The Suicide Squad (Film Review)

2021 Warner Bros. Pictures
Written and Directed by: James Gunn
Starring: Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Michael Rooker, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi, Alice Braga, and Pete Davidson
Rated: R; Running Time: 132 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 5/10

On a dark and tropical beach, a definitely not the A-Team group of freshly prison-sprung superheroes get ready to storm an island fortress, to complete a top-secret, but apparently extremely important mission. They screw it up, and are slaughtered. Meanwhile, on a beach on the other side of the island, a group of slightly more A-Team superheroes get ready to do the exact same thing. Turns out that first team was a gag...I mean, a diversion. This second group of prison-sprung superheroes might not be The Avengers...wait, sorry, this is DC, The Justice League, but they've got bombs placed in their skulls by their handler, so if they try to run from their mission, it's bye-bye heads. Can this not-so-crack unit come together to stop some kind of dangerous experiment or something, or will they fail even harder at this mission than they have at their lives up to this point? 
I love James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films, and my sense of humor is a few shades past midnight, so I guess I set my expectations a bit too high for his latest film, the I guess sequel to the film of the exact same name, minus the "The," from 2016. This 2021 film is more similar in tone to the recent Deadpool films than it is Gunn's GOTG films. In fact, The Suicide Squad is actually so similar to Deadpool 2, it rips off its "Here's the new team of heroes...whoops, they're all dead in outrageous and violent ways" scene, the best in that Merc With a Mouth sequel.
There's not a lot I find fresh here, very little that, by this point, hasn't already been done in other films. That flaw can be circumvented if the filmmaker is able to get the viewer invested in their characters, but as The Suicide Squad dragged on, I found that I cared little for what and even who was going on, until almost two hours into the film. Even that can be circumvented by big and consistent enough laughs, but even those are a little sparse here. When the film finally decides on its true central team, as I said, very late in the film, I did start to enjoy The Suicide Squad...the film ends about ten minutes after that moment. Imagine Guardians of the Galaxy's prison break scene happening two hours in, instead of just 30 minutes into that blissful film.

From a performance standpoint, the cast here are all pretty good. Margot Robbie has owned the Harley Quinn character from the start, even when the films she's been featured in haven't been so great. Idris Elba is solid as the sharpshooting co-lead, though he isn't given much to work with. The biggest standout here is the polka-dot-throwing David Dastmalchian, who envisions every one of his enemies as his mother. As fun as that touch is, Gunn's other eccentric injections, such as making environmental effects like fire in the background of a shot spell out the title to the film's next chapter, feel strangely twee--the tone here, where brains are getting blown out one moment, and one character is making sweet best friends with a shark man the next, never hits a satisfying consistency.
The Suicide Squad has drawn critical fawning and a lot of comic fan accolades. I thought I would love it. I'm bummed to be in the minority on this one. For me, The Suicide Squad just doesn't work.