Suicide Squad is an epic story of delusion, mania and loss, featuring lunatic characters unleashed on society and sent sprinting in all directions. Naturally, I’m referring to the behind the scenes story of how they made the film, rather than the film itself, which sucks.
The director wanted to make a film that was “methodical, layered, beautiful and sad,” which is fine as a concept but probably shouldn’t involve cartoon characters. One of the stars was a dangerous, feral Method actor who terrorized the cast and crew. The rehearsals involved intrusive personal questions, physical fights, tattoo guns and dead pigs stuffed with bullets.
And then Deadpool came out, and Warner Bros realized that what they really wanted was an anti-hero comedy, so they wrenched it away from the director, reshot a significant fraction of the movie and then edited it together at random.
It’s a mess of a movie that’s fun to talk about, and this week Evan Brady joins me on the podcast to dig into what the hell happened to Suicide Squad.
The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Audible and lots of other places. Come check it out!
Here’s Act 2:
And here’s Act 3:
Next week:
Knock knock, you’re about to get shell shocked!
Sloane and I take on the 2014
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
— Danny Horn
Superheroes Every Day 
My memory of this movie – which I did see in the theater as a favor to a pal – was that the first act was nothing but introducing you to the characters three times on repeat. I felt like I was taking crazy pills. It was like “here’s Diablo! He catches fire, but he’s sad.” Then, “By the way, we’ve got Diablo who has fire powers! But he’s got troubles.” and finally “All right, Diablo. Time to stop being sad and come use your fire powers.” Weirdly, Birds of Prey followed this same pattern. Like they thought people were trickling into the theater, they had too many characters, and so every time those characters showed up, we had to remind everyone “that one is the one who does X”. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since those two movies.
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I’m probably gonna comment each section. Sorry. I really, really, (reaaaalllly) hate this movie. DC put a stake in the ground in the weirdest way by insisting that they were not going to copy Marvel, and so – why bother to actually tell compelling origin stories when you can just start a story. Why explain Batfleck when you can just make him a puzzle-box of implied history? Suicide Squad as a comic worked because the characters had previously existed as villains, it was the recontextualization of this one Bat-villain now with other crooks. Captain Boomerang is a Flash villain. We got a Flash movie something like 10 movies later with no Flash villains. They were in such a rush to get anti-heroes to screen, they absolutely forgot to do the first part first – or at least well (which Gunn showed up and did with minimal effort), and – of course – the massive distraction of Harley and Joker in this movie. WHY they didn’t just have a Harley movie and instead shoe-horned her into two other non-Harley properties is absolutely mind-boggling. Clearly there’s a story to tell there, so what are you even doing with this weird “btw, also, Harley” nonsense in a completely different movie?
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sorry – the “it was the recontextualization of this one Bat-villain now with other crooks” was about Deadshot.
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I just hate this movie so much, I can’t type out thoughts.
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