Originally published December 13, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
Suicide Squad Extended Cut, 2016.
Written and Directed by David Ayer.
Starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Jai Courtney, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Cara Delevingne, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jay Hernandez, Adam Beach, Jim Parrack, Ben Affleck, Karen Fukuhara, Common, Ike Barinholtz and Scott Eastwood.
SYNOPSIS:
It feels good to be bad… Assemble a team of the world’s most dangerous, incarcerated Super Villains, provide them with the most powerful arsenal at the government’s disposal, and send them off on a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. U.S. intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do. However, once they realize they weren’t picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it’s every man for himself?
I had high hopes for Suicide Squad as a DCEU savior after the critical drubbing of Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. David Ayer would be the rogue director to bring something new and exciting to the DC universe with his movie about bad guys being good guys fighting bad guys. Once the movie hit theaters and the bad reviews started to come in, we started to hear about conflicting visions for the movie and different cuts, so it was exciting to hear that there would be an extended cut of the movie released. Perhaps we would see all that footage of the Joker that Jared Leto said was left on the cutting room floor and that we saw in the trailers and promotional materials, but never saw in the film. My great hope was that the extended cut would do for Suicide Squad what the Ultimate Edition did for Batman v Superman – make it a more complete movie. Snyder said that the version of his movie that went into theaters was not his vision of what the movie should have been, but Ayer went on the record to say that the cut of Suicide Squad that went into theaters WAS his version, so I knew the extended cut would not be the band-aid on the movie I had hoped for, but I was still curious as to how it changed the movie.
Suicide Squad is a film that starts out with a lot of glitz and glam and rock music to introduce the characters and set the story up, but once we get into the team actually assembling and going on their first mission, the pace slows way down. It seems like it takes forever to actually get to the battle at the end with Enchantress and Incubus and the extended cut only exacerbates this. I appreciated seeing some of the characters get more fleshed out, like Deadshot, Joker, Katana, Rick Flagg and probably the person most benefiting from the extended cut – Harley Quinn. We see some longer scenes between her and the Joker where we start to see just how complicated their relationship is and how much the Joker struggles with this woman who is crazy in love with him, but he’s not quite sure if he’s in love with her too. Ultimately, if most of that extra Joker footage was not in the extended cut, then it’s probably going to remain unseen. We also see more interaction between Harley and the other Suicide Squad members where she pulls out some of that psychology training and gets into their heads a little bit. It’s good character development, but at the expense of slowing a slow movie down even more.
There is more to Rick Flagg’s story in an extended bar scene and we get a small glimpse into Katana’s world in these extra scenes, but it doesn’t fix or clarify plot holes. It doesn’t change the fact that WB marketed this as a Joker film when he only has ten minutes of screen-time and is not the main villain. It doesn’t change the fact that it seems like it takes them three days to get to the fight with Enchantress, only to have it last five minutes (and really, how long was she going to stand there doing that weird dance keeping all that metal up in the air?).
In the end, the extended cut did make for better character development, but it did not make the film more complete. It does not fix problems of pacing, plot inconsistency and mismarketing that plagued the theatrical release. The special features are interesting, especially the gag reel and if you are a big fan of anything DC, you will probably buy this, but I won’t be spending my money. Perhaps some day we’ll get a Director’s Abbreviated Cut? One can only hope. The Suicide Squad Extended Cut Blu-Ray/DVD is available now.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Tai Freligh is a Los Angeles based writer and can be followed on Twitter.
