SUICIDE SQUAD
How DC’s naughtiest are set to hijack comic-book cinema.
DIRECTOR David Ayer STARRING Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Will Smith, Cara Delevingne
ETA 5 August
It’s not often that a studio has reason to be happy with a rival’s runaway success, but you can bet that Suicide Squad studio Warner Bros and its DC division are doing the dance of joy after Deadpool’s game-changing demolition at the box office. Anti-hero(es)? Check. Irreverent
insanity? Check. R-rated? Well, not yet, but don’t be surprised if potty-mouthed crisis talks are currently underway in the bowels of DC HQ.
Not that there weren’t plenty of reasons to be optimistic about Suicide Squad before the Merc With A Mouth made adult-oriented comic-book movies a lucrative proposition again. David Ayer’s nutjob team-up movie is superhero cinema’s edgy outsider precisely because it acknowledges a truth most are afraid to admit – bad guys are vastly more interesting than their goody two-shoes counterparts, as long as they’re not underwritten to the point of irrelevance (see every Marvel movie villain, bar Loki).
“In your normal comic-book movie you have the good guy, the hero, and there’s a checklist and you can reverse engineer their actions from any given situation because they’re going to do the right thing,” Suicide Squad’s writer/director David Ayer tells
Total Film. “These are bad guys, so they have a lot more options open to them in any given situation. They’re capable of anything, and that’s the fun of this.”
Batman V Superman may boast the dual might of the Dark Knight and the Last Son Of Krypton, but Suicide Squad has an even more enticing twosome at its core – Jared Leto’s clown prince of crime, the Joker, and Margot Robbie’s clinically insane former psychiatrist Harley Quinn. Let’s not kid around: the phenomenally popular lovebirds aren’t just the aces up Suicide Squad’s sleeve, they’re the sleeve, torso, trousers and shoes too.
It’s Leto who is grabbing all the hype-building headlines – staying in character as the Joker for the duration of the shoot, sending live rats and dead pigs to his co-stars and putting the heebie-jeebies up his director (“The hairs stand up on the back of your neck”), but according to Ayer, even this off-the-charts mythologising doesn’t do Leto’s performance justice. “What Jared has done is absolutely incredible,” Ayer explains. “When he steps onto the set the world stops. Everything stops. What he’s done is so powerful, so menacing, so palpable, you can feel him. The crew stops working and just watches him. I have to get everybody going again because he’s so fascinating.”
In spite of all this, it’s Harley who’s poised to snatch Suicide Squad from under the ace of knaves’ nose. The bonkers, bat-wielding Brooklynite’s big-screen debut is long overdue, the character proving a fan favourite since her inception in the ’90s Batman animated series. “Harley Quinn” was even the most-Googled Halloween costume of 2015, beating out “Star Wars”, “Pirate” and, yes, “Batman”. And if the Quinn-centric first trailer is anything to go by, Robbie looks to be the most inspired piece of comic-book movie casting since Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark.
But two motley psychopaths does not a Squad make. There’s also the small matter of Will Smith’s crack marksman Deadshot, bendy-stick-flinging antipodean Captain Boomerang ( Jai Courtney), reptilian cannibal Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), firestarter El Diablo ( Jay Hernandez), military man Rick Flag ( Joel Kinnaman), ancient witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), devil in a blue dress Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) and, well, you get the idea, it’s an incredible cast. The appeal is immediately obvious: instead of taking a well-trodden dark and gritty path,
Suicide Squad is embracing the unfiltered fun of the comics. And if you think the leaked Bat-cameo means there aren’t any surprises in store, think again.
“What’s interesting to me is how there’s been a lot of perceptions of what this film is because we have been exposed more than other movies,” Ayer confides. “What people think this movie is is not what it is. There’s so much more to come.”