Lots of People Who Died

 Netflix is being kind, and sending us all of the movies that have been on Wait status. Or maybe no one else wanted to see James Gunn's The Suicide Squad (2021).

It starts in prison, with long-haired, sour Michael Rooker as Savant bouncing a ball in the solitary exercise yard - bouncing it off a birdies skull! Then Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) comes to get him to let him know he's going on a suicide squad mission. The team includes Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman), along with a bunch of redshirts, including a Bill-the-Cat lookalike, a javelin-bearing German, Pete Davidson, and Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang. They are to invade the Caribbean island of Corto Maltese and take the citadel called Jotunheim. 

When they hit the beach, they are almost all immediately killed. Savant, who we thought was our point-of-view character, tries to retreat, so Waller sets off the bomb in his head. Survivors Flagg and Harley are captured. All to the tune of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died". 

Back at mission control,when they find out about the carnage, Waller just wants to know how the real task force is doing, now that the decoys are all dead. That team is lead by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and includes Peacemaker (John Cena), who will kill anyone to make peace. He's a very goofy character, and he now has his own show on Disney+. There's also King Shark (voice of Sylvester Stallone), Polka-Dot Man (David DastMalchian), who's the crazy one, and Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Mechior), daughter of Ratcatcher (Taika Waititi), who can control rats. She's a teenaged girl who just wants to sleep and play with her CGI rat Sylvester. 

Note that Bloodsport is exactly the Deadshot role, and King Shark is Killer Croc. 

Their adventures are somewhat absurd and very bloody. Since I've already spoilered the gag about the decoy team, I'll mention another. In a very exciting infiltration and massacre of a jungle camp, Bloodsport and Peacemaker expertly kill everyone, before discovering that they were the good guys. 

In another scene, Harley is seduced by the leader of the opposition, before he reminds her a little too much of her unmentioned ex. So she kills him, and fights her way out, with everyone she kills spouting gouts of cartoon flowers and birdies instead of blood. To the tune of Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody".

Overall, the tone is nihilistically comic. Bloodsport is pretty straight, like Deadshot was, and Ratcatcher has a lot of heart. Polka-Dot Man is a joke character who develops some real depth, then some real insanity. But mostly, people die, nobly or for no reason. It is a Suicide Squad. 

Jotunheim turns out to be the lab of the Thinker - Peter Capaldi with a bunch of vacuum tubes sticking out of his head. He has been working on Project Starfish - an alien starfish 100-feet tall, who controls minds. His name, of course, is Starro, and is an actual DC villain - the first foe of the Justice League. He is defeated in a ghastly and beautiful way, with Harley floating serenely in a ... pool, surrounded by Ratcatcher's rats. 

I liked the anarchic humor of this - it was like Guardians of the Galaxy dialed up to 11, or the goofy parts of the original without the boring plot. I think there was a message about the value of life in the face of absurdity, the amorality of violence as entertainment and so firth. But I mostly missed that part.