The director of The Suicide Squad has said that he had “reservations” over one particular sequence in the film.
Anyone who’s seen The Suicide Squad – the star-studded DC superhero sequel – will know that director James Gunn isn’t afraid turn up the violence, with a number of the squad’s villains and their targets dying horrific, gory deaths.
However, Gunn has recently revealed that he was worried he’d gone too far with one of the film’s sequences – the scene in which Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and Peacemaker (John Cena) competitively massacre a platoon who turn out to be their allies.
“The stuff with Bloodsport and Peacemaker, I had a lot of reservations about,” he told Variety.
“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 path forward to true manhood is through vulnerability.
“That [sequence] is a big part of that – just a big contest between two people. But even watching it the other night in the [cinema], that’s the one place I go ‘holy shit, we pushed it far‘ – like, it’s at the edge of where we could go with that.”
He added that some Warner Bros executives were also worried about the sequence and so he added an extra line of dialogue for Viola Davis’ team boss Amanda Waller to water down the impact of their killings.
“I think that’s when I added Amanda Waller explicitly [telling] 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.”
The film, which acts as a standalone sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad, also stars Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, David Dastmalchian and Daniela Melchior as members of the titular squad, who’re sent on a mission to destroy a laboratory in Corto Maltese that is conducting experiments on Starro the Conqueror.
You can check out our full The Suicide Squad review to see what we thought of the film, or check out our guide to the post-credits scenes.