As someone whose day job involves sorting out movie metadata, I consider taking a movie called Suicide Squad and making a direct sequel called The Suicide Squad to be something of a personal broadside. But then, I’m not sure that the use of a definite article in a blockbuster title has ever been so loaded. 2016’s Suicide Squad was panned by critics, widely mocked on the internet, disowned by its director, and made a boatload of cash. Clearly, a bankable idea was in need of a reset. So the “the” can be read as a tweak on canonicity: it’s a way of saying forget that one, here’s this one. It’s also a chance for DC to poach a director who was (temporarily) fired by Marvel over a Twitter PR scandal and give him the freedom of an R-rating. “From the horribly beautiful mind of James Gunn” trumpeted the red-band trailer, promising yucks, bad taste, weirdness, blood—and authorship, at a time when the existence of authorship in these franchises is worth debating.

If much of what’s added by “the horribly beautiful mind of James Gunn” is irreverent banter and gore, I could honestly take or leave both. Gunn’s all-in commitment to banter is a stumbling block as often as a lubricant, and I’ve long since lost enough innocence for incongruent splatter in a family-friendly genre to feel subversive. Besides, the basic schema—wisecracking chaotic-neutral misfits save the day, but don’t sound or act like “serious” heroes—is no longer a rebuke to formula, if it ever was, but a formula of its own. (Gunn has his own hits to pillage from, and he will). So if The Suicide Squad stands out as one of the most satisfying blockbusters to come along this year—and it does—where it deserves praise is not subversion but the fundamentals. This is a tight, cohesive story that grabs the eye, moves fast, builds stakes, has engaging human presences, makes its share of distinct aesthetic choices, and does indeed feel like it’s got an individual consciousness swaying it. More than most Marvel movies, in fact, including Gunn’s. And it may be that his real contribution at the tentpole level is showing that if those fundamentals are in place, the actual specifics have an elastic leeway to be just about anything. Like “The Polka Dot Man”, a DC character Gunn seems drawn to purely because it sounds like such an uncool idea. Or a climactic monster whose visual conceptualization owes less to the state-of-the-art King Kong reboots than an old kaiju matinee quickie.

As it passes through theaters and HBO Max, the film has occasioned two sidenotes. First, that it’s been considered something of a financial disappointment, which is of interest principally because definitions of success are fluid when a $185 million movie can go right to an SVOD service while theaters face a public health crisis.

And second, ink has been spilled over whether the film is a critique of American imperialism, arriving coincidentally just in time for the emotional reckoning of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. That reading is plenty apparent on the surface: an elite military squad is sent by the government to aid in a regime change, only they learn the extent of US wrongdoing, and it all reaches a climactic battle between one soldier who feels betrayed by his country and one who stands by it, right or wrong. But you don’t have to look hard to see paradoxes. You could start with the fact that the film plays a lot of local deaths for laughs. Or that it transparently pulls its punches by having the US intelligence apparatus save the day. Or that in general, “our” interests are central while “theirs” are background. So any political critique it offers is likely to only hold up for a younger audience to whom a challenge of triumphalist narratives is new. Which, if that was the goal, is not to knock the film (at least not too much). Teens all start somewhere. But I’m not sure, in 2021, how many young triumphalists are left.

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The Suicide Squad recently finished its run on HBO Max and is still in theaters. Jared Leto died on the way back to his home planet.