Cinematic violence run amok

Orson Wells supposedly once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” James Gunn’s new movie, The Suicide Squad, points to the truth of that maxim.

In 2016 Warner Bros. released Suicide Squad, a movie about supervillains who embark on a dangerous mission on behalf of the U.S. government. It performed well at the box office, but critics and fans hated it. Now Warner Bros. tries again with The Suicide Squad, which is neither a sequel nor a reboot of the original. Instead, the studio let Gunn, most famous for his Guardians of the Galaxy movies, reimagine the Suicide Squad without any restrictions. What he’s created is a surrealistic, clever, horrific, profane piece of nihilism.

In The Suicide Squad, agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) coerces a group of supervillains (including performances by Idris Elba and Margot Robbie) to secure America’s interests by infiltrating a Caribbean island nation that’s just experienced a coup. She promises to reduce prison sentences if the villains do what she asks. She promises to detonate explosives implanted in their skulls if they do not. She follows through with that second promise in the first few minutes of the film, and Gunn doesn’t move the camera away from the gory moment. That scene is just a drop in the bucket of blood Gunn splatters throughout this movie.

The Suicide Squad earns an exceedingly hard R rating for explicit violence and gore, frequent foul language, brief graphic nudity, and of course depictions of smoking. The plot, the dialogue, and the cinematography are all better than the 2016 version, but Gunn kills his own artistry through his lack of restraint. He revels in the countless deaths—major characters die, minor characters die, background characters die—and many receive gruesome bloody close-ups. The movie forces its viewers to become numb to the horror, but becoming numb to evil makes things worse.

The Suicide Squad also promotes a world of moral relativism. The good guys are bad guys. The bad guys are good guys. Those bad guys whom you thought were good guys, actually—nope, they’re still bad guys. Perhaps most disturbingly, Gunn plays the deaths of innocent people for laughs.

Warner Bros. was betting on Gunn to revitalize its faltering DC Cinematic Universe, but The Suicide Squad, while beating other films on its opening weekend, has proven a relative disappointment at the box office. The original raked in $133 million in its opening weekend, but this one bombed with $26 million.

COVID-19 concerns contributed to the lackluster performance, but Black Widow and F9—both rated PG-13—debuted at $80 million and $70 million respectively. Not only do restrictions aid in creativity, they help you find an audience.