The Suicide Squad

Essential, and the best film in the DCEU. It is also a soft reboot: it shares two or three characters with the 2016 film and assumes nothing from it, so it can be watched cold.

The opening makes the premise honest for the first time. A squad is assembled, the audience is encouraged to learn their names, and almost all of them are killed in the first ten minutes on a beach, in a sequence that is funny and horrible at once. From that point the film has credibility: anybody can die, and several do.

What is unexpected is that it is a political film. The mission is to destroy evidence of an American programme at a facility in a country the United States has been propping up for decades, and the last act turns on whether a team of expendable criminals will follow an order to leave a population to it. The monster at the end is treated with genuine pity.

Gunn's affection for the obscure corners of the catalogue carries it: a man who controls rats, a shark that eats people and reads, a man who fires polka dots. David Dastmalchian and Daniela Melchior are the emotional centre. It is extremely violent and extremely sincere, and it is the film that got Gunn the job running the whole thing.