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

4. Joker & Harley's Relationship Wasn't Convincing

Suicide Squad Movie Harley Joker Robbie Leto
Warner Bros. Pictures

Harley and Joker's twisted romance was one of Suicide Squad's biggest selling points; after all, it's a relationship we've never seen play out on the big screen before. And while there were a couple of standout moments, the pieces never really gelled, and it came off as more than a little bit forced.

To be fair, it's clear that a lot of this material was cut out - the film's trailers are proof of that. Still, that appreciation doesn't stop the subplot from being any less convoluted; we don't really understand why Harley is so infatuated with Joker other than that the script says so, and the characters seem to be riding on their comic-book history for their on-screen love story to make sense.

Case in point; we see the pair sat at a table, with Dr Harleen Quinzel questioning a restrained Joker. Joker asks her to deliver him a machine gun, and the scene cuts to a shot of those guns in action. Shouldn't there be a scene in between those two that shows Harley falling under his spell and being driven to retrieve the weapon for him?

Well, yes. And there is! We've seen leaked set videos of Harleen Quinzel holding the clown at gunpoint before he talks her out of it, and the trailers showed shots of the psychiatrist riding a motorcycle, chasing down the Joker's sports car. Adding this footage back in could make an unconvincing relationship a lot more coherent, filling in some of the blanks the theatrical cut mistakenly left us to decipher.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!