The Suicide Squad Saved The DCEU, But Cursed The Reboot To Come

Remember when the DC Universe was in trouble? One needn’t look back very far to dredge up that memory — depending on who you ask, the franchise is still teetering on the brink. But just five years ago, circumstances were infinitely more dire. In 2021, DC’s Extended Universe was only just crawling out from the rubble of the Justice League debacle, and a so-so reception to its second Wonder Woman movie wasn’t raising its stock, either. Nothing since Aquaman was really moving the needle, and though you could blame plenty of external circumstances — from a lockdown-induced drought at the box office to the rise of superhero fatigue — nothing changes the fact that DC needed a win... bad.

The franchise found its lifeline in the unlikeliest of places. When James Gunn was ousted from Marvel’s inner circle (after the resurfacing of old, offensive tweets) in 2018, DC immediately scooped the director up. He would write and direct a sequel to the franchise’s much-derided Suicide Squad, redeeming the troubled team with his trademark irreverence and love for the deep cuts in DC’s catalogue. It was the same tactic that elevated the Guardians of the Galaxy to the upper echelons of fandom with two great Marvel films, and it was arguably perfected with The Suicide Squad. The result is arguably DCEU’s most successful film; sure, Aquaman grossed $1 billion at the box office, but Gunn inadvertently permitted DC to blow its failed universe to smithereens and rebuild it all in the director’s own image.

Gunn’s knack for “don’t worry about it” franchise-fixing truly began with The Suicide Squad. It’s not quite a sequel to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad — characters return, played by the same actors, but with hardly a mention of the mission that first brought them together — but it’s not a reboot, either. In 2021, that didn’t matter much: fans were just happy to get an ensemble film that didn’t reek of grimdark, 2010s sleaze. They were doubly happy to see Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag in a movie that actually knew what to do with them. Never mind the fact that Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and his journey from reluctant lackey to stalwart leader mirrored Deadshot’s (Will Smith) own arc in Suicide Squad to the letter. What mattered was that Gunn could do it better, with jokes that actually landed (depending on your tolerance for his brand of humor), and with a cast of characters you really wouldn’t mind hanging out with.

The titular squad in Gunn’s version of events couldn’t be more obscure: C-list figures like Peacemaker (John Cena), Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior), Weasel (Sean Gunn), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) round out the team. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has dispatched them to Corto Maltese, a fictional island off the coast of South America, to deal with Project Starfish. Contrary to what the mega-chud Peacemaker actually thinks, this top-secret mission is not a metaphor for butt stuff. There’s actually a giant starfish lurking somewhere on the island, and the squad has to locate and destroy it before the Maltese authorities can turn it into a weapon.

The squad’s best-laid plans go south the second they touch down in Corto Maltese: half of the villains dispatched by Waller become cannon fodder in a raucous riff on Saving Private Ryan’s D-Day sequence, while Waller’s biggest wild card, Harley, is captured by some local G-Men. That leaves a very small, incredibly dysfunctional group behind to improvise, with Bloodsport struggling to manage egos and keep the rest of the crew alive. Gunn tries to bulk up these lesser-known characters with some tragic pasts, just as he did with the Guardians, but The Suicide Squad finds the most success when it forces the filmmaker into different lanes.

The grudge match between Peacemaker and Rick Flag is one of this film’s highlights: Thanks to its hard-R rating, The Suicide Squad could go much further than Gunn was ever able to with Marvel. His cloying schoolboy humor gets a sobering lift when circumstances turn increasingly dire, and more bodies start to drop. Consequences felt real in The Suicide Squad — an urgency we see echoing even after a franchise-wide reboot and the recasting of so many major heroes.

Of course, there are also some not-so-great holdovers from Gunn’s first DC effort. The Suicide Squad was so successful that, just one year after its release, DC promoted Gunn to the top of the food chain. We’re only just now starting to get a sense of his priorities as the co-head of an entire studio, but the novelty of something like Superman hasn’t been enough to quell Gunn’s more grating instincts. His affinity for outcasts has inspired a slate that zigs when it needs to zag — why on earth are we getting a Clayface movie before his nemesis, Batman, even debuts in the DCU? — and asks minor heroes to prop up a shaky new universe. The Suicide Squad gave Gunn leave to do whatever he wanted with the DC sandbox, and he hasn’t been the most diligent steward. That it inadvertently became one of the pillars of the new franchise, surviving a purge that did away with nearly every other actor or storyline, was the first of many bad signs for the reboot.

After the lackluster Supergirl, and on the heels of a head-scratching new origin for the Green Lantern Corps, the new DCU already feels imperiled. A lot of what worked in The Suicide Squad has been replicated to lesser effect across the entire franchise. Old habits are obviously hard to break, but it’s surreal to watch Gunn’s foray into the world of DC (which again, depending on your taste, is very much a product of its time) and see every tactic he deploys, good and bad, play out within the team-up film. It’s still early days for the DCU, and ideally this new franchise will find its footing soon. Until then, however, it’s hard not to see The Suicide Squad as the poison pill, diverting as it was when it premiered five years ago. It might have saved the DCEU, but it can’t be the blueprint for the new regime.

The Suicide Squad is streaming on HBO Max.