“ ‘The Suicide Squad’ is definitely better than ‘Suicide Squad’ ” Joel Kinnaman

After David Ayer, director of the 2016 superhero film “Suicide Squad,” declared that what he did in 2016 was “an amazing movie” and that he pledged never to speak about the matter publicly again after fighting with Warner Bros. for the release of #ReleaseAyersCut, he vowed to never speak about it again.

Now, actor Joel Kinnaman, who portrayed Rick Flag in David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” and reprises the role in Gunn’s film, claims that while filming for Ayer’s film, he met some of his “best friends.”

“We had an amazing experience shooting the first film. Some of the people that I got to know on that film are still some of my closest friends. So the OG Squad, I mean, we’re still texting with each other. But the vision of what that film was going to be, it wasn’t clear to everyone, you know. It wasn’t like the producers, the filmmaker, the studio, everyone had the same vision. There were conflicting visions of what that film was going to be, and sometimes with these big budget studio films people start pulling at it from different directions, and then it doesn’t really end up anywhere. I feel like that’s what happened with the first Suicide Squad. It kind of ended up being neither here nor there. I think David was really setting out to do something much darker, much more emotional, and nihilistic in a way, at least in his portrayal of the Joker, his idea of the Joker, and I think the studio wanted something that was much more entertaining. I think the trailer for the first Suicide Squad really worked against us because it became so successful, [but] it wasn’t really what the movie was like. And then I think they almost tried to reshape the movie to be more like the trailer, so there was complete division,” he was quoted saying by an entertainment portal. 

The Suicide Squad, in contrast to Suicide Squad, has received almost universally positive reviews and currently has a 97 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Kinnaman says he’s much happier with The Suicide Squad than with the released version of the first film, which he says is much closer to the director’s original blueprint than the final result. “When I saw the film completed, I felt this was the film we set out to do”, he says. “In this film, they trusted who James is, everyone has confidence in his vision. It was a joy to shoot the film and what you see is very much the script, but then I was surprised [because] it just seemed there were more layers to it than I had expected. I didn’t see [in the script] the emotional depths that I felt were very unpretentiously woven into the film. Obviously, I’m hugely biased here, but I felt that that made the film transcend the genre, and the big spectacle of it, and made something that was a real work of art as well.”

The Suicide Squad will be released in cinemas and on HBO Max on Aug. 6.