The Suicide Squad

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Amanda Waller dispatches two Task Force X teams to Corto Maltese after a coup, ordering them to destroy the secret Project Starfish laboratory. The first team is ambushed on the beach; Rick Flag survives and Harley Quinn is captured. The second, led by Bloodsport, enters unseen and rescues Flag from rebels who are more helpful than expected. In the capital they seize the Thinker and break into Jötunheim, where Flag and Ratcatcher 2 discover that the United States helped fund experiments on Starro. Peacemaker kills Flag to keep the evidence secret, but the hard drive reaches Bloodsport. Explosives damage the facility, Starro escapes and controls the city. Waller orders the squad to leave; Bloodsport instead leads them against the creature. Harley pierces its eye and Ratcatcher summons rats that kill it. Corto Maltese’s rebels take power, and the survivors win their release.

James Gunn shapes the movie like a chaotic war story filtered through comic-book absurdity. The mission begins with two teams sent to the same island, but the opening beach assault makes the assignment’s real structure clear: some prisoners are disposable decoys. That reversal establishes the power imbalance before the film introduces its main group. The squad members wear explosives in their necks and work under Waller’s orders, so their apparent freedom is always conditional. The comedy comes from their personalities and situation, while the mission’s danger remains real within the story.

Bloodsport is an effective center because he distrusts heroism and understands coercion. Waller threatens his daughter to make him lead the second team, so his motivation is not a sudden desire to save the world. Idris Elba plays him as controlled and observant, a man who has built emotional distance into his skills. Ratcatcher 2 unsettles that distance. Her compassion for Sebastian and for people the others dismiss makes her power feel personal rather than simply useful. Daniela Melchior gives the character a calm sincerity that changes how the team sees its task.

Margot Robbie's Harley has a theatrical energy that cuts across the military organisation of the assignment. Her presence can turn menace into a grotesque fairy tale or make a decorative setting feel abruptly dangerous. The contrast matters because an ensemble of trained operatives might otherwise settle into a single practical register. Harley's emotional logic does not reliably defer to institutional expectations, and the film lets that independence have force. She can inhabit an extravagant fantasy without being merely an object inside it. The comedy comes partly from other people's failure to recognise that her apparent openness does not grant them control over her choices.

Joel Kinnaman's Flag and John Cena's Peacemaker expose competing meanings of duty. One can understand a mission as a responsibility that remains answerable to what is discovered; another can treat its authorised objective as the measure that overrides every discovery. Cena gives certainty an absurd physical and verbal confidence, making it comic until its implications become frightening. The collision asks what obedience is worth when an institution's interest separates from the people it claims to serve. The movie does not need its operatives to become morally spotless for that question to matter. An imperfect person can still recognise an intolerable demand.

Corto Maltese places the squad inside a political situation that exceeds their briefing. The island is not simply scenery available for outsiders to destroy on the way to completing an assignment. Its residents have objectives that cannot be reduced to approval of the visiting Americans, and that distinction complicates the action film's familiar rescue posture. Gunn's comic-book exaggeration sits beside a concern with intervention and secrecy. The protagonists' ignorance is part of the setup: being equipped to inflict force does not mean understanding the place where it is deployed or possessing the right to decide its future.

Gunn’s visual style borrows comic-book punctuation without turning the film into a sequence of static panels. Chapter cards interrupt the action, colour palettes distinguish the teams and locations, and sudden shifts in music can make a violent moment grotesquely funny. The opening decoy mission is edited to confuse expectation, while the later assault on Jötunheim tracks a more familiar team operation that steadily comes apart. Practical sets and creature effects give the characters textured spaces to scramble through, and the oversized Starro makes the final threat impossible to mistake for an ordinary military target. The visual contrast between Starro’s scale and the rats’ collective movement also lets radically different kinds of power share the climax.

The film's affection for disreputable, dismissed figures creates an alternative scale of power. A creature or person judged ridiculous can matter in ways a command structure cannot anticipate. Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher 2 is especially important to that idea because her sincerity remains intelligible inside the noise of the ensemble. Compassion is given an active role without being translated into a conventional image of spotless heroism. The final choice therefore concerns agency as much as courage: people recruited as expendable instruments begin deciding what their abilities should serve. Freedom arrives with compromises, but the possibility of acting for someone else's benefit is no longer reserved for officially respectable heroes.