10 Reasons Batman: Assault On Arkham Destroys Suicide Squad
The real Task Force X movie.
Everyone's now had a chance to see Suicide Squad for themselves, and a common line among fans is that not only did it fail to live up to the immense hype, but it's not even the best movie about the Suicide Squad you can watch.
2014's animated film Batman: Assault on Arkham is a similar but also fundamentally different take on the Worst Heroes Ever. Even though Deadshot, Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang still appear, they're instead joined by Black Spider, KGBeast, Killer Frost and King Shark (the latter of whom very nearly replaced Killer Croc in the live-action movie), and that has a big shift on the dynamic.
Now, not everything here is perfect (there's a Deadshot-Harley sex scene that nobody really needed and Boomerang's accent is eye-rollingly over-the-top), but on the whole it's an effortlessly superior take on the Suicide Squad that trumps David Ayer's attempt in pretty much every conceivable way. Seek it out for yourself and realise great cinematic stories about this team can be told.
Here are 10 reasons Batman: Assault on Arkham destroys Suicide Squad...
10. It Actually Has A Memorable Plot
It's fair to say that Suicide Squad's narrative was disappointingly scant: once the Squad was teamed together, the movie's remaining two acts were basically one long mission, where they rescued Amanda Waller and took down Enchantress.
Assault On Arkham by contrast has a more involving plot that actually sticks in the mind: it begins as a heist film, where the Squad has to break into Arkham Asylum in order to recover a flash drive in The Riddler's possession which would compromise every past and present member of the Squad.
From there things get infinitely more complex as The Joker hatches his own scheme, planning to detonate a dirty bomb as Batman attempts to put a stop to him. These plots intersect in a meaningful way and give the film a more layered feel, as opposed to the fairly singular, by-the-numbers narrative of Suicide Squad, where the only variation is by way of awkward, choppy flashback sequences.