratory on the island nation of Corto Maltese. The squad is meat for the grinder and Waller knows it. James Gunn builds the whole film around that disposability. The people on screen are designed to die, and the movie plays their deaths as both punchline and indictment.
Idris Elba plays Bloodsport with weary contempt for everyone around him, including himself, a killer who refuses to call himself a hero. John Cena plays Peacemaker as a fascist who murders for peace and believes every word of the contradiction. His total sincerity is the joke and the threat at once. Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn and plays her violence as pure joy, cutting through a roomful of soldiers while imagining flowers bloom from the wounds. David Dastmalchian gives Polka-Dot Man a sad, broken interior that turns an absurd power into real tragedy. Sylvester Stallone voices King Shark with a toddler’s vocabulary and a predator’s appetite, and Viola Davis plays Amanda Waller as a bureaucrat who never blinks.
James Gunn writes and directs with a comic-book sensibility that he takes literally. He stamps character names and locations across the frame in giant block letters and builds transitions out of reflections in puddles and helmet visors. The gore is practical and abundant, and Gunn shoots it for absurdity rather than dread. The score swings from needle drops to operatic swells under scenes of mass slaughter. The production design saves its best work for the third act, when a kaiju-scale threat turns a city street into a wading pool of carnage.
The film works as spectacle and as a sour comment on American power. Corto Maltese is a small country wrecked by a superpower that calls the wreckage a mission. Gunn lets the violence stay funny without pretending it is clean. The squad bleeds out for objectives that serve the people who sent them. The result is a war movie wearing a cape, loud and crude and smarter than it needs to be.