10 Wild Ideas For The Perfect Suicide Squad 2

10. The Suicide Squad Is Not A Superhero Team

Yes, it’s set in the DC universe mainstream continuity, sharing a universe with some of popular culture’s most iconic superheroes - but Suicide Squad is not a superhero property and never has been.

It’s not even a superhero movie that subverts the genre to incorporate tropes from another genre, like Logan did with the western or the upcoming New Mutants supposedly does with horror. It’s the other way around.

The Task Force X conceit revolves around the use of incarcerated supervillains - costumed criminals, some with powers, some without - as black ops agents for the United States government. Superheroes only appear here through association: there are cops in The Usual Suspects, but it’s not a cop movie.

Suicide Squad is an espionage concept: a political spy thriller that riffs on superhero tropes. While John Ostrander’s 1987-1992 run of the comic book occasionally incorporated magic and alien worlds, it was heavily grounded in realpolitik, realistic geopolitical structures and hard-nosed tradecraft.

There were stories detailing disastrous covert missions overseas; the different cultural imperatives that inform how foreign powers would view superpowered agents; the way in which politics at home would affect interagency intelligence work; the dynamics that are called into play when criminals are tasked with taking down terrorists.

If a Suicide Squad movie doesn’t begin with this fundamental premise, it’s not a Suicide Squad movie.