‘The Suicide Squad’ beach scene is gruesome in all the right ways

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Move over, Old. There’s a new movie in the Killer Beach Cinematic Universe, and its name is The Suicide Squad.

The Suicide Squad‘s beach may not turn you old or actively kill you. (Although, in a movie with a giant alien starfish, would that be so hard to believe?) It is, however, the site of a very brutal, very bloody fight scene. And in a movie filled with memorable fights, that beach battle reigns supreme.

A quick recap, complete with big spoilers: The Suicide Squad begins with government agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) sending Task Force X (aka the Suicide Squad) on a top-secret mission, the details of which aren’t revealed to the audience. The team, including Suicide Squad (2016) holdovers Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), and Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), lands on a beach on the fictional island of Corto Maltese. They’re greeted by beautiful scenery and heavily armed Corto Maltesian forces.

Then, basically everyone dies. And honestly? It’s awesome.

Obviously, it’s also horrifying to watch these characters get absolutely demolished. But this beach fight scene — perhaps “massacre” is more accurate — is exactly the opening sequence The Suicide Squad needed. Not only does it establish precisely what kind of superhero movie this is, it delivers on one of the biggest failed promises of the original Suicide Squad.

That promise: stakes. A sense that any member of the Suicide Squad could die at any time. In Suicide Squad (2016), only two villains on Task Force X perish. There’s Slipknot (Adam Beach), who only exists so he can get his head blown up, and El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), who dies after a climactic battle with Incubus (Alain Chanoine). For a movie that branded itself as edgy and unpredictable, those two deaths felt pretty tame and left little to no impact.

Meanwhile, The Suicide Squad wipes out nearly an entire team within its first 15 minutes. It’s the perfect way to warn the audience to expect the unexpected. From that point onward, no one is safe.

The beach fight is a pure distillation of everything The Suicide Squad needed to be: gory, wacky, horrifying, and fun.

On top of setting up the film’s stakes, the beach massacre nails the tone of The Suicide Squad with a blend of extreme violence and humor, as well as the creeping horror of Waller’s true intentions.

Unlike its PG-13 predecessor, The Suicide Squad is rated R. And, boy, does it earn it. The beach fight is not the most graphic part of the movie, but it sets the bar high early on. A helicopter crashes into a crowd of soldiers, spattering the camera with blood. A boomerang slices a man’s head open and exposes the brains inside. Pete Davidson gets his face blown off.

It’s a lot to handle, but it’s consistent with the rest of the film and its promise of gruesome action, though it isn’t just gruesome. Sometimes it’s downright hilarious.

There’s humor in small moments, like Harley’s gleeful use of her rocket launcher, but it’s Nathan Fillion as The Detachable Kid (T.D.K.) who steals the show. His superpower, the weird ability to detach his limbs and control them from a distance, turns out to be a lot cooler in theory than in practice, as seen in the clip below.

When T.D.K. unleashes his arms on the Corto Maltesian soldiers, he just…ineffectually slaps them. Composer John Murphy’s pounding score drops away, replaced with the muffled complaints of the soldiers. What the audience expects to be an epic moment falls ridiculously short. It’s perfect, and it’s elevated by Fillion’s hardcore commitment to the bit.

This is the kind of bizarro humor that runs throughout the rest of The Suicide Squad, and it primes us for further weirdness to come. Think T.D.K. and Weasel (Sean Gunn) are strange? Wait until you meet Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) or Starro the Conqueror. Thanks to the beach sequence, The Suicide Squad sets a high baseline of weirdness that it can surpass it later on.

Despite the gore and the laughs and the sheer “what just happened?” of it all, writer and director James Gunn threads something a bit more sinister through the scene: Amanda Waller. She isn’t physically on the beach, but she’s still very much involved. She oversees the operation with the power to blow up any Squad member’s head with the push of a button. Which she does, killing the terrified Savant (Michael Rooker) as he runs from the carnage.

Waller killing Savant with ease is chilling enough by itself, establishing just how little autonomy Task Force X members have. It pales in comparison, though, to the revelation that Waller sent this team as an unwitting distraction so that another team, led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba), could make it to Corto Maltese undetected.

Just hanging out on the non-killer beach.
Credit: warner bros.

It’s a highly effective reveal with scary implications, hammering home just how disposable these characters are to Waller, who’ll do anything to get the job done. Her involvement in the beach massacre positions her as one of the film’s biggest villains, in a movie filled with them. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Still, we as the audience have to thank Waller for sending this team down to the beach of death. Without her ruthlessness, we wouldn’t have gotten such an awesomely brutal sequence. This fight is a pure distillation of everything The Suicide Squad needed to be: gory, wacky, horrifying, and fun. And as the blood-stained sands of the killer beach settle after all the madness, we know we’re in for a good time.

The Suicide Squad is in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.

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