WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Suicide Squad, now in theaters and on HBO Max.
Unlike the 2016 Suicide Squad movie, which only killed off minor members of Task Force X, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad makes good on the premise that the supervillains/anti-heroes assembled by Amanda Waller are truly expendable. The movie does so quickly -- the majority of the Squad's death count builds up before the opening credits have even begun -- as the stakes are quickly established.
The believability of those stakes allows the movie to sneak in a couple of effectively surprising fake-outs amidst the actual deaths. The Suicide Squad's ultimate body count includes seven official members of Task Force X and one close companion/enemy, not to mention countless soldiers, politicians and innocent civilians of Corto Maltese.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article has been updated to reflect comments by writer/director James Gunn about the fate of T.D.K., played by Nathan Fillion.
Of the team Waller sends to Corto Maltese in The Suicide Squad's opening scenes, only three members survive the initial beach invasion: Rick Flag, Harley Quinn and one major fake-out death. After the team arrives on the beach, Blackguard is the first to die when he's uncovered as a traitor. The Task Force X victims in the ensuing shoot-out are the returning Suicide Squad character Captain Boomerang, the alien Mongol, and Javelin, who grants his namesake weapon to Harley Quinn moments before he croaks.
Savant, the first character introduced in the film, tries to swim away from the carnage, which only leads to him having the most gruesome death of the bunch as Waller flips the switch for the bomb in his skull and blows up his skull. A bird of the same species that he killed in prison then feasts on his flesh. His blood leaks out into the water to form the words "Warner Bros. Pictures presents," starting off an opening credits montage set to the song "People Who Died" by The Jim Carroll Band. And at that point, it's revealed that the whole team was a distraction so the main group of Bloodsport, Peacemaker, Ratcatcher II, Polka-Dot Man and King Shark could arrive in secret.
The Thinker isn't sent as part of Task Force X, but he is an important contact who is apprehended by and forced to tag along with the Suicide Squad for a good chunk of the film and meets an appropriately gruesome end. He was a top scientist involved in Project Starfish, a top-secret American-backed series of experiments on the alien kaiju Starro the Conqueror and countless unwitting human victims at the Jotunheim prison. One of the most purely unsympathetic of the various supervillains in The Suicide Squad, it's satisfying when Starro rips him apart and splatters his body against a window.
Significantly changed from his characterization in the first Suicide Squad, Rick Flag is by far one of the new film's most moral characters (relatively speaking, of course). When the military veteran and ARGUS member learns the truth about Project Starfish, his ideals compel him to want to leak the files to the world. The jingoistic Peacemaker disagrees, murdering Flag in a horrifying fashion by slicing his heart in two with a broken tile. Peacemaker threatens to kill Ratcatcher II over this as well, but thankfully, Bloodsport stops Peacemaker.
Polka-Dot Man's death is something many fans were calling from the trailers, predicting the line "I'm a superhero" would be his last words. Sure enough, his "I'm a superhero" moment is his last, but the circumstances of his death are entertaining nonetheless. Polka-Dot Man only kills people when he imagines them as his mother, an abusive scientist who experimented on him as a kid to try to turn him into a superhero with grotesque polka-dot powers. In the climactic fight against Starro, he imagines the starfish alien as a giant version of his mother and delivers a powerful polka-dot blast to one of its limbs. This is what makes him finally feel heroic, but the celebration doesn't last long as Starro quickly squashes him.
Initially, Weasel appears to be the first major death in The Suicide Squad, doomed even before he reaches the beach of Corto Maltese. The child-killing creature is the first to jump out of Task Force X's plane into the ocean, but nobody checked to find out if the strange beast could swim. Weasel flails around in the ocean drowning; his body is dragged up to the shore but he shows no signs of waking up. This all turns out to be misleading, however, as in the first scene after the ending title card but before the credits, Weasel coughs up the water in his throat and walks away on the beach seemingly unscathed by the whole experience. Given Weasel's whole presence is one big inexplicable joke, it makes sense to use him for a fake-out.
If you didn't sit through the credits of The Suicide Squad, you might be under the impression that Peacemaker is actually dead. Falling somewhere between John Walker and Homelander, he ends up being one of The Suicide Squad's most threatening antagonists, and being killed by Bloodsport by means of Chekov's gun with smaller bullets would have made for a fitting end. Yes, a Peacemaker solo series for HBO Max has already been filmed, but anyone who saw Avengers: Endgame before Black Widow knows that characters can die in cinematic universes before getting their own movies.
The post-credits scene, however, reveals that Peacemaker is now in the hospital, his body retrieved by ARGUS and his death narrowly averted. When one agent asks why they would even bother trying to save Peacemaker, another agent responds that they need him around to "save the fu**ing world." Thus, The Suicide Squad sets up the Peacemaker series not as a prequel, but as a sequel.
To see which characters make it out of James Gunn's film alive, The Suicide Squad is now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.
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