Suicide Squad's Extended Cut: 8 Problems The Movie Needs To Fix

By Danny Meegan / October 12, 2016

Blockbuster movies are incredibly expensive to produce. Once you factor in marketing, cast and crew, visual effects and reshoot costs, overall budgets can very easily outscale the 200, 300, even 400 million dollar mark - and recouping that cash is the number one goal.

So when we get an extended cut for a movie on this scale, it's usually a financial move on the part of the studio. They know it'll pique our interest and we'll be more likely to part with our cash, to get more of a movie that we loved, or a better movie than one that proved unfulfilling in cinemas.

Suicide Squad leaned toward the latter camp when it released this past August. Love it or hate it, there's no avoiding it had a handful of notable issues that prevented it from being the runaway success DC desperately needed after the reaction to Batman V Superman. The movie didn't feel fully complete or coherent, with several gaps in logic, haphazard subplots and wasted characters making for a rather unsatisfying cinematic experience.

But fortunately, the extended edition has an opportunity to fix all that. We're not expecting the studio to rectify every single complication the movie had, but if the additional 13 minutes address even one, two or half of the following issues, then Suicide Squad will be all the better for it. Here are eight problems that it needs to fix!

8. Slipknot's Lack Of Screen Time

Imagine you're actor Adam Beach and you've just signed a contract with Warner Bros to appear in Suicide Squad. The contract stipulates that your character is to die, but at least you get a cool backstory before that happens! You sit down to watch the finished cut, and then... disaster. All your scenes have been axed, and your character is reduced to a plot device to show how Rick Flag's remote explosives work.

It's pretty laughable to watch, too. This guy is introduced as a complete !*$%, (he punches someone in the face the very second he steps on-screen) but minutes later, his head's blown off, making you wonder why the filmmakers bothered to include him in the first place. If all he needs to do is die, why waste a potentially interesting character in such a brainless fashion?

Well - it's because Slipknot was originally in the film a lot more. Speaking to Empire, director David Ayer revealed that his team shot a backstory sequence for the character, and that Adam Beach dabbled in combat training to prepare for his role in the film. This means that somewhere out there, there's a good chunk of Slipknot footage just lying about, and the extended cut needs to put it back in.

For starters, it felt odd to watch every other character get a flashback sequence or flashy title animation, and Slipknot to get nothing. Because he's introduced in such a throwaway fashion, you instantly know that he's expendable, and you're just waiting for him to die instead of, you know... caring about him as a character.

We're not asking for Slipknot to avoid death - that's built directly into the film. But that death would've been a much weightier moment if the movie at least tried to make his character seem important, or interesting, or... human - and the extra footage could do just that.