Look no further than James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad for proof that superhero media has truly become too big to fail. As legions of old and new, traditional and bizarre, familiar and not-so-familiar heroes position themselves to win out at the box office, as well as, increasingly, on our premium streaming services, comic lore has become the last remaining monocultural tentpole of our current age.

They arrive cyclically and unceasingly, refilling the pool of digital watercooler chatter, with a new installment, sequel, spinoff, team-up, episode coming next week, next month, next year. The cycle continues but nothing really changes. The convention is too deeply entrenched, the profitability margins too seductive as they are. Whatever vessel they arrive in may have received a shiny new paint job but it’s the same engine under the hood. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The only thing that has shifted is the boundaries. A decade ago, the thought of framing a billion-dollar burgeoning franchise around a monosyllabic sentient tree and gun-crazy, wise-cracking raccoon would have gotten you laughed out of the board room. Convention said that people only showed up for the Big Three. Your Supermans. Your Batmans. Your Spiderguys. Lady superheroes couldn’t soar at the multiplexes, they said. Even Iron Man seemed like a risky venture at the time it was being made.

Fast forward to 2021 and Polka-Dot Man (played here by David Dastmalchian), a metahuman with the ability to harness and weaponize energy-filled polka dots, has now made his onscreen debut. And yet, the broadening of the parameters for what is or is not too strange hasn’t really translated to a fundamental shift to the narrative DNA of these stories. A crew of irreverent anti-heroes might be firing off polka dots, flowers, or an army of rats but the makeup of their battles and the underlying good vs. evil tropes themselves don’t change. Convention follows superheroes, wherever they may go. Their greatest undefeated adversary.

Though Marvel ostensibly pioneered taking a gamble on lesser-known, lower-tier comic characters, James Gunn deserves a good chunk of credit for really putting that ideology into practice with Guardians of the Galaxy. With that franchise’s prolific success came an appetite for even more “risk”, audiences having revealed a willingness to ameliorate themselves with the deepest, darkest corners of comic book universes. Which brings us back to The Suicide Squad and Gunn’s riffing on DC’s deepest, darkest corner.

After the abject critical and commercial failure of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (which he has publicly condemned for intensive studio interference), Gunn was given carte blance to go buck wild with DC’s least likely heroes. While continuity-wise, The Suicide Squad is a loose sequel of sorts to the widely-panned 2016 creation, the movie is more spiritual reboot than anything, bringing aboard a mostly-fresh cast while making room for the familiar faces of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, Jai Courtney’s Boomerang, and Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller. Joining the fold is Idris Elba as Bloodsport, a mercenary marksman and unwilling but de-facto group leader; John Cena as Peacemaker, a troublingly patriotic proud boy; Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2, a sleepy millennial with the ability to control rat populations; and a double-c thicc anthropomorphized shark named Nanaue, voiced by none other than the Sylvester Stallone. Pete Davidson, Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker, Peter Capaldi, Storm Reid, Sean Gunn, and more enter the equation and Gunn is never gun-shy to dispense with as many of his flock as he pleases. The problem becomes that we rarely have the time to form any meaningful attachment to these characters before their inevitable pruning so while their slayings cut against the grain of popular convention (heroes survive, at least until the third act), it doesn’t actually mean anything.

Gunn’s irreverence has become such a trademark of his work that it’s almost not really irreverence anymore. The boundaries have shifted. Does Suicide Squad shift them further? In some ways, yes. In other, arguably more important ways, it does not. Thanks to the commercial smashes that are Guardians and Deadpool, R-rated comic fare has been welcomed into the mainstream with open arms. The characters say “fuck” now but nothing has really changed. This Suicide Squad is entertaining, sure, but the film they find themselves in is as disposable and interchangeable as they are to their government.

CONCLUSION: James Gunn’s ‘The Suicide Squad’ is a marked improvement over the original feature in nearly every quantifiable sense but for a movie that’s all about offbeat characters bucking convention, the film’s DNA oddly adds up to little more than your garden variety comic team-up flick…but with blood and swear words.