The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the end of The Suicide Squad.
It's only been out for a weekend but by most accounts, The Suicide Squad is a pretty great movie. While its box office totals may not be that impressive, the movie is getting strong responses from critics and fans alike. The movie is funny and bloody and endearing and dark and is somehow able to balance all those things incredibly well. Considering all the things that director James Gunn was willing to do in The Suicide Squad it feels like nothing was off limits but apparently there was at least one thing that was, as Gunn admits he changed his original ending because even he thought it was too dark.
The name The Suicide Squad is certainly an accurate one as nearly everybody who appears in the movie is dead by the end. Even those among the core cast of characters are not safe, as a couple main characters who you might expect to survive don't make it, and even more appear to die. In the version of The Suicide Squad that we all saw this weekend, the character of Polka-Dot Man gets smashed to death by Starro, but originally it seems that he survived, and the director tells Variety it was Ratcatcher 2 who died instead. Gunn explains...
There was a change. The original ending that I pitched, one main character died and one main character did not die. And the main character who died was was Ratcatcher 2. She was so sweet, I just felt like it was just too dark. Not that we don’t love Polka-Dot Man. We do. I just couldn’t [kill Ratcatcher 2]. So I relented.
One of the things that The Suicide Squad does well is that it's able to endear these various characters to us all, despite how dark, viscous, and generally messed up they all are. Having said that, Daniela Melchior's Ratchatcher 2 is clearly the heart of the team. She builds a relationship with Idris Elba's Bloodsport that is the emotional core of the film. As such her death certainly would have hit audiences hard, which was probably the point of doing it, but it was such a dark idea to kill the character that Gunn eventually decided he just couldn't do it.
Instead, David Dastmalchian's Polka-Dot Man got the ax, which still probably upset a lot of fans who loved the sad sack character, but it probably didn't have quite the emotional impact that Ratcatcher 2's death would have had. You can already imagine fans sending James Gunn irate tweets if she had died. People were calling her the highlight of the movie as soon as it was released. She was "just so sweet" as James Gunn says and sometimes there are lines that you just don't cross.
In the end, your favorite character in The Suicide Squad probably died, most of them did, but Racatcher 2 survived, and that's what matters. She had actual goodness and decency and so if she can make it, there's hope for the rest of us.
