![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/image-24-692x1024.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Only four characters from the first movie return here: franchise standout Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), team organizer Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), team babysitter Rick Flag (Joel Kinneman), and barely-tolerated team member Boomerang (Jai Courtney). Waller puts together teams of criminals to do black ops missions with no expectations of survival. In this movie, it\u2019s actually two teams, but one fares very poorly. Some of the actors on that team seem to have been cast just so the audience can cheer for their faces getting blown off. It\u2019s the second team that gets most of the focus after the opening scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New characters include weapons expert Bloodsport (Idris Elba), other weapons expert Peacemaker (John Cena), rodent-controller Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), self-explanatory Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and loveable maneater King Shark (Sylvester Stallone). I liked most of these characters, especially Bloodsport thanks to Elba, but I didn\u2019t go so much for King Shark. With his monosyllabic vocabulary and Gunn\u2019s direction, it felt too much like the movie was trying to turn him into the DCEU\u2019s version of Groot. I would much rather the film have imported the charming Ron Funches from the \u201cHarley Quinn\u201d TV series to voice the character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waller sends the teams into a South American island that houses a Nazi-era laboratory that holds an extraterrestrial presence. The country has recently undergone a revolution, with a revolution to that revolution coming soon. I could have gone without either revolution storyline, even though they\u2019re the backdrop for the only interesting Harley scenes in the movie. The team eventually locates The Thinker (Peter Capaldi), who introduces them to Starro the Conquerer, a giant starfish who serves as the Big Bad of the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film jumps around in time a lot, a device I usually despise, but it\u2019s handled well here. Much of the action is taking place concurrently, so it makes sense that we\u2019d have to see one set of scenes, then the other. Again, the stuff with Harley and the new government is the most awkward fit of the bunch, but the movie had to give us some Harley-centric scenes at some point, and they\u2019re good scenes in and of themselves, just not a great fit with the search for the laboratory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe Suicide Squad\u201d falls into a few traps of the genre, with a few too many characters and subplots, but it makes up for its shortcomings by being funny and exciting. It was definitely the right decision to go for the R rating here, and it makes the original seem even more toothless when you get a taste of what could have been. Sometimes you want to see bad guys just get bloodlessly swallowed up like in \u201cBlack Widow\u201d and sometimes you want to see them get absolutely ripped apart as they do here. This movie doesn\u2019t hit the target as well as it wants, but it doesn\u2019t waste its shot like the first movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: B-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Suicide Squad\u201d is rated R for strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use, and brief graphic nudity. Its running time is 132 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver \u201cThe Suicide Squad\u201d has probably the most important \u201cThe\u201d in movie title history, so important that it should be alphabetized under \u201cT\u201d instead of \u201cS.\u201d This… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":49990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[568],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49991,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49989\/revisions\/49991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}