The Sacramento Kings Suicide Squad Review
By Ti Windisch
Well, this is not what I expected to write about this morning. On Monday morning Grantland’s Jason Gallagher premiered his trailer for The Sacramento Kings Suicide Squad, a parody of the recently released trailer for the actual Suicide Squad movie.
Gallagher took the original trailer (seen here) and spliced in some Kings footage, although he only used audio from the trailer. The results are honestly fantastic. There’s been a lot of Kings bashing this offseason, but this isn’t really in the same vein as that. It definitely pokes fun at Sacramento, but I think any Kings fan with a sense of humor would enjoy it:
One of my personal favorite parts was the “are you the devil?” line when George Karl makes his first appearance in the film. I’ve written previously about how destructive Karl seemed to be earlier this summer, although even in that piece I didn’t go as far as calling him the devil!
Another fitting/admittedly pretty funny line from the actual movie used to fit the Kings was “all you need to know is you work for me” when Vivek Ranadive made his first appearance. The jabs here are funny because they’re all at least partly true–Vivek has had sudden direction changes in his reign as Kings owner thus far.
But by far the best part of the trailer was, in my opinion, the ending. Rajon Rondo gets introduced as the Joker, and the threats Jared Leto is making along with some creepy music juxtaposed with videos of Rondo from old PR introductions and some footage of him yelling at Rick Carlisle is haunting and also pretty damn funny.
Of course Karl isn’t actually the devil, Rondo isn’t really the Joker and Vivek isn’t actually that assertive (at least not over Vlade Divac, who has some amazing footage seen in the trailer), but comedy has long over-exaggerated details or features to make something funny. That’s the point of this, by the way.
I know it can be tough to look at something coming from outside Sacramento taking shots at the Kings without instantly having flashbacks to the salty Wojnarowski tweets or countless articles deriding every move Vlade has made this offseason, but this is pretty different to those things.
Gallagher is clearly going for laughs here, and he actually roots for the Kings (sort of) in his short write-up of the trailer:
"The assignment: Succeed in the Western Conference with the most absurd amalgamation of players and toxic personalities on and off the court. There are no do-overs, because the Kings traded away a former first-rounder and a future pick (not to mention the pick owed to the Bulls). It’s now or never, gents. Also, their star player and head coach might kill each other, and their owner has “built in deniability” by pinning it all on a madman named Vlade.This is such a terrible idea, and … I sincerely hope it works. It’s time for America to break bad by cheering on this crazy group of “imprisoned supervillains,” a.k.a. “the worst of the worst,” a.k.a. “some kind of suicide squad,” as they set to embark on this suicidal 2015-16 season.Let’s go Patsies. Let’s Go Kings."
For what it’s worth, I sincerely hope it works too, Jason.
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