James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad trailer review: Here we go again

James Gunn’s Suicide Squad may end up being the better movie, but we’ve started off with a worse trailer.

It’s easy to forget, after the movie that ended up coming out in the summer of 2016, just how good that first Suicide Squad trailer was. Sure, David Ayer’s film turned out to be an unwatchable disaster, but there’s a reason that we all rushed to see the film, and a reason it ended up grossing nearly $750 million worldwide at the box office. It was all due to that first, lightning-in-a-bottle preview.

Let’s revisit it quickly. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody blares as we’re introduced to the cast of characters, headlined by Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. The jokes pop, the characters are visually distinct—everything about it feels fun, fresh, and a bit rebellious, a snarky sidestep from the ultra-seriousness that Zack Snyder had set as the tone with Man of Steel in 2013. It promises a grand old time—much in the same way that James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy had, and successfully delivered on, in 2014.

The film we got, however, was a hot mess—a twisted nightmare imitation of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, with a punishing power-hour soundtrack, indiscernible characters, and nothing plot. Ayer says there’s a better cut somewhere. Sorry #releasetheayercut acolytes, I struggle to see how any cut could improve this.

It makes perfect sense then, that Gunn would have been hired to take over the franchise in the brief minute that he was fired from Marvel after some old tweets resurfaced—and Gunn is a talented enough filmmaker who has enough clout to assert his vision. The film we’ll likely get from him in this sequel/reboot ‘don’t call it Suicide Squad 2’ film ‘The Suicide Squad’, coming later this year, I’m still hopeful, will be what the first one should have been.

This first trailer, however, has me wavering.

Let’s start with the good: Idris brings a straight-man energy that Will Smith, who he is replacing as Deadshot couldn’t pull off. John Cena as Peacemaker seems to be continuing to do bizarro parodies of his WWE character, this time as a kind of try-too-hard patriotic do-gooder without any sense of irony.

Watch the trailer below, though you’ll have to sign in because it’s age restricted:

Ok, now that you’ve watched it. A bit underwhelming, right?

None of the jokes really land, and the set up remains exactly the same as Suicide Squad’s in 2016—a rag-tag group of diverse villains have been brought together for an impossible mission, complete with sardonic detachment and over the top gore and language. That all would of course be well and good if this were 2016 and we hadn’t seen a failed version of this once already.

Maybe that’s the problem—the trailer promises us the same movie we were promised the first time. After that one failed to deliver, promising the same movie again in a less punchy fashion doesn’t engender optimism.

It gives you the feeling of Charlie Brown running toward’s Lucy’s football—the crushing realization that you’re probably going to end up unfulfilled flat on your back, with the knowledge that you’re still going to keep running, every single time, towards that fruitless goal.

But I mean, it’s cool that Sylvester Stallone is a big shark.