Suicide Squad: all of The Joker’s deleted scenes

It’s pretty well known by now that Jared Leto’s take on The Joker got a little bit stuck in the editing suite of Suicide Squad. That a notable amount of his footage didn’t make the final cut of the film, much to the surprise and disappointment of Leto himself.

But what was missing? Well, an enterprising YouTuber by the name of RedDawnHanger77 has answered that question. They’ve used photos, footage, and conversations of other scenes that Leto featured in, to try and bridge the gap and demonstrate just how much of Leto’s Joker did end up chopped out. These are scenes, incidentally, that didn’t make it to the new extended cut of Suicide Squad.

Here’s the video…

As for that extended edition, over at Collider, the folks there have got an advanced review copy of the Suicide Squad extended edition that Warner Bros is releasing in the UK on 5th December. A digital version will be available at the end of the month in advance of that.

It’s thus gone through the disc and reported on just what you get in the extra 11 minutes of footage that have been added to the film.

It reports that the character who gets the biggest increase in screen time is Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Killer Croc, who now gets a longer introduction, and one or two more bits throughout the film.

There’s also more of Harley Quinn plotting the Squad’s escape from Rick Flag, as she includes Boomerang and Diablo in the plan that she’d previously discussed with Deadshot. Harley also gets a flashback scene with Jared Leto’s The Joker, where they have some kind of row and she tries to get him to declare his feelings for her. Finally, there’s a scene with Harley is said to try and psychoanalyze the group, too.

What we get it here is more a case of deleted scenes put back in than anything that affects the movie one way or the other. You can find Collider’s detailed report here.

Here’s a taste of one of the deleted scenes…

Here’s a trailer for the extended cut…

And here’s the box art for the new release…

Please note: we’ve moved the comments thread for Suicide Squad to here.

Suicide Squad sequel

In an interview on the promotional trail for the film, writer/director David Ayer has been nattering about where next, and the fact that the first Suicide Squad film ends with things left open. After all, we see the Joker breaking into the high security incarceration centre, to take Harley Quinn away.

“We shot that during the first week of photography”, Ayer told Collider. “I don’t want to give stuff away but it’s that anything is possible, and that’s the thing, for as much control and commend Amanda Waller has over these guys, at the end of the day they’re supervillains and they’re gonna do supervillain stuff”.

He added that “plus, the Joker/Harley relationship just seemed like the right button for the movie, it opens so many doors if another one of these were ever to turn up under a rock somewhere”.

As for a plan for Suicide Squad 2? “I don’t know, there may be a cocktail napkin with some scribbles on it somewhere”, Ayer laughed.

On the topic of follow-ups to Suicide Squad, Jared Leto has told the Toronto Sun that he’s rather keen to prolong his stay as the cinematic embodiment of the Joker.

“I hope it’s an introduction and not the end!”, he said. “Because I could easily just play the Joker a couple more times and then retire. Because it’s so fulfilling and so creative and it’s so imaginative. It’s really difficult to think about doing anything else”.

As for where else we might see his Joker? When asked about turning up in Ben Affleck’s planned standalone-ish Batman movie, Leto said “I think it would be incredible to see Batman and the Joker go head-to-head! This Batman and this Joker. I mean, I don’t know, that might be too much! But that would be fun”.

We’d suggest that announcements may be coming one way or the other once the dust has begun to settle on Suicide Squad.

Suicide Squad deleted scenes

MTV has shared a video online that features Jared Leto, Jai Courtney, Will Smith, Margot Robbie and more discussing scenes that got cut from Suicide Squad. Here it is…

Speaking of deleted scenes, a Reddit user has posted a list of scenes that were reportedly deleted from the movie during its tricky post-production and reshoot period. It would be fair to say that it’s quite a list.

Here’s are some of the highlights:

“In early cuts, the movie’s opening detailed June Moon’s possession by Enchantress in real time. Reshoots reshuffled the scene to be later in the movie in flashback form in favour of a new opening centered on Deadshot.”

“El Diablo being escorted to a training center by being placed in a tube that fills with water to quell his flames, and then unceremoniously dropped onto the ground.”

“Early interviews showed Captain Boomerang’s racism and sexism, but the movie is light on examples of such behaviour, which have apparently been deleted. Most of them were reportedly directed at Katana, to whom Boomerang is attracted to.”

“Early reports indicated more backstory for Killer Croc, revealing that he entire life as a social outcast due to his physical appearance and has convinced himself that he is beautiful in his own way. Croc crossed paths with Batman while working as muscle-for-hire for numerous Gotham’s crime bosses, while secretly planning to take over one day. There were also scenes displaying his affinity for making sculptures out of discarded materials. Aside from jokes about Croc viewing himself as ‘beautiful,’ one of these were retained in the final cut.”

“Also deleted was a scene where he becomes sick at the helicopter escort to Midway City, throws up half-digested pieces of goat, and then eats them again, disgusting the nearby Navy Seals.”

“Early cuts reportedly included a passing reference to Slipknot being serial rapist, likely to further paint him as unsympathetic to the audience ahead of his own death.”

“Extended scene of Joker interrogating Captain Griggs, including the line, “I can’t wait to show you my toys,” which was in every trailer, but was removed from the movie.”

“Joker and his men escaping after shooting up a restaurant. Harley, who is already affiliated with the Joker, follows them on a motorcycle and intercepts their car. Joker bangs his head against the glass in frustration.”

“Joker and Harley then get into a fight, which ends with Harley pointing a gun at Joker’s head. Joker sweet-talks Harley into lowering the gun, charming her, then backhands her across the face. Afterwards he sweet-talks her again and they kiss.”

“Extended Batmobile chase scene with more interaction between Joker and Harley. One of the examples, presented in all the trailers, is the Joker punching the roof of his car.”

“Extended scene of Joker breaking into the nano-bomb manufacture facility to arrange for Harley’s neck-bomb to be disabled.”

“More interactions between Harley and Boomerang. Early cuts apparently included her really disliking him despite growing affectionate to all the other members of the squad.”

“Extended bar scene with Harley taking everyone’s orders. Deadshot calls for a shot, Katana wants whiskey, Croc and Boomerang settle for beer, Harley asks Diablo wants and he prefers water which she jokes, “is a good idea.” The scene was featured in the trailers, but in the movie it cuts directly to Deadshot’s speech about them all almost pulling the mission off.”

“Removed several scenes with the Joker to repaint his relationship with Harley as more loving rather than abusive.”

“Joker and Harley get into an argument after he rescues her in the hijacked helicopter. In early cuts he reportedly pushes her out to kill her, then the helicopter gets shot down. This was apparently reworked into the helicopter getting shot down first and Joker pushing her out to save her.”

“Joker returns during the final battle in the subway station, face half-burnt from the helicopter crash, which apparently leads to a brief altercation with the Squad. He calls for Harley to escape with him but she refuses for once in order to help her friends, and the Joker escapes after throwing a live grenade at the group to cover his own escape.”

The film’s director, David Ayer, has confirmed that “there may be six or seven different versions of the film.” He told Empire that one of the alternate cuts told “the story in sequence [starting] with the arrest and Batman, and then we go to Belle Reve”.

We’ll have to wait and see whether any of these deleted scenes or alternate versions make it onto the home release.

Suicide Squad review

For the most part, the reviews for Suicide Squad have not been on the positive side. (Our own review was two-star one.) And writer/director David Ayer has taken to his Twitter feed to respond…

The translation of that quote? “I’d prefer to die standing, than to live on my knees”. 

Suicide Squad post-credits scene 

Suicide Squad has a mid-credits scene that it’s worth waiting around for. We’ve talked about it a little over in our ‘questions answered’ article.

Please note: we’ve moved the comments thread for Suicide Squad to here.

Suicide Squad trailer

Here’s all the trailers for Suicide Squad, starting with the latest one…

Thank Squad. The wait is almost over. #SuicideSquad #WBSDCC #SDCC https://t.co/S28CCS5duehttps://t.co/c3s429nFB8

— Suicide Squad (@SuicideSquadWB) July 23, 2016

Suicide Squad release date

Suicide Squad is out now, having reached UK and USA screens on August 5th 2016. The movie has been confirmed as PG-13 in the US, for “sequences of violence and action throughout, disturbing behavior, suggestive content and language”.

In the UK, though, Suicide Squad has been given a 15 certificate by the BBFC. It has earned its 15 for “sustained threat, moderate violence”.

Furthermore, it’s now confirmed that the film runs for 122 minutes and 44 seconds, and it has been passed uncut in Britain.

Suicide Squad plot

Here’s the official synopsis for Suicide Squad, which provides a teasing description of the story’s basic set-up:

“It feels good to be bad…Assemble a team of the world’s most dangerous, incarcerated Super Villains, provide them with the most powerful arsenal at the government’s disposal, and send them off on a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. U.S. intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do. However, once they realize they weren’t picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it’s every man for himself?”

You can find our speculation about the film’s plot in our trailer breakdown article and our ‘what to expect’ feature.

Please note: we’ve moved the comments thread for Suicide Squad to here.

Suicide Squad cast: Jared Leto’s Joker

Much of the press surrounding Warner Bros’ second DC movie of the year – Suicide Squad – has surrounded Jared Leto, and his particular approach to playing The Joker. There have been stories of Leto sending odd gifts to his colleagues in the cast, and staying in character once the cameras were switched off. And Leto himself has now been chatting to EW about his approach to playing the character.

“We knew we had to strike new ground”, he said, appreciating that his Joker was following the Oscar-winning take on the character from the late Heath Ledger. “There had been such great work that we knew we had to go in a different direction. So you had a kind of direction from the very beginning, knowing that you can’t go that way, so you have to head this way. That was really helpful. But the Joker is fantastic because there are no rules. The Joker operates from instinct”.

“He became a real person”, Leto continued. “I don’t know if person is the right word. I think the Joker lives in between reality and another plane. Kind of a shaman in a way. It’s a very intoxicating role to take on. You have permission to break rules and to challenge yourself and anyone around you in a really unique way”.

At first, the actor immersed himself in the source material of the character, but “at a certain point I knew I had to stop doing that. Because the Joker has been redefined many times before”.

And as for Leto’s approach on set, and those gifts to members of the cast?

“I had to be committed beyond belief. And I did what I needed to do to deliver the best I possibly could”, he said. “It’s not a part-time job. It’s immersive. It takes over your life and that’s what I needed to do for myself. Other people can show up and are genius but I did what I needed to do to deliver. And we had a good time with it. I think it was exactly what was needed for me, at least”.

Plenty of thought went into Leto’s look, too. “A lot of it has to do with creating a character with some kind of history and footprint in our world”, director David Ayer told Yahoo. “And not have this sacrosanct being outside of our continuum, our reality. If a guy like him really existed today, where would he come from? How would he do business? Who would he know? What would he look like? In my mind, I took a lot of inspiration from drug lords on Instagram. It’s a great way to understand the lifestyle of a villain”.

You can see some of that ‘drug lord’ vibe in things like Joker’s customised car and gun, for example. But what about those tattoos? 

“The tattoos tell a very specific story”, Ayer said. “And eventually people will decipher them and understand what’s going on, but obviously they’re contentious, any time you do something new it’s contentious. There’s very specific stories and easter eggs in those tattoos. And even his teeth, there’s an entire story behind that which is absolutely canon. It’s putting his history on his body. This Joker is a little more working class, who I believe could live in our world”.

Will Smith  – who plays sharp-shooting assassin Deadshot in the film – has also been publicly chatting about working with Leto on Suicide Squad. Or rather: not working with him.

“I’ve never actually met Jared Leto”, Smith told Beats 1. “We worked together for six months we’ve never exchanged a word outside of ‘action’ and ‘cut’. We’ve never said ‘hello’, we’ve never said ‘good day’.”

He added that “I’ve only ever spoken to him as Deadshot and him as the Joker. I literally have not met him yet. So, the first time I see him will be ‘hey, Jared. What’s up?'”

“Not a single word exchanged off camera. He was all in on the Joker… I’m looking forward to meeting him”, Smith added.

Suicide Squad cast

The Wolf Of Wall Street star Margot Robbie is playing Harley Quinn – Joker’s on-and-off girlfriend, and constant annoyance to Batman – in the movie. She jokingly told Cineplex that “Harley is creepy, violent, crazy – all of the things that I aspire to be!” 

She added that “no. It’s the fun of livin vicariously through someone who is doing things that I would never do in real life”.

Robbie has also been chatting about getting the look of Harley Quinn just right. She told Hello Giggles that “we tried on every variation of the costume. I cannot emphasise enough how many outfits, and how many variations of the Harley Quinn costume we tried”.

“We tried the court jester costume, we tried the corset and skirt, we tried leather pants, we tried literally every type of costume possible for her. I really love where we ended up. And who knows, maybe in the sequels we’ll go with the court jester one. I think there’s a world of possibilities”. 

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays another of the film’s villains, Killer Croc, and he’s been chatting to Coming Soon about it.

“At the time you meet him in the film, he’s a fully-fledged criminal”, Akinnuoye-Agbaje revealed. “He’s really one of the baddest criminals known to be roaming in Gotham, hence his lockup in Arkham [Asylum]. He’s tangled with the Batman and here he is amongst these other foes. He’s very much a formidable force at the time that you meet him”.

The role wasn’t the easiest for Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje to prepare for, with around five hours of prosthetic and make-up work every day. “It was something that was a challenge that I was up for, because I wanted to set a new standard for what can be do with prosthetics”.

“We could easily have CGI’d this”, he admitted, “but David [Ayer, director] was insistent on their being an actor to bring out the soul of the character”.

As for researching the role, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje went back to the comic books. “I went back to the young Waylon Jones. The animated series. I had my own take, too. I researched cannibalism. I actually went out and watched real crocodiles, too. We incorporated some of the real life fight techniques that crocodiles do when they kill their prey”.

Cara Delevingne plays Enchantress/June Moon in Suicide Squad. She chatted about the movie in an interview with W magazine. Therein, she described her initial meeting with David Ayer, when the pair met about the role.

“I met the director, David Ayer, at a hotel in London on a dark and stormy night. He didn’t tell me anything about the movie. Instead, he showed me pictures of these amazing, enlightened, powerful, but very evil women. He spoke to me about addiction and mental illness, which are things I find very, very interesting”, she recalled.

“The next time I met David was at his house in L.A. He asked me to read a scene from Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? I love that play and had acted in it at school when I was 17, so I was excited. Somehow, when we were doing the scene, I became livid. I hadn’t felt rage like that in years. And then I got the part!”

As for what happened next? Well, her preparation for the role wasn’t quite to go full Jared Leto, but she did reveal that “David asked me to go and try and find a forest and, if it was a full moon, get naked and walk through the woods with my feet in the mud, which I did. There wasn’t a full moon, but I howled like a wolf. It would have been really funny if someone had seen me”.

One person who isn’t in the film – but came pretty close – is Tom Hardy. Because of The Revenant’s notoriously difficult shoot, where weather issues caused big delays, Hardy was prevented from taking the coveted Rick Flag role in Suicide Squad. 

“Was I bummed? Of course I was. I hate fucking losing work”, he told Variety. “I kept bemoaning that they were losing me significant money on a daily basis. Actually, it was good for my character [in The Revenant]”.

The Suicide Squad role that once belonged to Hardy ended up going to Joel Kinnaman, star of the 2014 RoboCop remake. Suicide Squad also stars Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, Adam Beach as Slipknot, Jay Hernandez as El Diablo, Scott Eastwood as GQ and Ben Affleck (briefly) as Batman.

Please note: we’ve moved the comments thread for Suicide Squad to here.

The main Suicide Squad trailer has landed, in all its Bohemian Rhapsody-spewing glory. It explains the plot to us better than previous promos, as well as showcasing more characters and closer-to-being-finished special effects. All this is understandable, considering that David Ayer’s villainous super-team movie is now only a few months away (it lands on American and UK screens alike at the start of August).

Here’s everything we could deduce by breaking down the trailer shot by shot…

Is this the real life…

The trailer sets out the basics of the Suicide Squad premise very effectively. If it wasn’t clear before, these villains have been locked up for rather a long time, and they’re taking it a variety of different ways.

Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn doesn’t seem too fussed, reading what looks like a romance novel and sitting cross-legged on her bunk. Perhaps she’s convinced that the Joker – the subject of her affection, ever since she treated him in her past life as a psychotherapist – will break her out somehow.

This is one of the many shots to establish Harley as the lighter, comic relief character who – while still an indisputable criminal and utterly insane – seems to be rather at ease with her lot in life. Unlike this chap…

Will Smith’s Deadshot looks sad. Perhaps this will be the most sympathetic version of DC’s gun-toting assassin that we’ve seen so far. And that’s saying something, as the version on Arrow ended up getting close-to-chummy with the good guys and sharing important information with them. Could Smith’s Floyd Lawton be on a similar arc?

If you were wondering about his backstory, Deadshot grew up under an abusive father and accidentally shot his brother in his youth. This lead him to become a haunted, sharp-shooting assassin that never misses. Being co-opted into the Squad eventually gave him some redemption, which could be repeated in the movie.

Meanwhile, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Killer Croc is working out determinedly in a swamp-like cell. Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang seems unhinged and desperate for freedom. And Jay Hernandez’s El Diablo is staring at his own hand…

Enter Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller, the iconic DC character who acts as the brains behind the Squad and is constantly portrayed as a very strong presence (she’s even squared up to Batman in the comics)…

Here she’s explaining the basics of the plot. Those crooks you’ve just seen struggling/putting up with prison life? They’re the ‘worst of the worst,’ and Waller wants to coerce them (possibly using explosives implanted in their brains, if the comics are anything to go by) into doing the US military’s dirtiest dirty work.

Too late, my time has come…

Ah, yep, here we go. It looks like some shady surgery (implanted explosives, surely?) will be done on the Suicide Squaddies before the government can start ordering them about…

This is a frequent element of the Squad in the comics – these guys haven’t hard a change of heart and turned good, they’re helping the government on fear of death. Their reward – as well as remaining alive – is normally a reduced prison sentence.

Despite these precautions, it becomes apparent very quickly that all may not go swimmingly with this plan. That’s because Captain Boomerang – without any of his gimmick-friendly Australian projectiles to hand – suddenly whallops one of the military personnel tasked with keeping an eye on him…

This quickly sets up Boomerang as the volatile wildcard of the team. Adam Beach’s Slipknot follows his lead and whacks a different guard, suggesting a potential alliance between the pair. Harley Quinn doesn’t seem too fussed about escaping just yet, though, as she cracks wise about the voices in her head instead.

And then we’re on to the roll-call scene, ripped straight from the Guardians Of The Galaxy trailer. But instead of John C. Reilly we get RoboCop reboot star Joel Kinnaman, here playing Rick Flagg – the military general tasked with wrangling the Squad.

While Cara Delevingne wears Harry Potter glasses and looks at his hair, Flagg fills the viewer in about the villains on his new taskforce. Some of his descriptions tell us stuff that we already know, but the clarification that Delevingne’s Enchantress character is ‘possessed by a witch’ – serving to introduce a more mystical side to the DC Extended Universe – is a welcome touch.

It looks like she can rein that side of her personality in, though, as she’s been allowed to hang out with Flagg. Regardless, she looks pretty deranged in this cutaway shot…

Has the devil put aside for me?

Flagg’s soon clarifies that the mission the Squad have been selected for is a very dangerous one. In keeping with the comics, it takes place ‘somewhere very bad’ and will ‘get you killed.’ We’ve still not been given a direct explanation of their task, but now we know for sure that it’s centred around this black sludge… 

This dark substance looks like some kind of biological weapon. And various shapes around this set resemble corpses that have been consumed by it. Deadshot quickly tries to shoot it, but that won’t be enough to stop this sludge of doom. It’s clearly pretty darn strong, and can tear through motor vehicles like nobody’s business…

How on earth the Squad will manage to stop this substance remains to be seen. It doesn’t seem like brute force is the answer, and none of them seem clued-up enough to science the shit out of it. Maybe the government has already come up with an antidote to it and just needs them to get close enough to deploy it, although that’s just wild speculation on our part.

Meanwhile, Harley breaks rank, pops in a lift and waves goodbye to her reluctant teammates. Could it be that she’s off to meet The Joker upstairs? Could Jared Leto’s Clown Prince Of Crime be the man behind this terror sludge? In the narrative of the trailer, he certainly shows up very soon after Harley runs off.

‘I can’t wait to show you my toys’

Tah-dah! There he is, slapping an unfortunate fella in the face and talking about getting his ‘toys’ out. But before we can spend too much time speculating on who exactly he’s toying with (is it Scott Eastwood’s as-yet-unnamed character? Is he a hero of some sort?), the pacey editing takes us out into a corridor where these two strange-looking chaps are under fire…

Are these guys Joker’s henchmen? Are they trying to keep the Squad out of his torture chamber/play area? Or are they other members of the Squad that we don’t know about yet? And did David Ayer realise that the one on the left looks exactly like Orb from Marvel Comics? Will Warner Bros get sued?

But again, before us or Warner’s lawyers can get too worried about this, we’re quickly shown a different scene instead. The Joker, in different clothes, looking very happy about shooting someone/something up…

Where does this scene fit in? It’s unclear so far. But, seeing as Mr J is in his gladrags I’d take a stab at ‘somewhere in the third act where he’s already eluded the Squad a few times, either before or after the Batman car chase.’

Speaking of which, the Batman-chasing-the-Joker-and-Harley scene isn’t given much prominence here. But we do get one brief shot of their fancy wheels, which I’d like us all to call The Jo-Car in our heads…

Right. Best guess at the plot so far: the Squad have been sent to disarm the sludge and bring in the Joker. The Joker escapes with Harley, Batman makes a cameo, and the Squad has to regroup before a big show-down with Joker later on. It didn’t take Poirot levels of deduction to put that together, so it seems likely that there are layers of plot that we’ve not been shown yet. What’s the larger picture for the Joker, for instance? If he’s behind the sludge, how did he manage to get his hands on it and learn to control it? Maybe there’s a more powerful, scientific villain involved too.

Anyway, moving on…

‘Let’s do something fun’

Next up, Enchantress is back in a government meeting room suggesting ‘something fun.’ Does she mean ‘something fun’ in an ‘I’m going to kill you and escape’ way or a rooting tooting ‘let’s go catch that naughty Joker!’ way? It’s hard to tell. Judging by the next shot, the Joker certainly needs someone to come and ruin his fun, as Leto lies in a room of carefully-arranged weapons laughing his head off…

These, it seems fair to say, are his toys. Maybe he’ll use some of them on that bloke he was slapping earlier. Then, after a big explosion, we get a shot of Karen Fukuhara’s Katana…

I’d guess that this shot actually comes from earlier on in the film – possibly during the Squad’s first mission – as Harley is still with the gang and hasn’t yet driven off with Joker. But of course there’s no time to think about it, because the trailer throws up some explosions, Will Smith playing with a gun and El Diablo yelling.

And then, arguably the trailer’s biggest laugh – Jai Courtney having a sneaky beverage on the job. Gee, that Captain Boomerang is naughty, isn’t he?

This brief shot seems to suggests another influence from Guardians Of The Galaxy – a comedic tone to make us enjoy the company of a bunch of A-holes. The playfulness of Harley’s scenes supports this idea, too. She soon pops up again pretending to use a chain as a gun in a room of frightened people…

And soon after we get some more unexplained oddness in the form of this cute little guy…

I fully expect gun-toting panda plushes to be the big gift next Christmas. On a serious note, do you reckon it’s Joker on a costumed crime spree? Possibly. Either way, with a silly costume like this alongside heaps of dialogue jokes and Boomerang larking about, this film is shaping up to be funnier and weirder than many might have expected.

And look, there’s Scott Eastwood (on the right)…

He’s clearly a military bloke who enjoys a sideways fist-bump as much as the next guy. Dare we say that this isn’t a very big role for the star of a successful film like The Longest Ride? Perhaps there’s more to his military character than meets the eye. We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that some of the characters here might be teed up for spin-offs. Maybe he’s a superhero waiting to happen.

The editing is so quick, though, so let’s not worry about Mr Eastwood too much. Let’s go straight onto this…

Wait, what?! That yellow 1980s-movie-style explosion was a train a split-second ago. And who’s that in the funky headwear blowing it to pieces? I haven’t the foggiest. If it’s someone obvious and I’m just having a mental blank, please do plonk it in the comments. This is by far the most powerful display of superhuman abilities in the trailer (as he seems to have enabled that destruction with a hand gesture alone), so it feels like this character – whoever they are – could be very important.

And, from here, the trailer descends into quick shots that don’t make much sense without context. Here are a few that have us intrigued…

The Joker has more weird henchmen! And who is he threatening? And what does he want in this movie? Is he just an agent of chaos a la The Dark Knight or does he have a larger plan up his sleeve? It’s impossible to tell at this stage, but we look forward to finding out. I can’t help but feel that he could be in an alliance with some other villains. Weren’t there rumours of a Lex Luthor cameo at one stage?

Croc picks a fight with Katana! Like The Avengers with villains instead of heroes, we’d expect a few battles between the bad guys before they can agree to get along for the greater good. Seeing as Katana isn’t in any of the trailers all that much, perhaps she doesn’t come out on top in this bout.

This is our best look at the sludge in action. It has tentacles, which should cause trouble for the gang. Judging by the high fatality rate in the Suicide Squad comics, it seems likely that the sludge will kill at least one of them before they find a way to stop it.

Here’s more proof that Cara Delevingne doesn’t spend the whole movie in her Enchantress form. Her civilian name, pre-witch possession, is June Moone.

In the comics, June was a freelance artist who stumbled upon a witch costume – that endowed her with powers and whole new personality – at a costume party. Her debut comic christened these events as ‘The Witcheroo-Switcheroo!’, a term that may or may not feature in this dark, gritty movie.

Crikey, look! The Joker is jumping off a thing! By the looks of it, he’s trying to save Harley (which doesn’t sound like a very Joker-y thing to do, so perhaps there’s more to it than that)…

And what’s Harley doing unconscious, surrounded by this strange substance in the first place? Did someone push her in or did she jump as well? If so, was she hoping that jumping into toxic waste might make her more like her boyfriend?

Then – after a few shots of people looking cool, punching things and wagging their fingers – we get this…

Surely, this is the sludge at the height of its powers. How will they stop it? What actually is it? Dunno, on both counts. I’d maybe hazard a guess that it’s somehow linked to alien tech, but it’s still hard to predict how a band of unhinged villains will manage to halt its destructive path.

Then, after some promising action shots and one final Harley joke (‘we’re bad guys, it’s what we do!’), we get a title card.

It’s interesting to see Joel Kinnaman and Viola Davis given higher billing than actual Squad members played by Cara Delevingne, Karen Fukuhara, Jay Hernandez, Jai Courtney, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Adam Beach. That could tell us something about how much we’ll actually be seeing those guys in the movie. Maybe there’s more focus on Waller and Flagg than this action-packed trailer suggests.

Regardless, one thing’s for sure… I’m never, ever, getting Bohemian Rhapsody out of my head. Heck, maybe I’ll embrace that and watch it one more time… 

Please note: we’ve moved the comments thread for Suicide Squad to here.