The tenth entry into the DC Animated Movie Universe, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay is a 2018 animated superhero movie. In the film, Amanda Waller (Vanessa Williams) recruits various supervillains to the team of Task Force X, colloquially known as the Suicide Squad, due to the missions’ high mortality rates. Deadshot (Christian Slater) leads the team, which also includes Harley Quinn (Tara Strong), Captain Boomerang (Liam McIntyre), Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten) and Copperhead (Gideon Emery), on a mission to retrieve a mystical artifact with life and death implications. Despite the name and characters, this is unrelated to the film Batman: Assault on Arkham, which instead takes place in the universe of the video games.
+ all of the major Squad members are fine, with Boomerang a favourite of mine, obviously, and I really enjoyed the inclusion of some of my favourite characters in smaller, but no less important roles, including Professor Pyg (James Urbaniak) and Silver Banshee (Julie Nathanson). The various powers/weapon usage/craziness on display from all of them is a joy to watch, especially as internal conflicts arise because, remember, these are all criminals: they really should be portrayed as the jerks they are
+ the magical macguffin is hardly important on its own, but the means to the end of retrieving it are lots of fun. The film utilises it’s harder rating as a way to not only drop some swears, show copious amounts of blood and even show a bit of nipple, but also to discuss some meaningful topics you may not think of when watching a comic book movie
+ there is a simply fantastic plot development towards the end that completely sealed the deal for me on this film. It was just so clever and made so much sense in-universe that I can’t help but smile just thinking about it
– there are a few changes to the established powers/lore of the DC Comics characters that I didn’t like, mostly because they were the only way to make the plot work. I’d almost have preferred they use different characters, if they could not work around the abilities we all already know and love
> Liam McIntyre, a personal favourte of mine from Spartacus, plays Captain Boomerang, which has previously been played by two other former Spartacus cast members, Nick Tarabay on the Arrow/The Flash TV series, and Jai Courtney in the 2016 Suicide Squad live action film. McIntyre also played another Flash villain, the Weather Wizard, on the TV show
Should you see this film: Animation and live action have different strengths, weaknesses and rules, but damn if this wasn’t everything that the live action movie should have been. The Squad was fun, at odds with each other more often than not, and more importantly still super villains. The violence was never over the top, there was no excessive swearing and as mentioned, the story made so much sense it is easy to say that this is a must see for comic book fans.
MoshFish Reviews 