Fans of trash cinema — and their number is larger than you’d expect — fondly remember the 1980s glory days of Troma Studios, which brought us gleefully gruesome low-budget classics such as The Toxic Avenger, Surf Nazis Must Die, Rabid Grannies and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, among many others.
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| Having battled their way through most of an island nation, our "heroes" — from left, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Bloodsport (Idris Elba), King Shark and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) — simply cannot believe what they now must deal with. |
Which is to say, this is an unapologetically tasteless, offensive, gruesome and profane 132 minutes of hyper-violent gore, made (perhaps) a bit more palatable by equally relentless gallows humor. It’s The Dirty Dozen gone dog-nuts.
Gunn and visual effects supervisor Kelvin McIlwain include all possible means of torturing a human body, invariably amid gouts of splattered blood: decapitations, sliced limbs, craniotomies, gouged eyeballs, halfectomies (just what it sounds like), close-range shotgun blasts, and every other imaginable form of slicing and dicing. (Actually, they may have missed defenestration, but I’m not going back to double-check.)
Oh, yes: and being devoured by an enraged, land-based shark.
Gunn has no shortage of chutzpah. Recognizing that the 2016 film was a grim, joyless affair, he has doubled-down on this one’s unceasing snark. The most ridiculous lines, emerging at the most inappropriate moments, are uttered with straight-faced sincerity … which, of course, makes them even funnier (if your predilections run to such things).
And I do love the clever intertitles that bridge events and signal flashbacks (“Eight minutes earlier…”).
Gunn also earns geek cred for resurrecting some of the craziest characters ever introduced in DC comic book lore, such as the one updated here as TDK (and played by fan fave Nathan Fillion, although he’s hard to recognize beneath the mask); and the even more unlikely Starro the Conqueror, the first supervillain faced by the original Justice League of America, when that team debuted in early 1960.
Unlikely, to be sure … yet also quite creepy.
But that comes much later. Events kick off with the clandestine, late-night invasion of the island nation of Corto Maltese, which — thanks to a vicious regime change — suddenly has become a threat to the good ol’ US of A. Our assembled “mercenaries” are misfit, hyper-enhanced villains given this chance to shorten their sentences at Belle Reve, a prison with bragging rights for having the country’s highest mortality rate.
These degenerate delinquents are released to the care of Task Force X leader Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), with their every move monitored back in the States by government techies supervised by the merciless Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). One false step, and she’ll activate the micro-bomb implanted in the base of each villain’s skull, thereby blowing his — or her — head off.
(Yes, of course we get to watch that happen.)
It’s pretty easy to separate the wheat from the likely chaff; likely disposable Task Force miscreants include Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), Mongal (Mayling Ng) and the aforementioned TDK.
They’re minor distractions against the obvious A-team, which features Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), the improbable Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and — last but certainly not least — Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie).
Robbie is by far the most entertaining element, in her third shot at this merry sociopath. Harley’s deranged non-sequiturs and stream-of-consciousness ramblings are wholly at odds with her calmly lethal capabilities, and Robbie excels at switching her gaze from pouty, little-girl innocence to wickedly unhinged insanity. She’s dangerous because she’s fearless and wholly, totally nuts.
In terms of ability, Bloodsport and Peacemaker are cut from the same cloth: Both are expert marksmen with all manner of weapons, and equally adept at hand-to-hand combat. But their personalities couldn’t be more different; Bloodsport loathes unnecessary collateral damage, whereas the do-or-die Peacemaker strives for peace if he has to kill every man, woman and child to achieve it.
King Shark is the group’s raw brawn: a lumbering behemoth with the mentality of a 5-year-old (and, yes, that juxtaposition prompts considerable humor). He’s also hungry. Constantly. The eternally glum and dispirited Polka-Dot Man is visibly ashamed of his weird power, which isn’t immediately revealed (so I’ll say no more here).
Ratcatcher 2, finally, is a stereotypical teen millennial: lazy and unmotivated, but also keen to explore everybody’s feelings. She’s forever accompanied by Sebastian, the nearest and dearest of her four-legged feral friends. No question: He’s a cute li’l guy, particularly when he tries to cozy up to the disinterested Bloodsport, who has an aversion to rats.
It soon becomes clear that not all of these folks are inherently “evil,” in the strictest sense. (Harley definitely is.) Elba, always a richly nuanced actor, shades Bloodsport as a man beginning to regret the path he has chosen, and the carnage he has left in his wake; there’s also latent guilt over the daughter (Storm Reid) that he has ignored her entire life.
Polka-Dot Man isn’t a bad guy in any sense of the word; he’s simply a mistreated soul cursed with a power he can’t control. Dastmalchian makes him the ultimate nebbish: a forlorn misfit with serious Mommy issues (which are well-deserved).
Ratcatcher 2 certainly didn’t deserve being tossed into Belle Reve; she’s just a street kid doing her best to survive, and blessed with a nifty gadget passed down from her father. One suspects her presence in this prison had more to do with Waller’s callous assessment of the girl’s potential value as a weapon: a cold-blooded swipe at American arrogance that also includes — a bit later — a pointed indictment of our tendency toward extraordinary rendition in isolated international locales.
Melchior, the exact opposite of Robbie, is quite endearing: Ratcatcher 2 is sweet, trusting and determined to bond with Bloodsport.
Cena, finally, is hilariously stoic as the absurdly single-minded Peacemaker, particularly when he aggressively spars with Bloodsport. In Gunn’s words, lifted from the press notes, Peacemaker is “a douchey Captain America who would shoot a kid.” He’s the ultimate monomaniacal fascist.
Actually, Amanda Waller is even more ruthless, in the service of her rather warped view of national security. Davis’ dead-eyed stare is a thing of true terror.
Mere armed soldiers aren’t much of a threat to our antiheroes, of course, even though Corto Maltese’s new dictators — generals Luna (Juan Diego Botto) and Suarez (Joaquín Cosio) — have a massive army at their disposal. No, the real menace is Project Starfish, whatever that is, concealed within the island’s former Nazi base: a massive stone silo dubbed Jotunheim, where unspeakable things are supervised by Gaius Grieves, better known as Thinker (former Doctor Who Peter Capaldi).
Although Gunn and editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner deliver most of the brutal, landscape-leveling mayhem with audacious momentum, not everything works. A lengthy interlude involving Luna and Harley is a bizarre waste of time, and — typical, in such films — the overlong third act becomes tedious and utterly ridiculous, even by this story’s manic standards. Gunn’s film is simply too long.
It also isn’t geared for mainstream viewers or the faint of heart. But genre fans who adored the similarly indelicate tone in Deadpool will love this. It’s absolutely out of control … and that’s not entirely a bad thing.
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