A Deep Dive Into The Extended Cut of 2016’s SUICIDE SQUAD
A profane look back on the few strengths, and many failings, of David Ayer’s studio-corrupted entry into the DCEU — a box office hit that soured into a punchline.
“We weren’t picked to succeed. You know that, right? We were all chosen to fail.”
“Yeah, I know that. Worst part of it is, they’re going to blame us for the whole thing. And they can’t have people knowing the truth. We’re the patsies. The cover up. Don’t forget… we’re the bad guys.”
EXTENDED CUT (but crucially, not the fabled “Ayer Cut”).
The following is a typed-out transcription and expansion of the handwritten notes I took during this particular viewing of Suicide Squad — my second watch of it overall since originally seeing it in cinemas five years ago, and my first watch of the quote-unquote “Extended Cut” (which, SPOILER ALERT, fixes none of the film’s unfixably bone-deep problems) — in preparation for soon after watching James Gunn’s definite article-enhanced THE Suicide Squad. Occasionally, these notes will be interspersed with addendums and corrections to my haphazard scribblings. Preface is now over.
• Black Site what?? Sorry, I didn’t get time to read your fleeting small black text overlaid a dark background. Editing starting off strong right out of the gate.
• Needle drop #1: ‘House of the Rising Sun’ — because we’re beginning in a place located in Louisiana, so let’s use a famous song whose opening lyric is “There is a house in New Orleans”, and that’s about the only relevance the song has to what’s going on right now. Also, considering the way the introductions to each character will shortly proceed along the way, I guess this also serves as a song for Will Smith’s Floyd Lawton?
• Ike Barinholtz’s asshole prison guard, Griggs — promptly set up as a villain for Floyd (and basically all the other squad members) to get revenge on later for his deplorable actions towards them, only to eventually disappear entirely from the movie almost halfway through, with no payoff to his character facing any comeuppance, thus rendering his inclusion in the plot completely pointless. (I believe I wrote a variation of that sentiment multiple times in my notes later on.)
A victim of Ayer only having six weeks to write his screenplay, and not having time to tidy up these jaggy offshoots of plot, or a victim of the reshoots, and/or overabundance of editors chopping the film to pieces? Who knows?
• Needle drop #2: ‘You Don’t Own Me’ — the unofficial theme song for Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn upon her introduction¹, used because it was in the trailers, and it also shows nobody owns Harley, or tells her what to do…
…except Joker, because at this point in her character’s development, she remains wholly toxically beholden to that creepy edgelord douchebag, so right now that song’s substance holds no water with regards to accurately describing her.
¹ (So much so that Daniel Pemberton would later base his entire score for Birds of Prey around emulating and interpolating the song into the very fabric of his soundtrack.)
• Who is choosing and playing these songs into each prisoner’s cells? And why?
• Why exactly does Harley run headfirst into the bars of her cell again, immediately after being electrified by them? Is it to deliberately knock herself out to stop reliving the memories of Griggs’ infliction of torture on her, as the editing would make it seem? It’s hard to tell with this movie sometimes when a point is being made deliberately, or accidentally, because the editing is just so slipshod.
• Needle drop #3: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ — the song to introduce Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller. Because she’s the devil. D’YA GEDDIT?????
• Here comes the infamous deluge of expositional character intros, which last for almost exactly 15 minutes, starting at around the 00:05:00 minute mark, and ending at about the 00:20:00 minute mark.
• I still like Roman Vasyanov’s cinematography, with the widescreen anamorphic of it all. It’s a subjective taste sort of thing, but for me, I find that that particular shooting format makes images look just that much more cinematic. What fatally undermines the cinematography is that goddamn murkily dark colour grading.
• I also still like Steven Price’s score. It’s one of the best things to have come out of the whole film, post-mortem. Granted, it’s not on the level of his work on Gravity, but whatever.
[END OF PAGE 1 OF NOTES.]
[START OF PAGE 2.]
• Needle drop #4 (I think? At this point, I stopped bothering to keep track, as it was all just wall-to-wall source music jammed in with zero care, consideration, or curation): ‘Super Freak’ ² — because Harley, right, “she’s a super freak, super freak, she’s super freaky”, innit?!
God.
² (Hey, remember that time in the 90's when Rick James and his girlfriend held a woman hostage for six days while they were on a cocaine binge, assaulting her in a multitude of horrific ways, and then while on bail for that incident he was arrested for, he and his girlfriend then beat up and kidnapped another woman for 20 hours? If you didn’t know, now you know.)
• If David Ayer didn’t have a perpetual hard-on for tattoo- and grill-heavy gang imagery, Jared Leto’s Joker might have been somewhat as frightening, unsettling, and intimidating as Zack Snyder later successfully made him be in The Snyder Cut’s epilogue of Justice League. But here, Leto is a joke… and not the right kind of joke appropriate to his character, either.
• A throwaway bit of exposition that comes and goes faster than your brain can process amongst the frenetic editing:
So… during her time treating Joker when she was still Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Harley apparently erased Joker’s memory?
From what, to what?
(ADDENDUM: As it turns out, this piece of information wasn’t present in the theatrical cut, which is why I couldn’t recall hearing it before.)
• This fucking editing in the transitions. It’s like one of those TikTok filters used by cringey dudebros eye-fucking their cameras while lip-syncing to dialogue from Riverdale or something.
• “The itch in my crotch”? Fuck you, and fuck off.
• “HUNKA HUNKA!” Christ. I realise now that the voice Leto’s putting on means he must have decided to channel 1990’s era Jim Carrey, and… NO. Absolutely not. I reject it like a mismatched donor organ. Now get it away from me.
• Jai Courtney’s Boomerang has a fetish for pink unicorns. Maybe it’s a comics thing, or sheer coincidence, or maybe even flat-out copying, but… gee, Deadpool much?
(At least Deadpool had the R rating to actually show, not tell this information/running gag.)
• Per Amanda Waller, Boomerang “tangled with a metahuman, and lived to talk about it” (with said metahuman being Ezra Miller’s cameoing Flash)? And that qualifies Boomerang to face off against the next hypothetical evil Superman, or this film’s antagonist of the Enchantress? How?
• Killer Croc’s story feels like something greater could’ve been done with it. Something poignant that made you sympathise with this guy who got dealt a terrible hand by life, and responded by becoming the monster the world saw him as. (You know, the kind of thing James Gunn could do in his sleep.) But either it got left on the cutting room floor, or it was never there to begin with.
[END OF PAGE 2.]
[START OF PAGE 3.]
• You thought the intros were done? 19 minutes in, and NOPE.
• “Fluoride in our water” is comparable to anthrax? Is Ayer a disciple of Alex Jones? Does he believe the chemicals in the water are turning the friggin’ frogs gay?
• For what it’s worth, I do like Ayer (and his creative team)’s style in depicting the look of the supernatural stuff³, and if he made a straight-up horror movie that looked akin to the imagery of the Enchantress’ fingers interlocking beneath June Moon’s fingers as she possesses her, I’d be at the very least interested to see what he did with that.
³ (Ditto with the look of Bright, which was otherwise let down by its staggeringly stupid story, both whichever parts were Max Landis’, and whichever were Ayer’s additions and rewrites. Incidentally: fuck Max Landis.)
• Random second quick cutaway barely establishing the existence of Enchantress’ brother (the first cutaway happening in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it capacity during an earlier quickfire montage). Still isn’t enough to properly set up this key component to the plot that otherwise comes out of nowhere.
• Cara Delevingne’s acting here? Oof. Not great. (Even in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, she was better than this.)
• Amanda Waller, as written here, is just stupid. Evil, and stupid. (The worst combination of character traits, in fiction and real life.)
• HARLEY: “Are you the devil?”
WALLER: “Maybe.”
Well, there’s your justification for the earlier ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ inclusion, I guess.
• DIABLO: “I’m gonna die in peace before I raise my fists again.”
Hey, a good line is a good line.
• Whether it’s because of the lousy dialogue he’s saddled with, the fact he later has to shout a lot of it over the noise of helicopter blades, or because I’ve seen his scenes memed on so many times in countless takedown video essays about this movie’s awfulness in the intervening years… whatever it is, Joel Kinnaman’s voice for Flag just really annoys the heck out of me in these scenes.
• A “clear my browser history” joke? In 2016 (now 2021)?
• Needle drop alert! Hey, here’s a clever idea — let’s use Kanye West’s ‘Black Skinhead’ for a scene featuring Will Smith, who’s a Black man seen here with a shaved head! GENIUS!! WOWWWW!!!!!!
[END OF PAGE 3.]
[START OF PAGE 4.]
• Kuleshov Effect-ively cutting from a close-up of Waller, to a close-up of Joker, basically implies that they’re comparably evil. Clever, or forced?
• Leto’s cat-like purring. Fucking hell.
• Wait… was that in the theatrical cut?⁴
⁴ (Referring here to a moment where Enchantress disorients and distresses Flag by showing him a vision of him being beside June as she dies in a hospital bed, after doctors and nurses fail to resuscitate her. I checked against my memory, and it would seem this was indeed in the theatrical cut, and I forgot.)
• So she (Enchantress) can work without her heart (with the help of her brother’s sorcery, and as long as he’s alive)? Well, which is it — does having control of her heart help in killing her, or doesn’t it? Was this setup ever as important as the emphasis placed on it?
• SKY BEAM!!!!!! (The classic 2010’s CBM trope that was once so inescapable.)
• ‘Seven Nation Army’ playing over the scene where the squad — composed of seven members (not including Slipknot, because c’mon) — is assembled like an army? Your music supervisors are basic.
• “I want to hear you tell a joke when no one’s laughing in the background.”
(Written in response to a scene of allegedly humorous banter that had no real jokes, and wasn’t at all funny, and nobody was laughing, so my brain filled the vacuum with a relevant Bo Burnham quote.)
• Slipknot. (“The man who can climb anything.”) So much of a joke, his mere existence is a meme in and of itself.
• Eminem? ‘Without Me’? Playing over the squad getting their gear on, because “this looks like a job for me”?
COME ON. TRY. A LITTLE EFFORT IS ALL I ASK.
[END OF PAGE 4.]
[START OF PAGE 5.]
• Set up Boomerang hiding the stuffed unicorn in his left inside jacket pocket; doesn’t follow through on it, as will be seen later. Continuity who?
• Poor Margot/Harley, having to be subject to some of the most flagrant and skeevy and entirely unnecessary examples of the male gaze ever seen in cinematic history.
(The slow, leering pan of the camera up her body while she’s putting her clothes on, in a shot populated completely by men in the rest of the frame, and which is filmed by a male cinematographer, and a male director, for no other purpose than to look at Margot Robbie wearing as little clothing as she and the rating will permit. You could write a whole fucking dissertation on this moment alone, and somebody probably has by this point in time. Especially post-Birds of Prey and THE Suicide Squad.)
• And in this exchange between Deadshot and Diablo, we get some of Ayer’s trademark cringey usage of racially-tinged lingo that will pervade a sizeable chunk of the dialogue moving forward (which can be said for a lot of his movies, really).
e.g. Here we have Floyd pointedly using the word “ese” when referring to Diablo, while the latter replies with a sentence ending in “homes”. None of this sounds natural, mind you; it just sounds like a white guy (which Ayer is) writing what he believes these characters would talk like.
More on this later…
• “What, we some kind of… suicide squad?”
In the words of Peter Griffin: AH. AH, HE SAID IT, HE SAID IT! AH, AH, THERE IT IS, THERE IT IS!
• It probably goes without saying, but Katana is so much more interesting than this film shows. Like the concept of the Suicide Squad itself, both things were done a lot better in Arrow.
• If Ayer wrote these jokes, I think his funny bone is broken.⁵
⁵ (Though to be fair, who knows how many of these jokes were the product of the reshoots attempting to funny up the tone of the movie. Maybe these jokes don’t accurately represent Ayer’s sense of humour in real life? Maybe he intentionally made the jokes unfunny as a kind of “fuck you” to Warner Brothers for tampering with his original vision? Or maybe — taking into account everything he’s stated he’s gone through in his life before becoming a filmmaker — he’s been through too much darkness and horror for him to have as robust a sense of humour as we may want? I don’t know, I’m just wildly speculating about things I have no idea about, and am likewise not qualified to speculate on, because I’m an asshole.)
• Waller dispatches the squad to save her own skin. She undermines her villainy with her idiocy.
• Bye bye, Slipknot.
• A “killer app” joke? In 2016, let alone 2021?
Margot must’ve inwardly cringed as hard as Ray Fisher later did when he was forced to say “boo-yah” by Joss Whedon during the Justice League reshoots.
Actually, no, I take that back. Fisher definitely cringed harder…
• Thank fuck Birds of Prey made Harley better than this movie made her out to be.
[END OF PAGE 5.]
[START OF PAGE 6.]
• Jay Hernandez’s Diablo is the most interesting character, and he is WASTED.⁶
#ReleaseTheAyerCut for Diablo staying alive in DCEU canon!!
⁶ (I specifically underlined this word in my notes for extra emphasis.)
• At least Karen Fukuhara is in The Boys now, where she cannot possibly be as underused as she is in this film.
• Hey, uh… you forgot to colour correct your slow-motion shot of the bullet casings raining on the ground. It, uh, doesn’t match the rest of the footage surrounding it? Guys? Hello…?
• Where did Boomerang get his can of beer from? Where did it go in his next shot? Visual gags need some sense of continuity too, y’know!⁷
⁷ (In retrospect, this was an unfair and inaccurate note. Ignore it, I was just being petty.)
• Smith’s Deadshot single-handedly taking out the onslaught of Enchantress’ blobheads is still a pretty cool sequence.
• Did you really have to have Margot bend over from that camera angle? What purpose did it serve beyond generating fanboy fap material at Margot’s expense?
• Margot’s Aussie accent slipped through mightily in this (extended cut exclusive) flashback.
• JOKER: [*claps*] “I’m an idea!”
Subtlety much?
• Gratuitous Harley butt shot #2, maybe #3…
[END OF PAGE 6.]
[START OF PAGE 7.]
• KATANA: [*removing her mask to stare directly at Harley, and speaking in English*] “I am not hiding.”
A nice little Katana moment not in the theatrical cut.
• DEADSHOT: “If they don’t blow our heads off, we’ll have to fight our way out of this city. I need you to play nice with the other children.”
HARLEY: “And quietly return to my cage. Sure, okay. Hey, that’s okay. Sell out, I get it. Like you. I know how the world works, okay?”
ME: [*compulsively quoting Bo Burnham yet again*] “Thaaaaaaat is how the world woooooorks!”
• DEADSHOT: “I don’t like this, Flag.”
That’s a quote that’s crying out for the meme treatment. Like a photoshop job of Will Smith saying that line, only you remove the comma, and you have him looking at a flag with, like, a swastika on it, thus making him say, “I don’t like this flag.” Something like that.
• That blobhead’s knife should have stabbed through Boomerang’s jacket, and into the well-established unicorn plushie he’d twice been seen to have stashed there. But instead, Boomerang pulls out the knife, which has been plunged into… a concealed stack of cash?
Was this a deliberate joke subverting the expectations the film had been building up, or is this an actual mistake in continuity that happened in the chaos of the reshoots and the editing?
We may never know.
• The lacklustre line “You don’t stand for shit, you ain’t shit” only serves to remind me of a similar, yet infinitely better line, in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, courtesy of Scott Glenn saying:
“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
And sure, for all I know, the latter may be an age-old aphorism that predates either movie by god-knows-how-long, but it’s still more appealing and meaningful than Ayer’s street-ification of the saying’s sentiment.
• A cardio joke? In 2016?
Come on now.
• A Jim Carrey voice, and a Macauley Culkin face =/= a Joker.
Or at least, not a Joker befitting the tone this movie was going for.
Maybe in Teen Titans Go!, but even then that’s a big maybe.
• WALLER: “Admit it, Rick. I was right.”
YOU WERE RIGHT?! In what remote way, in what universe, by what possible metric, were you right?! ⁸
⁸ (In this film, with this version of Amanda Waller as she is written, let me remind you that she created the threat of the Enchantress, she didn’t in any way lock away the statue of Enchantress’ brother to keep them separated, she got herself trapped in Midway City because of the chaos her incompetence caused, and she had her assembled black ops team of criminals brought out solely to rescue her dumb ass, without any thought or care as to how Enchantress would be stopped once Waller was evacuated.
To play devil’s advocate, I can see the potential argument that maybe this story’s depiction of catastrophic sociopathic stupidity on a governmental level has inadvertently been bolstered by the Trump administration’s time in office that happened shortly after this movie came out, and that maybe you can say this film is making a point by having Waller be so contemptibly amoral and moronic, all with the full backing of the American government, and military intelligence.
But at this point in the movie, I find that notion extremely hard to swallow.)
• Two characters have now said the phrase “That’s gangster” in response to somebody saying or doing something supposedly badass.
Change the record, Ayer.
[END OF PAGE 7.]
[START OF PAGE 8.]
• Killer Croc’s voice is so unintelligible beneath the slathering of post-production effects added to his speech, that I barely understand half of what he’s saying at any given time. The prosthetics caked over Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s face make lip-reading an impossibility too, so without subtitles, comprehending KC’s dialogue is practically a lost cause.
Akinnuoye-Agbaje deserved so much better than this. I can’t decide if this is worse than, or on par with, him getting killed off on Lost. (It’s not exactly coincidental that Mr. Eko dying was in the last episode I saw before I abandoned the show entirely back in the day.)
• “Aw, she dead.”
Okay, Smith’s delivery of that line got a little chuckle out of me, I’ll admit.
• “Grape soda, and a bearskin rug”? This Joker is not a Joker who fucks. He’s a fucking incel at best.
• Again, Waller — how did you expect to escape? By getting in a helicopter and flying away, as if the big godlike monsters will give you a free pass from the city?
This version of Waller really is one of the dumbest fucking characters in movie history. (Might the Ayer Cut do anything to remedy this?)
• Only through the strength of Margot Robbie’s performance, and Steven Price’s score, does this moment of her grief over Joker’s “loss” (hah, as if) have any weight to it.
• Why would Flag, even as blinded by his love for June as he is, ever think the Enchantress would have ever gone along with any plan anyway? (He’s only beaten in his dumbness by Waller.)
[END OF PAGE 8.]
[START OF PAGE 9.]
• And now the bar scene. The only fully good scene in the whole movie.
• Were all of Katana’s English lines completely cut from the theatrical version?⁹
⁹ (Yes. Yes, they were.)
• Hey, remember that spiel I went on earlier about the racially-charged asides in the dialogue that Ayer felt compelled to include?
An extended cut moment of that comes in the form of Harley, whilst serving drinks behind the bar, asking Katana: “Ninja, you want some sake?” Katana replies in English that she wants whiskey. Roll snare drum.
• Post-bar scene, the film actually feels like it coheres and focuses into an actual… well, film. With stakes, and pacing, and a mission that generally makes sense.
Took it long enough.
• An extended cut bonus line from Flag, talking to Floyd:
FLAG: “I thought love was bullshit. Getting serious, desire, mutual benefit, whatever. I mean, I get that, but… actual love? I mean, I rated that with UFOs. A lot of believers, no proof. And then I met June.”
A good line is a good line, and this one is one I think deserves highlighting.
• The creative decision to have Enchantress belly dance? Silly.
• “I’ve been waiting for you all night. Come on out, I won’t bite.”
Since when was Enchantress into rhyme?
• I already made this joke 5 years ago, but still:
Harley’s dream is to have a Wolf of Wall Street/American Psycho crossover, with her as Naomi, and Joker as Paul Allen?
• DIABLO: “I already lost one family, I ain’t about to lose another.”
Suffice it to say, this was NOT. EARNED.
• BIG QUESTION: What changed along the way that made Diablo die in this version, but survive in the ostensible Ayer Cut pre-reshoots?
[END OF PAGE 9.]
[START OF PAGE 10 — THE LAST PAGE.]
• I do not remember Enchantress engaging in sword-based hand-to-hand combat with the squad.
• Don’t ever forget the time Enchantress — an ancient witch with mystical godlike powers — literally kicked and cunt-punted Harley as a fighting move, like some down-and-dirty bar brawl.
• Okay, for real, who is the Enchantress’ voice? It’s bugging me how much I recognise it.¹⁰
¹⁰ (From what I could gather afterwards, it doesn’t seem(??) as if they got a different actress to talk over Delevingne in Enchantress mode, but may have instead just taken her real voice, and lowered it down to a deeper pitch. If that’s the case, it makes her sound a bit like Cate Blanchett doing her Galadriel voice in Lord of the Rings.)
• Flag sacrifices his love with June in order to kill Enchantress by crushing her heart… and June still survives anyway, rendering the established stakes almost wholly pointless.
• Almost as big a waste of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as the film Bohemian Rhapsody.
• Roll credits.
• At least the titles’ visuals are well designed. What can I say? I’m a man of simple pleasures, and I like me a good titles sequence.
• Edited by John Gilroy… and Lee Smith… and Michael Tronick, and Rob Schlegal, and Geoffrey O’Brien, and Kevin Hickman, and Joel Salsburey, and Eugene Fillios.
EIGHT EDITORS.
EIGHT!
Even Terrence Malick would say that was overkill!
• Ugh. Imagine Dragons. Ugh.
***
FINAL VERDICT:
While Suicide Squad (2016) may be an unholy mess, and I may find it to be unengaging, misguided, mediocre, frustrating, and frequently cringe-inducing…
…I no longer think it’s the worst DCEU film anymore, surprisingly enough.
That dubious accolade now falls to the 2017 theatrical cut of Justice League, which when compared to 2021's Zack Snyder’s Justice League, highlights all of the myriad, infinitesimal ways that Warner Brothers and Joss Whedon desecrated, and demonstrably destroyed Snyder’s vision to make a seemingly deliberately inferior product. Justice League (2017) is compromised, ugly, condescending, inexcusable, perplexing, creatively bankrupt trash.
Suicide Squad (2016) is also compromised and ugly, but you can at least detect that there was a singular vision guiding the decisions behind the way the film looks, and feels, and operates. It may not be a vision everyone likes, but in spite of how much of it got stripped away and rewritten and reshot by order of a panicky Warner Brothers, the film does still contain a decent percentage of recognisable individuality from Ayer’s creative perspective. Justice League (2017) is nothing more than a soulless corporate product made by everyone and no-one, cynically shat out into theatres without a care for the fans it was supposedly made for, a $300 million studio expense that looks like something cheaper and cruder than a failed CW pilot.
Suicide Squad (2016) retains some small shred of credibility.
Justice League (2017) has none.
Originally published at https://letterboxd.com.
