August is a great month for John Cena fans in India. The Suicide Squad was released last week, and Fast & Furious 9 is due next week. The former superhero movie is a soft reboot of the original Suicide Squad that returned in 2016. It features DC super villains, to be exact, including the likes of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Bloodsport (Idris Elba), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), Peacemaker (John Cena), and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). The two-hour film is written and directed by Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn – the man who was fired and rehired by Disney for his controversial tweets.
On this episode of Gadget’s 360 podcast Orbital, host Akhil Arora chats with editor-in-chief Shayak Majumder, steeped in DC comic books, to discuss The Suicide Squad.
Spoiler alert: if you’re planning to watch The Suicide Squad but haven’t seen it, don’t listen to our discussion immediately, and watch the movie first.
Title. The Suicide Squad shares some notable similarities with 2018’s Deadpool 2. While it bears no direct relationship to the film based on the Marvel Comics character Deadpool, it has a blood-and-death storyline that reminds us of the earlier one.
James Gunn, the director, and writer of The Suicide Squad brings his unique take on everything. One of the main things that differentiate the movie from other superhero movies with a list of villains is the mass murder, even of the main characters. Of course, Gunn promised this before release.
The Suicide Squad Review: More Than DC’s Guardians of the Galaxy
In the second half of the episode, Akhil is joined by Ali Pardiwala and Jasmin Jose, two of our Fast & Furious fans, to talk about the ninth chapter in the series, F9. The film was released internationally in May and will hit Indian cinemas on August 19. Universal Pictures originally planned to release Fast & Furious 9 in 2020, but it was delayed several times – one of which was due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spoiler alert: Don’t listen to our discussion if you’re planning to watch Fast & Furious 9 but haven’t seen it yet.
Fast & Furious 9 is directed by Justin Lin and is the sequel to Fast & Furious 8 (aka The Fate of the Furious), released in 2017. The nearly two-and-a-half-hour film brings back Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, with Cena playing his younger brother Jakob Toretto. Also returning are Michelle Rodriguez as Letty Oritz, Tyrese Gibson as Roman Pearce, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges as Tej Parker, and other actors. Frankly, there is little connection between one Fast chapter and another.
Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Jakob Toretto (John Cena) in F9 Photo Credit: Giles Keyte/ Universal Pictures
Of course, F9 continues the franchise’s love of plenty of unrealistic, physics-defying action sequences. The film’s main characters are also simply invincible – a joke the film itself plays in – and don’t die even if they fall from a great height or have a serious accident. They are essentially superheroes, like in The Suicide Squad.
Fast & Furious 9 Speeds Past $500 Million Box Office, A First For Hollywood In COVID-19 Pandemic
We talk about all this and much more in our discussion. You can listen to it in detail by pressing the play button on the embedded audio player above. You can also follow the Gadgets 360 podcast on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Could you rate us and leave a review?
New Orbital episodes come out every Friday, so tune in regularly.
