The Suicide Squad (2021)

The perfect movie title... or else, I need sleep.

I was expecting something like R-rated Guardians of the Galaxy or something completely different from '16's Suicide Squad, but it ended up being neither.

It was James Gunn's Suicide Squad, whatever that might mean.

It was definitely something different from what we've seen from DC and Marvel so far and it was also a statement that a comic book movie that belongs to a certain brand doesn't have to have a certain style.

But what was Gunn's film style?

Photography dirty and raw in some places and overly stylized and colorful in others. Plenty of intense action, but not on the scale you'd expect from a superhero movie. Not so careful editing and invalid - although imaginative - chapter titles scattered throughout the film. Humor, but not the humor with the punchlines and callbacks and references of modern films of the genre. Fast and natural dialogues between the characters at some points, empty and wooden at others that only serve to convey the plot to the viewer. Rich and slick gore, but not realistic John Wick-style or Deadpool-style outrageous.

In other words, Gunn is deliberately trying to make his film not look modern and expensive in order to make a modern high-budget B movie.

And more specifically, a meta exploitation film.

Or in other words, a "cheap" movie that "steals" a popular title (Suicide Squad) and slightly modifies it to make it its own (The Suicide Squad), keeping elements of the old (common characters, soundtrack of well-known hits), but without clarifying his relationship with him (neither sequel, nor reboot).

Which brings us to… The Suicide Squad (2021, though).

Whether I liked the movie or not, in the end, is of little consequence.

Basically, I wouldn't put it much higher than that of '16. For some reason the first film made me feel more for its characters and the team's bond, and while the second's songs tied in better with the film, they didn't make up for the weak - if not non-existent - original score. The '21 film wins points over the first mainly because it knew from start to finish what it was and what it wanted to do.

What matters is that audiences and critics seem to have liked it, which can only be interpreted as a positive for the future of the genre and, in general, the world's tolerance for experimentation and different approaches.

PS: For the third one, I want a completely different director, like del Toro perhaps, to do what he likes and in the end we have a trilogy of three somewhat sequels, somewhat reboots, completely different