Review: 'The Suicide Squad' Dazzles With Divine Derangement

DC Comics fans, your wait is over! "The Suicide Squad," the 10th installment in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), is now in theaters and on HBO Max for your viewing pleasure.

Directed by the famed “Guardians of the Galaxy” auteur James Gunn, the standalone sequel to David Ayer’s 2016 “Suicide Squad” follows a team of crime-fighting misfits on a mission to save the world from doom.

Watch the trailer.

In Gunn’s new superhero movie, Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn, a once-promising psychiatrist who became an antiheroine after falling madly in love with the Joker. Charismatic and whimsical, she is a trickster and a harlequin who now wields a javelin for a weapon instead of her signature baseball bat. Why? Well, the answer lies in the final moments of the movie. (No spoilers in this review, of course.)

Viola Davis also reprises her role as Amanda Waller, the no-nonsense high-ranking government official who manages the members of Task Force X, also known as the Suicide Squad — a team of clowns, criminals and supervillains recruited from the Belle Reve penitentiary to carry out deadly missions in exchange for reduced sentences for their crimes.

Notably, a squad member had better obey Waller’s orders. Otherwise, the result would be a one-way ticket to oblivion, as she can remotely detonate a bomb through a chip implanted in the necks of the recruits.

Joining Harley is a motley crew full of personal quirks, including Bloodsport (Idris Elba), a mercenary with spectacular gun skills; Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), a supervillain who can control rats telepathically; Peacemaker (John Cena), an extreme pacifist who uses brute force to achieve peace; and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), a misfit with ever-lingering mommy issues. Plus, let’s not forget King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), a friendless, ravenous walking shark who wears shorts. His favorite words? “Nom nom!”

Well-crafted and smart as it is, the opening sequence quickly propels audiences into a world of intrigue, confusion and chaos, setting in motion the squad’s black ops mission to Corto Maltese, a fictitious Latin American island in the midst of a military coup.

Turns out, our supervillains are tasked to destroy a Nazi-era prison, where a mad scientist named Thinker (Peter Capaldi) conducts horrific experiments.

Finally, "The Suicide Squad" then leaps into an action-packed, wild adventure that dazzles with rapturous surprises, delightful goofiness and divine derangement. We will discover what makes our supervillains tick, but be prepared for the blood and gore along the way.

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