The Suicide Squad is the DCEU's latest film. It is also the second live-action film to star this famous team of supervillains who work to receive reduced prison sentences by performing covert missions with the government's secret Task Force X (as the Suicide Squad is officially called).
The team answers to Amanda Waller, a woman every bit as merciless as any of the supercriminals she sends into the field. If anyone steps out of line, she kills them by remotely detonating a bomb she has had surgically implanted into their heads. But as the new movie makes clear, there are no good characters in the Suicide Squad. Then again, some are clearly much worse than others.
10 King Shark Will Eat Almost Anyone
King Shark (AKA Nanaue) is a giant humanoid shark. He has multiple possible origins in the comics, but in the film, he is described as being descended from a shark god.
Nanaue has three personality traits: he is dumb, he wants to make friends, and he wants to eat people. In fact, he wants to eat people so bad that he even tries to eat his teammates. Most of his victims are fully conscious at the time.
9 Rick Flag Voluntarily Works With Task Force X
Rick Flag is the only person in Task Force X who is not a criminal. He agrees to serve as the leader of this black ops field team out of a sense of patriotic duty.
On the one hand, it is commendable that he is willing to sacrifice so much and put himself at risk as an act of service. But the Suicide Squad does some truly terrible things, and in reality, the team's missions are not about actually promoting national security, but rather serve much darker political agendas. The rest of the Suicide Squad is a team of literal supervillains, but even they had to be coerced to commit horrifyingly violent acts in the service of their government. Flag volunteered.
8 Captain Boomerang Enjoys Murder And Psychological Terror
Captain Boomerang is one of the more noteworthy villains on the team, having been in the previous film. Beyond the DCEU depictions of the character, another version of him is also a major recurring character in the Arrowverse.
He is a professional killer who enjoys his job way too much. Captain Boomerang also spent his time aboard a plane to a mission filling his teammates with terror, psyching them out on their way to face down certain death. This is just mean-spirited and cruel.
7 Bloodsport Is A Professional Killer Who Tried To Murder Superman
Bloodsport was trained from early childhood to become a killer. His father was a brutally abusive man who tortured him if he failed to live up to what was expected of him. By the time he reached adulthood, Bloodsport had little to no virtue or decency left in him. He was jailed for trying to assassinate Superman with a kryptonite bullet.
When his daughter visits him in prison, he has no idea how old the girl is and his only fatherly advice for her is that she should be smarter about stealing, as she got caught doing it. Bloodsport grows more compassionate over the course of the film, but for the most part, the only thing he knows or cares about is killing.
6 Starro Is A Mind-Controlling Alien Conqueror
Starro the Conqueror is a giant starfish from outer space. If that was not weird enough, it excretes smaller starfish copies of itself that latch onto people's faces, then takes over victims' minds, making them into slaves that serve Starro even as their memories, knowledge, and identities are absorbed by the alien.
Robbing people of their mental autonomy is obviously bad, and this level of brain death essentially kills its victims. It has afflicted thousands of victims. But even if a person wanted to argue that Starro was just following its own biological imperatives, the alien has another motivation that is also evil: it wants to conquer and dominate whole cities (and presumably, in time, the world).
5 Peacemaker Is A Nationalist Who Will Murder Anyone He Can
Peacemaker is a lot like Rick Flag, in that both believe deeply in serving their country. However, while Flag is a patriot, Peacemaker is a nationalist. The big difference is that patriots love their country, while nationalists believe their country and its citizens are better than others.
The other thing that separates these two characters is that Flag kills specifically to complete mission objectives, while Peacemaker seems to look for any justification to kill people, no matter how innocent or helpless those people are. Though he makes excused to justify this behavior, he spends much of the film actively looking for opportunities to murder innocents.
4 The Thinker Operated Project Starfish
Project Starfish was a secret weapons program run by the government of Corto Maltese. The program held the alien Starro hostage, experimenting on the creature. The site of the project, called Jotunheim, was built by Nazi scientists after World War II, then became a death camp for the dictatorship of Corto Maltese to torture its citizens.
The Thinker was in charge of operations at Project Starfish. He personally oversaw the torture and murder of uncounted innocent people. On top of that, he went out of his way to be excessively abusive for his own pleasure.
3 The Herrera Family Ran Corto Maltese As A Brutal Dictatorship
The Herrera Family were the oppressive leaders of Corto Maltese. This family of autocrats was based on an amalgamation of several historical real-world fascist governments in the Americas. Such regimes were frequently backed by the United States to promote the interests of specific corporations like United Fruit Company or to advance a very narrow cutthroat interpretation of free-market economics during the Cold War.
The Herreras worked alongside the US to oppress their own people, operating Project Starfish on behalf of the United States. They killed journalists. They killed political rivals. They even killed the families of anyone who they considered a problem. And prior to all of this, they worked with Nazi scientists.
2 The New Corto Maltese Government Is Also A Brutal Dictatorship
Early in the movie, audiences learn that the Herrera Family was killed in a political coup. They were replaced by a new dictator, Silvio Luna, who ran the country with his Major General, Mateo Suarez.
The truth is that very little of Luna's ideology is ever revealed. Autocrats can be from any ideological background. General Suarez exhibits many of the "strongman" traits associated with right-wing fascist leaders, touting hyperviolence as a form of masculinity and advocating for the extermination of those he sees as weak, useless, or just foreign. This suggests that the coup was a power grab rather than an actual political revolution. Whatever the case, both men continued to operate Project Starfish as a death camp and exterminated many of their own people.
1 Amanda Waller Is A Ruthless Militant Who Spreads Violent Imperialism
Amanda Waller is the woman in charge of Task Force X. In other words, she is the handler who oversees their missions. Nicknamed "the Wall," she is fearless, merciless, and possessed of an indomitable will, all traits that serve her well when she has to be willing to execute those under her own command.
By the end of the movie, it's clear that Waller is directly responsible for contributing to and covering up many of the human rights violations that the United States funded in Corto Maltese. The team's entire mission in the film is just to help the US save face. Waller is willing to let thousands of innocents be murdered (and potentially millions) to further the interests of US imperialism abroad. When Task Force X decides to save the lives, she tries to execute them. This brutality was completely unnecessary. It was bloodshed for the sake of ensuring she and her accomplices would not be held accountable for spilling more blood in the past.
0 Comments