A bloody good time.

There are few films that sum up the negative energy of its creators better than 2016’s Suicide Squad. While it certainly made decent money at the box office, the thing was a raging dumpster fire of a movie that epitomised everything wrong with how Warner Bros were handling the DC brand at the time.

From its obnoxious presentation to its muddled plot, Suicide Squad was just plain bad and epitomised the rut Warner Bros and DC Films were in. Coming fresh off Batman v Superman’s disappointment and with the mess of Justice League just around the corner, DC were desperately scrambling around to pad out their cinematic universe, and Suicide Squad’s many issues exposed the hole its studio had subsequently found themselves in.

Fast forward five years, however, and we’re looking at a remarkably different picture. While still striving for the consistency of arch-rivals Marvel, there’s a much-improved energy around DC these days, yet the stink of Suicide Squad still lingers.

Enter James Gunn. With a mountain to climb to turn such negativity around, it seems rather fitting that the man who launched Marvel into space via a ragtag bunch of intergalactic arseholes gets a shot at redeeming DC’s most roguish of properties.

Armed, chipped, and dumped onto the remote hostile island of Corto Maltese, a motley collection of super-powered convicts – including Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Peacemaker (John Cena), and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) – are charged with taking down Jotunheim – a Nazi-era prison and lab thought to be housing extra-terrestrial WMDs. But with only Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) on the ground and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) in their ears keeping them in line and their own villainous instincts putting everything at risk, the smart money is against them – all of them.

All things considered, there really isn’t anyone better suited to this oddball story than James Gunn. Let’s not forget, this is a man who once made us fall in love with a sentient tree and a huge driving force behind turning one of Marvel’s biggest risks into one of its greatest successes.

Much like Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad is populated by some of the oddest players in the comic book world, a factor that places it outside the superhero norm and right in James Gunn’s wheelhouse. Well, when your superpowered team includes a jingoistic killer with a toilet seat on his head, a man-shark, a bloke with boomerangs, a man who throws dots, and an actual weasel, you need a director uniquely qualified to handle such singular comic book weirdness, and Gunn is just that guy.

Leaning into the Suicide Squad’s inherent eccentricities is something the first film missed the mark on my quite some distance, however, with Gunn on board and let loose, we not only have one of the best DCEU offerings to date, but one that completely washes away the bad taste that once tainted this franchise.

While Gunn has undoubtedly done great things with Marvel and the Guardians, he is a filmmaker who clearly thrives on autonomy, and that’s what he has here. Although there’ll always be some level of oversight on a film as big as The Suicide Squad, Gunn has certainly been afforded the kind of filmmaking freedom he’s not seen since his Slither and Super days, and the result is an absolute blast.

Irreverent, weird, mischievous, and full of more needle drops than you can shake a javelin at, The Suicide Squad is pure, uncut Gunn and everything that made Guardians tick – just dialled up to 11. And while it really wouldn’t have taken much to elevate it above Suicide Squad, this sequel/reboot is lightyears ahead of its predecessor.

Leaning heavily into the grunginess and goofiness of its characters, the film lets its freak flag fly, as Gunn takes the inherent weirdness of the source material and runs with it. Diving head-first into the comic’s eccentricities is definitely a bold move, but with the likes of King Shark, Polka-Dot Man, Ratcatcher 2, and Weasel at your disposal, it’d be rude not to.

While the first film made a vague stab at mining the Suicide Squad brand for humour, the results were woefully wide of the mark, however, filtered through the anarchistic mind of James Gunn, the tone has been nailed this time around. As a heady mix of gloriously crass toilet humour, brazen visual gags, and solid writing that knows what makes its characters tick, The Suicide Squad’s comedy is right on the money.

Feeding into this, the film’s action is a volatile cocktail of bombastic comic book mayhem, well-choreographed fight sequences, bold visuals, and surprisingly affecting smaller moments that combine for a wholly satisfying watch. Whether it’s a showdown with a huge intergalactic starfish or a blood-soaked beach battle, The Suicide Squad gets its action bang on, with a well-balanced mix of absurd and epic that utilises its characters perfectly.

Ridiculous, expendable rejects though they may be, Gunn does right by his assortment of weirdos, as The Suicide Squad gets its characters just right. With the tattooed atrocity of Jared Leto’s Joker now a distant memory, The Suicide Squad not only picks the right balance of villains and abilities for its ragtag roster but puts the time and effort into making us actually care about them.

Like any big team up movie, the difference between success and failure is in the way you juggle the demands of your various protagonists without things feeling half-baked or overcrowded, and as he once did with the Guardians, James Gunn nails it. For those that survive long enough to make an impression, every member of Task Force X is allowed the time and space to do their thing and to be more than a one-note joke.

Of course, bigger stars like Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, and John Cena are given the lion’s share of the screen time, yet they never overshadow the lesser-known faces. And despite the raggedy nature of the crew, there’s a tangible cohesion within the group that pulls the film through, as the quality of the writing succeeds in selling this random assortment of oddballs to us.

Across the board, every member of the core cast does well and the blast they’re clearly all having is positively infectious. In far and away her finest outing as Harley Quinn yet, Margot Robbie is having the time of her life with the character and the vastly improved writing she’s been given, while Idris Elba is as excellent as he’s ever been, especially in tandem with John Cena who further demonstrates the surprising quality of his comedy chops.

However, as seems fitting for a film about a team of outcasts, it’s The Suicide Squad’s fringe players that really take things to the next level. With Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2 acting as the story’s unlikely heart, and with both David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man and the Sylvester Stallone-voiced King Shark bringing their own unique weirdness to the party, it’s the strength of the film’s group dynamic that makes things tick.

As one might expect, there are several issues with the film, as a meandering, overstuffed plot, one-dimensional villains, and the comedy’s habit for obnoxious self-satisfaction holding The Suicide Squad back from the comic book movie elite, however, these wobbles are never allowed to undermine the film’s overriding qualities.

Unconcerned with tying into a wider universe and largely free from its franchise’s baggage, The Suicide Squad is an all-encompassing comic book freak-out and all the better for it. Humming with James Gunn’s riotous sensibilities, the film and its writer-director are left free to indulge their freakiness and the result is (quite literally) a bloody riot.

Invigorated by James Gunn’s singular anarchic vision and emboldened by a renewed sense of freedom, The Suicide Squad is a brash, bruised, and blood-soaked ride, and the perfect antidote to the horrors of its predecessor. Unafraid to lean into the source material’s chaotic weirdness, The Suicide Squad is a facetious, frenetic, and frequently funny freakshow that marks a fresh start for the DCEU and one of the franchise’s finest efforts.

The Suicide Squad is in cinemas and available to stream on HBO Max (US only) now.