James Gunn sounds bored as hell with comic book movies
The Guardians Of The Galaxy director is describing his new film, The Suicide Squad, as much as a war film as a super villain story.
James Gunn has always made unconventional superhero movies; even before Guardians Of The Galaxy made him a household name with its attempts to put a less serious spin on Marvel’s glossy cinematic universe, Gunn’s resumé was filled with stuff like dysfunctional superteam mockumentary The Specials (which he wrote and co-starred in), and 2010's pitch-black vigilante comedy Super. When your most conventional superhero movie features your hero defeating the universe-level threat by dancing like a goofy moron, it’s probably taken as read that you’re not especially interested in the “Beams and punches and portals in the sky” school of superhero filmmaking.
So it’s not entirely surprising to see Gunn give an interview this week—ahead of the release of Warner Bros.’ The Suicide Squad, which the director is describing mostly in terms of being a war film in supervillain costume—in which he says that the majority of modern superhero movies are “really dumb” and “mostly boring for me right now.” Talking to The Irish Times, Gunn (who’s spoken out before when directors like Martin Scorsese have floated their own dismissal of the superhero machine) seems to be talking mostly from a place of his own rapidly gestating tastes and interests, linking superhero films to the same cycles that have controlled the fortunes of other once-dominant genres: