Spoiler: It's not.
Suspension of disbelief is "how far can a story go, before it pushes away its' audience". Not how wacky it is, or how realistic it seems. The "it's a movie" statement is lazy debating, one has to keep in mind that the whole point of a story is to explain something in a manner that is easy to relate to.
We don't question the Iron Man suit's ability to stop inertia from explosions, not "because... you know... he science'd it", but because we can all agree that in this moment; the armor just works. We're ignoring that minor detail for the sake of understanding the story.
The Jaegers can run and jump without falling apart, because of that thing they never ever mention in the movie. We're fine with that.
We're also fine with idiots dying in horror movies, because they're idiots. Even the "smart" character will become a drooling moron whenever the killer needs to magic their way into a house. Even though we'd all love a scene in the teen slasher flick, when the crazy killer (who's really the boyfriend) goes to a college party to kill someone, and runs into a marine on leave.
"I have a knife!"
"And a future filled with expensive medical bills..."
What kills this suspension, effectively cutting the wires, is when things happen that defy the basic reaction laws of humanity. Not when characters make mistakes, but when we're expected to just "go along" with something that no one in the audience could ever truly "go along" with. It's where movies that try to strong arm political agenda into movies usually fail.
Examples: Transformers, and The Purge.
In our first example, we come across a movie in many people watching it stopped numerous times and went "are you kidding me? Am I the only non-moron here?" Not when giant robots punched eachother, we accepted "alien stuff" as the explanation for that, along with "sure Megan Fox would date... him...". What kills it is "... is he really going to go to college, the face of the human vs. Decepticon war, without his awesome car/best friend/body guard? That's like Michael Knight telling Kitt "Nah, stay home, I'm going to solve this case with my Hyundai." That, and the government strong arming giant robots with no allegiance into exile.
"Hi, Autobots? It's
In our second (and far worse) the Purge breaks a rule that even fantasy and surreal genres are held to: human actions. We accept that elves are perfect beings, because we're not, and they're not us. Humans in fantasy are always "strong, dependable, capable of great evil or great good, work hard despite their short lives", it reads like a DnD fortune cookie. The vast, vast majority of the action and thriller genres literally depend on one human trait that we all tend to share: we love ourselves some revenge.
We're revenge junkies. How many movies, books, shows, entire series are devoted to revenge. Even our most popular super hero team of the decade The Avengers, name quite literally means those who take that revenge we love so much. Why? Because revenge is the one time, the one time, when a good, mild mannered man is able to put down his glasses and beat some ass. We love it. We want to be the heroic Gristle Mc Thornbody, beating down thugs because they killed his second best friend ever. It's sexy and fun.
The Purge breaks this, by saying that should a night be "anything goes" the streets wouldn't be filled with men with guns, bats, swords, knives, superhero costumes... just looking for evil to smite. The actual purge would have lasted one time, before everyone realized that "most criminals are just not dumb enough to walk out into the world on the night where they can be brutally murdered for sport by angry mobs."
... that would have been a better movie, a bunch of low income drug dealers, gang members, and petty thieves, trying to hide from roving bands of people who believe they're heroes.
There's your political statement.
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