The Suicide Squad: Dehumanizing the Superhero Story
From christandpopculture.com
2021-08-24 14:00:00
K. B. Hoyle
Excerpt:
There is promise to a story premise that takes a cadre of villains, against their will, and makes them fight for something bigger than themselves. If they refuse, they die, placing everything on the line. Along the way, they band together,discover the difference between universal right and wrong, and choose self-sacrificially to do the right thing. This is why I have, twice now, watched a Suicide Squad film. But I have also been twice disappointed. A story that centers villains as antiheroes and then redeems them could be a very good story, in the end. But villains as villains aren’t meant to be heroes, and the bungled execution of these films serves as good examples of why.
I’m not here to review the 2016 Suicide Squad, which was almost universally panned for a variety of valid reasons. Rather, I tuned in this week to…