Warner Bros.
Say something nice about 2016’s Suicide Squad? Go ahead, do your best. I’ll wait. Take as long as you need.
Nothin’, right? Couldn’t agree more. If it weren’t for the existence of the abominable Justice League, Suicide Squad would be, far and away, the worst film in the DCEU, which is really saying something given the franchise’s track record. I’ve written about my disgust towards the film pretty extensively (almost obsessively, whoops) on this website, even going as far as calling its director, David Ayer, my rival. Sort of like The Gang in Flipadelphia.
Whether Suicide Squad’s sheer awfulness is David Ayer’s fault is a different argument for a different day (my baseline opinion is that he can blame Warner Bros. all he wants, he’s still the one who tattooed “damaged” on Joker’s forehead), the fact is that it is an awful movie no matter how you slice it. So awful that James Gunn’s recent kind words regarding the casting likely qualify as the first-ever compliment the film has ever been paid.
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“Listen, David Ayer’s gotten trouble for the movie. I know it didn’t come out how David wanted it to come out. But he did one really, really great thing, and that is he picked fantastic actors to work with, and he dealt with these actors in building their characters in a really deep and fearless way. It’s something David definitely deserves to be lauded for, and it’s definitely added to this movie.” [via Empire Magazine]
It should come as no surprise that Gunn worked with many of these actors on The Suicide Squad, as Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman, and Jai Courtney are all set to reprise their roles from the original. We’ll see how many of them make it to a third film, though, as Gunn has previously teased that a number of Squad members will die in the upcoming sequel.
At this time, The Suicide Squad is currently scheduled (*sigh*) to hit theaters on August 6, 2021.
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