Okay so maybe SUICIDE SQUAD does not seem like your typical musical--though it does have writer/director James Gunn's typically skillful needle drops, as well as a sequence for Harley that Gunn himself saw as veering into MARY POPPINS territory.
(By the way, SUICIDE SQUAD spoilers ahead. Beware.)
But there's a way in which good action movies do storytelling in ways similar to musicals. The action sequences stand in place of songs as the moments where the characters express who they are and what they want. (Also they often involve insane amounts of choreography.)
So SQUAD's opening sequence with Michael Rooker's Savant and the ball may not be your typical musical opener, but it does tell us who he is and what he's feeling in the same way a character solo number would.
(By the way, the choice to open on Savant and stay with him the first 15 minutes is such a great choice. In his interview with Variety Gunn reveals he pitched the film to Warner Brothers/DC in exactly that way, with them having no idea that there was a twist coming. A little master class in pitching right there.)
I don't want to push the musical/action movie comparison as much as distract you so that you won't mind me either spending a second week on American musicals because I am obsessed with them right now (thank you, SCHMIGADOON!) or taking a day from all that to write about SUICIDE SQUAD.
How am I doing?
There's a lot of smart storytelling things going on SUICIDE SQUAD. The investment put into the fake team, backstory reveals that feel like time-release capsules, adding emotion and energy to the current story rather than ever pulling us out of it -- actually at some point this week I'm going to write about that, as well, because it's so well done and backstory work is so hard to do well.
But the thing that really stood out to me is what the film does with Harley Quinn.
Here's the thing: At this point Harley is way bigger than this movie and its characters. Even though this is only her third appearance in the DCEU, and the first was in the prior SUICIDE SQUAD film, that film absolutely launched her into Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman-adjacent territory. Some of it's Margot Robbie's glorious performance and some of it is just the character herself. She's insanely funny, totally unpredictable and yet also capable of profound poignancy.
Bringing together a character like that with a bunch of nobodies is a recipe for disaster, even if one of them is played by Idris Elba. She draws all the attention, even when she's just standing there. With her around it's going to be very hard for the audience to ever fall in love with the other characters.
So, Gunn makes the brilliant choice to give her her own story completely separate from the rest of the team for over half the film. She attacks Corto Moltese with the meant-to-fail Team A, gets caught and then ends up first wooed by the country's new president and then tortured by the General that replaces him. It's just two sequences, each of them among the most musical-inspired of the film (man, I am really leaning this musical/action movie comparison, aren't I?).
We get an animated Disney-eque Shopgirl wooed by the Prince sequence, complete with birds (and the wish fulfillment ending that so many have about Disney princess films -- YOU DON'T NEED THOSE MEN, LADIES; YOU ARE SO MUCH MORE ON YOUR OWN). Then we get her escape from torture sequence that as it goes on begins to transform the world around her in a way that is indeed very psychadelic-POPPINS or FANTASIA-esque.
Those two sequences prove to be enough time spent with Harley to satisfy us in large part because they are so memorable and visually arresting. But they also continue her broader DCEU storyline of breaking free from an abusive relationship with the Joker and figuring out who she wants to be. Murdering the President is her learning from her past mistakes. And then murdering the seeming fortress of men who tortured her speaks to her growing project as avenging angel of abused women.
It's interesting, Gunn says in that interview he had no idea what BIRDS OF PREY was about when he wrote the SQUAD script, so there's a wonderful element of just plain serendipity in all this. But the three films do work very very well together as a story of Harley.
In a way what Gunn has done her is a variation on what Snyder did with Superman in his DC films. In "killing" Clark at the end of BATMAN v. SUPERMAN Snyder gave all the other characters in JUSTICE LEAGUE time and space to breathe and become characters that we would love in their own right. And then in the end he can come back and be the film's big gun, just as Harley is the one who literally vaults into Starro's eye, leading to their death.
This may sound very feature-centric, but you see the same thing happen on TV shows. Something big or tragic will happen to the protagonist or a major character at the end of a season, launching them off on their own story in the next. And that becomes a way to give all the other characters room to develop further and get stories of their own.
When people are loving your show and hungry for more stories of your supporting characters, it's a good question to consider: How can I take the protagonist off the table for a bit (without taking them out of the picture)?
