THE SUICIDE SQUAD
SQUADRO PHENIA
WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? WE TALK TO DIRECTOR JAMES GUNN AND THE CAST OF THE SUICIDE SQUAD TO FIND OUT…
WORDS: WILL SALMON
CHANCES ARE YOU ALREADY know the story of how James Gunn landed the gig as director of The Suicide Squad, but for those who missed what was briefly the Twitter “scandal” of 2018, here’s the TL;DR. Gunn’s left-wing politics aggravated a bunch of online trolls who dug up a clutch of offensive tweets with some (admittedly pretty rotten) jokes that he had already apologised for, but had left undeleted.
The resultant storm in a teacup ended with the director fired by Marvel from the in-development Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. A campaign led by the cast of that film – and a general sense that things had been deliberately blown wildly out of proportion by some of the worst people on Earth – meant that, by March the following year, he had been rehired. In that time, however, the company’s Distinguished Competition had stepped in and made Gunn an offer. Effectively: here’s the DC universe. What do you want to do with it?
His answer was surprising, but typically Gunnish. “I turned them all down except for Suicide Squad, I guess,” he laughs when SFX asks if he’d consider tackling any other characters. “There were various ideas that excited me and as opposed to just saying yes to one of them, I took a month or so and I just started to write. Every day, I wrote a different idea and I kept writing and it just so happened that I was very excited about Suicide Squad, because I loved the comics as a kid.”
RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE
Another Suicide Squad movie was to be expected, of course. David Ayer’s 2016 film starred Will Smith and Jared Leto, introduced Margot Robbie’s franchise-stealing Harley Quinn and took a tasty $746.8 million worldwide. But it was also widely criticised, with almost unanimously poor reviews and a mostly negative fan reaction. Ayer himself has since suggested that studio cuts turned it into a very different film from the one he had shot, though calls for the alleged “Ayer Cut” to be released have been, so far, ignored.
" I was very excited about Suicide Squad, because I loved the comics as a kid "
The Suicide Squad, then, is a fresh start, neither a straight-up sequel nor a reboot. Smith and Leto are both out. Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney and Viola Davis are back, reprising their roles. And Idris Elba plays a new lead, conflicted assassin Bloodsport. Gunn says that he wanted to make something that stood apart from other superhero films, something that would hark back to the comic’s late ’80s John Ostrander-penned glory years – and that meant looking to another genre for inspiration.