Worth watching just for Margot Robbie’s performance, really. Everything else was…okay.
Almost comic-booky.
I noticed that too and kept expecting another named rat besides Sebastian.
Just like a comic book.
I just got back from seeing it. I thought it was one of the better DC movies. To me it seemed like a cross between GotG and Thor: Rag. But that’s probably because I knew Gunn was Directing and Waitit was involved.
I think the best part for me was the line in the very beginning of the exchange between Javelin and Captain Boomerang? of:
Javelin: “TDK? That’s just letters.”
Boomerang: “All names are letters, dickhead.”
Me and the four other people in the theater all laughed at that line. So that for me set the tone and mood for the movie. I thought it was fun and enjoyable.
TDK and his superpower and the others reactions to his superpower had me almost in tears from laughing so hard at the absurdity. So comic-booky.
In case anybody was under the mistaken impression that TDK wasn’t as silly a character in the comic books…
I thought I had read that TDK was made up for the movie!
“A DEADLY WEAPON!”
It was so funny how the arms were just pulling people’s visors down and slapping the guns in their hands.
I believe the name TDK was made up, as the original name was Arm-Fall-Off-Boy
All names are made up.
Drax the Destroyer: “That’s a made up word!”
Thor: “All words are made up.”
But everything else in the film does a really great job of subverting the comic book tropes, from the opening scene where the team of misfits no one trusts just all dies, to the super hero who has mother issues that are not err quite the kind batman and superman have, to the rescue mission that does not end in the way it does in comic books (twice!), and the love interest plotline which likewise does not end like the usual comic book romantic relationship. That’s why it’s so good to me (as well as well written characters with believable character arcs, good writing etc)
The final scene has none of that it’s decent, but completely follows the comic book trope.
So I haven’t read through the thread because of spoilers so if this has been covered apologies.
From what Im seeing online its a financial flop despite being a critical and fan fave. So the opposite of the first one. Yeah, I guess you can blame a good portion of its flopituedness on Delta but…its also free on the HBO Max Im already watching. Hey Warner…I would have paid $7-$10 to watch it. Not the $30 or whatever Disney Plus charges, but something. Maybe charge extra for your big movies on HBO.
That…that would defeat the whole purpose. While we were still deep in COVID lockdowns with no clear end in sight, Warner announced its 2021 releases would stream on HBO Max simultaneously with whatever theatrical release was practical. They wanted to attract subscribers to their new streaming service, and get some return on the money they had invested in their 2021 slate of movies.
It was an experiment. Everyone is struggling with trying to figure out how to navigate the new media environment and COVID lockdowns. From all the reporting I’ve seen, it seems like Warner’s gamble didn’t pay off - but it’s not entirely clear they would have been better off financially doing anything else, either.
Disney can charge $30 for streaming access to a single movie because they specialize in family movies, and on a per person basis, it’s actually cheap. And Disney movies have a lot of built-in appeal. It’s still not clear what pricing model would have worked for Warner, and it definitely wasn’t clear in late 2020, when they announced their policy.
In 2022, though, I’m sure Warner is going to discontinue their current streaming release policy.
Harley’s reaction and Flags’s response to the big “reveal” was also priceless.
Harley Quinn: TDK is The Detachable Kid?! What the fuck!!
Rick Flag: I didn’t pick the damn team!
Overall I really liked it. It was different from the usual origin story / meet and fight evil nemesis / thwart evil plan comic book films.
Eh, to me the whole thing felt like a demented fever dream. Which is fine if you’re into that.
I’m not, and I’m very glad I got it free with HBO+.
Everything is “just like a comic book”. Richie Rich could have come out and dropped a giant bag of money on Starro and it would have been “just like a comic book” but it wouldn’t have made for a better movie.
Very entertaining but ultimately forgettable like a lot of the superhero films these days with their interchangeable set pieces and action sequences.
It reminded me a lot of Mystery Men and I wouldn’t be surprised if Gunn was influenced a lot by that movie. A bunch of mis-fit heroes with odd abilities who argue amongst themselves, have funny one-liners, have daddy/mommy issues, but ultimately come together to defeat the baddie.
That is depressing, by rights it should do better than all the other drivel that passes for DC movies combined. But I guess that is not the way of the world. It does seem its more to do with the way it was released (and when) than the film itself.
Obviously only story makes for a better movie. Not who’s in the movie. A well written story certainly could have had Richie Rich drop in with a giant bag of money on a giant space starfish that can exist both in space and in earth’s atmosphere and has one giant eye that is invulnerable to bullets but not a javelin.
While I disagree that “only” story makes for a better movie, the complaint was with how the ending of the story unfolded and the point of my post was that “like a comic book” is a poor defense because “comic book” is too broad to be meaningful. As Griffin1977 pointed out, the ending did a poor job of subverting tropes that made the story interesting up to that point. I thought the ending was “okay” but that was about it… it was okay. I’d say it was mainly saved by rats eating Starro’s brain. The rest was held back by being a fairly typical feeling Big Bad Guy fight and Starro wasn’t really comical enough to be Staypuft levels of silly nor serious enough to be… threatening. Sort of a muddled area where I’d say they dropped the ball.
Harley was fabulous as always! 
I really like the job Idris Elba did with his character, too.
…a lot of box-office pundits online have no idea what they are talking about. Every big movie that has been released this year has been breathlessly characterized as “a flop.” Fast and Furious was a flop. Black Widow was a flop. Jungle Cruise was a flop.
The reality is that the world isn’t the same any more. The pandemic is still hitting countries hard worldwide. Australia is currently in lockdown. Movies are being released in different ways to different markets. And the covid situation in the world is dynamic, changing month-to-month, week-to-week, even day-to-day.
Suicide Squad has done just fine. Currently $42 million domestic and ranked 14 for releases this year. Pre-pandemic, that wouldn’t be great. But it’s also an R-rated release, it was simultaneously released on a streaming service, and we are in the MIDDLE OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC THAT HAS KILLED MILLIONS.
We have no objective measure of “what is or isn’t a flop” at the moment. We are at Box Office Year Zero, burning through the movies that had their budgets allocated before the world caught fire. The old “rules of thumb” won’t work any more. Online movie pundits have a need to feel relevant, but they are missing the mark here. Suicide Squad did just fine.