We knew The Suicide Squad was going to be rated R right from the get-go, but it's probably fair to say nobody was expecting the levels of gore writer-director James Gunn was able to get away with.
For the most past, the OTT violence is reserved for the bad guys (well, the really bad guys), but there are a couple of nastier moments in there, one of which sees Task Force X take down a bunch of Sol Soria's rebel fighters in the jungle. Peacemaker (John Cena) and Bloodsport (Idris Elba) dispatch the rebels in a variety of increasingly brutal ways as they attempt to one-up each other, only to discover that they've been killing their allies.
Essentially, our "heroes" massacre the good guys!
During an interview with Variety, Gunn was asked about this sequence and revealed that he did receive some pushback from Warner Bros., and explained why he had his own "reservations" about the including the scene.
"The the stuff with Bloodsport and Peacemaker, I had a lot of reservations about. I loved the sequence. It’s funny and it goes to the heart of what the movie is about, for me, in terms of Bloodsport’s journey of starting to learn that being a man and being a leader is not synonymous with being a toxic man, and that the path forward to true manhood is through vulnerability. That [sequence] is a big part of that — just a big dick swinging contest between two people."
"But, man, even watching it the other night in the theater, that’s the one place I go, holy shit, we pushed it far," Gunn continued. "Like, it’s at the edge of where we could go with that. There were some Warner Bros. execs who brought up, “Is this the one place that we go too far?” I think that’s when I added, you know, Amanda Waller explicitly tells them to go into the camp and kill everyone. So they are following her orders, and she is in a way the antagonist in the film. So anyway, yeah, I had reservations about that.
The scene in question is ultimately played for laughs, but when you think about it, it is pretty damn dark!
What do you guys think? Did Bloodsport and Peacemaker's little display take things too far in your estimation? Drop us a comment down below.