2016’s Suicide Squad was a bummer of a misfire. What should have been a colorful, offbeat collection of baddies saving the world turned into a sad imitation of Guardians of the Galaxy with no clear direction or even sensical plot. Thankfully, Warner Bros. decided to just go out and get the Guardians of the Galaxy writer-director James Gunn for the sequel/reboot The Suicide Squad, and it’s both the film we should have gotten all along and also only something that Gunn could deliver. His sensibilities are all over this film from the gory violence to the pitch-black sense of humor to the concept of found family among a group of rejects. By using villains instead of heroes, The Suicide Squad allows Gunn to make a comic book movie with life-and-death stakes and the freedom to have his characters do some truly gnarly things and skip away from our moral judgments. While your typical heroes have to worry about clearing the city and saving civilians, with James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, you get characters who sometimes relish getting their hands dirty if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

Robert DuBois aka “Bloodsport” (Idris Elba) is currently serving a sentence at Belle Reve prison for trying to kill Superman with a kryptonite bullet. Government agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) comes to him with an offer—ten years off his sentence if he leads a team of fellow inmates on a mission to the island of Corto Maltese to destroy a dangerous government project that threatens American security. As a sweetener, the cutthroat Waller dangles the prospect of not throwing DuBois’ delinquent daughter (Storm Reid) in jail. A reluctant DuBois takes the deal and puts together a team that includes Abner Krill aka “Polka-Dot Man” (David Dastmalchian) who can toss deadly polka dots at people; the half-man, half-shark Nanaue aka “King Shark” (voiced by Sylvester Stallone); Cleo Cazo aka “Ratcatcher 2” (Daniela Melchior), who can control legions of rats; and the violently zealous and self-righteous Christopher Smith aka “Peacemaker” (John Cena). However, once the group arrives on the island, they get more than they bargained for, and the team expands to include the cheerful and deadly Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) as well as the upright soldier Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). Together, this group of deadly misfits must save the world from something called “Project Starfish.”

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Image via Warner Bros.

From its opening scenes, Gunn leans hard into giving his Suicide Squad a completely different vibe from the 2016 movie, and one that really takes advantage of the fact that these characters are, for lack of a better word, disposable. That’s literally why they’re chosen for the mission, and in a world where every superhero is getting a three-film franchise and a TV series, it’s nice to see a big superhero blockbuster that says right from the beginning, “You may not want to get too attached to these guys.” It gives The Suicide Squad real stakes to where you don’t know who’s going to make it to the end of the movie, and while these characters are bastards, they’re the kind of lovable bastards that Gunn excels at creating.

The Suicide Squad is a real ensemble piece where even though DuBois is the team leader, everyone gets a moment to shine. Harley Quinn gets arguably her best scene in any DCEU movie thus far. You’ll want to adopt King Shark. Dastmalchian makes Polk-Dot Man hilariously tragic with his mother-obsessed psychosis. Melchoir is lovely as the film’s heart and strikes up a great surrogate daughter relationship with DuBois. And Cena once again shows that he’s an underrated comic genius as he deadpans his way through the film with one killer joke after another. Even some of the shorter-lived characters get in a good joke or two. With such a large cast, not a single person feels wasted here.

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Image via Warner Bros.

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That investment into these characters is essential as The Suicide Squad can be an utterly nasty piece of work. After a while, you start to feel a bit uncomfortable with how many brown-skinned soldiers are being gunned down (Corto Maltese stands in for “Any South American Government Unfortunate Enough to Have Interacted with the United States in the 20th Century”) until it becomes painfully clear that what Gunn is mocking is not human life, but the imperialism that treats it so cheaply. While The Suicide Squad has shades of Gunn’s past films Super (you could easily see the Crimson Bolt and Peacemaker bonding over beating a jay-walker to death), Guardians of the Galaxy, and even Slither, there’s also a heavy dose of Team America: World Police. It makes The Suicide Squad into more than a typical superhero movie and into more of a satire of the genre that also doesn’t have to carry the burden of making its characters purely heroic.

By filtering the superhero genre through this twisted lens, The Suicide Squad provides an entirely new flavor to this kind of movie. When the film reaches its climactic battle, it’s almost like a parody of The Battle of New York in The Avengers where the characters are reluctantly going to save the day, they might not all survive, and collateral damage comes with the territory. It’s not an oversight like Man of Steel; Gunn knows this is meant as a meaner work where these characters are such a deep shade of morally grey that they’re more focused on getting the job done than saving cats in trees. Some may be offput by the level of gore and irreverent violence, but Gunn makes no secret of the level he’s operating at in the film’s prologue, so if you’ve made it to the climax of the film, you either bought in or you checked out.

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Image via Warner Bros.

But The Suicide Squad is worth the buy-in for how it feels like Gunn taking advantage of a level of freedom that even Marvel with its “Yes, you can have a talking tree and raccoon in your movie, and yes you can have a son kill his god-father in the sequel,” did not come close to affording him. That’s not to say that The Suicide Squad is truer to Gunn than Guardians of the Galaxy; only that Warner Bros. has given him a canvas and the characters to run wild in a way that doesn’t have the restrictions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The result is a film that’s both refreshing, exhilarating, and a darkly-comic blast that will make you want to see these characters come back for more, assuming they survive.

Rating: A-

The Suicide Squad opens in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6th.

KEEP READING: James Gunn Reveals WB Asked Him to Include Harley Quinn in 'The Suicide Squad'