Starring: Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman, John Cena

Directed by James Gunn

Warner Bros, out UK now, on HBO and in US cinemas August 6

You know the drill: complete the mission successfully and get 10 years off your sentence. But sometimes it’s not worth even that…

My immediate reaction coming to the end of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad was that this was as mad as an ocean-going container ship full of frogs. It’s violent, it’s funny, it’s surprisingly emotional at times, and it’s probably got Margot Robbie’s best performance yet as Harley Quinn – this is a Harley let loose with proper weaponry, not bean bag guns, a Harley who can more than hold her own against all those around her and a Harley who’s a team player when required.

Inevitably some of the best moments have appeared in the trailers already, but there’s plenty of good material in the connective tissue between those points (and a number of twists that put what’s in the trailer in a completely different context). Kinnaman, Davis, Robbie and Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang are the links back to the 2016 movie, but there’s not a single reference to that, bar an assumption that both audience and felons know how the system works, and that the characters know each other.

There’s a lot of gratuitous violence in the film, right from the start – some of which, to be fair, is challenged within the movie itself – and Gunn doesn’t hesitate to show that there’s not one person who can be considered unexpendable. John Cena’s Peacemaker, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and Kinnaman’s Rick Flag butt heads at various points in the film, while Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2 is a good emotional barometer throughout. Some of the best humour derives from Sylvester Stallone’s King Shark – and so do some of the more poignant moments, surprising as that may seem – while easily the biggest laughs come from David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man and his motivations for killing. And anyone who’s forgotten how well Peter Capaldi can swear… there are plenty of reminders.

As ever, Gunn incorporates the soundtrack into the emotional trajectory of the movie, although not quite in as heavy-handed a way as was sometimes the case in the Guardians movies, and there’s plenty of well-shot action sequences. What he’s not done, as some feared, was give The Suicide Squad a Guardians feel – yes, to an extent it’s also about a group of misfits coming together, but there’s a rougher, harder, nastier edge to this than the PG-13/12 level of Guardians. These people are killers, and you never are allowed to forget it.

The inhabitants of the island that the Squad invades are depicted in very broad strokes – there are good guys (rebels) and bad guys (military, led by Quantum of Solace’s Joaquin Cosio playing even more broadly than he did in the 007 film) – and they do feel rather underdeveloped. But when you’ve got a Great White Shark wanting his “num-nums”, credibility does slightly go by the board…

Verdict: A huge improvement on the studio cut of the first Suicide Squad, and definitely up there with the stronger DC movies of the last decade. (And yes there is a post credits scene.) 9/10

Paul Simpson