When they attacked the guerilla camp, they just assumed that Flag was being kept prisoner by the Corto Maltese military.
Bloodsport, Ratcatcher, Killer Shark, Harley Quinn and Polka Dot Man were the most sympathetic of the villains. By the end, they’d bonded, sparked some humanity in each other and revealed that their origin stories all stemmed from traumatic circumstances, like abusive childhoods, being experimented on, the loss of family and the feeling of being an outcast.
When Flag, ostensibly their “good guy” leader, was killed for trying to expose the US government’s horrific experiments on innocent people, that was the final straw for them to push back, too.
Ultimately, they didn’t expose the US, like Flag had tried to do, and used the information on the disc to buy their own freedom instead. But none of them were completely villainous enough to leave an entire country to be enslaved by Starro, or to abandon their teammates to fight it alone.
It’s a deliberate riff on the ending of ‘The Wild Bunch’, where a handful of bloodthirsty outlaws decide against riding off into the sunset and choose to go on a final suicide mission to avenge their comrade and end the threat posed by the Mexican army.
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fc31 (4660)
3 years ago
Bloodsport is who I have problems with the most. It was him and peacemaker killing for sports. If something turned him around then it was not shown properly.
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JakeSWITCH (504)
3 years ago
He had a troubled relationship with his daughter, and he revealed that he was groomed to become an assassin by his own abusive father.
His friendship with Ratcatcher allowed him to finally form the emotional father-daughter connections he’d been denying himself. Her friendly rats also helped him move past his childhood trauma of being tortured by his dad.
He was also friends with Flag from some previous black-ops missions together, so he had some loyalty there.
Bloodsport actually had a big character arc, even if a lot of it recycled Deadshot’s story from the first movie - Idris Elba was originally cast as Deadshot, replacing Will Smith.
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fc31 (4660)
3 years ago
You sound like a comic book fan, but I haven't read comic books, so my view is basically from this movie. And to me, it does not make sense at all.
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JakeSWITCH (504)
3 years ago
All of that information is from the movie, not any comics.
Personally, I didn’t really understand the motivations of Flag (as Waller’s second-in-command, he turns on her way too easily over Project: Starfish) or Peacemaker (was he a secret government agent on the team or did he attack Flag because he was psychotically patriotic)?
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fc31 (4660)
3 years ago
Peacemaker I never tried to make sense of, because he was clearly clinically insane.
Flag does not make sense but he is just a dime a dozen typical movie good guy, can't have a movie with a US agency completely soulless from top to bottom.
Bloodsport is from sensible (refused to go on suicide missions), seems to be like a decent guy in a nut house. Then immediately started to kill people for fun. Then suddenly he has conscience again. His action was unexplained, unless of course he has multiple personality disorder.
Then again like you said, nothing in the movie really makes that much sense. The only one consistent is Agent Walker, but she was a joke too, everyone working for her was unprofessional, was even knocked out by her jokers of subordinates.
i guess this is just a stupid story, a dark movie trying to be funny and have a happy ending, can't decide what kind of movie it was trying to be, put all the elements together hoping teenagers just accept it.
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JakeSWITCH (504)
3 years ago
Bloodsport was just an assassin and wasn’t as crazy and quirky as the other villains, which is why Waller wanted him to be a leader.
I didn’t have that many problems with the characters, but I agree that the tone of the film jumped around from being funny to gross, serious and sentimental. That’s how James Gunn’s last film, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’ was as well.
Personally, I could have done with less humour and sentimentality, but it wasn’t a big deal to me. At least it was better than the previous film and ‘GotG Vol. 2’.
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fc31 (4660)
3 years ago
Most of DC films tend to be dark. But I guess action comedy elements of Marvel movies are so successful they were trying to have that too. The ending is almost a Disney film.
I don't like the previous film either but I'd say this is worse.
‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’ is a very average movie, but it is at least consistent with it's action comedy styles. And the story although is ridiculous, at least all characters and their motivations are clear, consistent and well explained.
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cyguration (3893)
3 years ago
It's weird, but I liked the action-choreography better in this film than the original Suicide Squad, as well as the overall story, but you're 100% correct about the film being tone deaf.
It has a hard time deciding what it wants to be, has SERIOUS pacing issues, and doesn't know how to frame the setup to the action in a way that felt satisfying (like Flagg suddenly wanting to turn his back on Waller and Peacemaker suddenly being the loyalist that Flagg used to be).
The other problem was that there wasn't enough motivation for Flagg to do what he did. Yeah the experiments were gross, but it was also done/portrayed in a kind of goofy way. Maybe if he had seen kids in there, suffering, something to make the audience side with him, it would have made more sense.
You also couldn't really tell the extent of the pain people were going through when they got the starfish on their face. The film sort of wanted to build a sense of sentimentality around something that wasn't really explained very well, and then it was all kind of played for laughs.
It's what made Flagg's about-face seem kind of hollow, and it made Peacemaker just look villainously shrewd out of nowhere. They should have spent more time building up the tension between the two before the showdown to make the payoff mean something.
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JakeSWITCH (504)
3 years ago
I agree.
They didn’t do enough to foreshadow that Peacemaker was a fanatic (to the degree that he’d betray the team he had befriended) aside from having him jokingly say “If this whole beach was completely covered in dicks, and somebody said I had to eat every dick until the beach was clean for liberty…”.
When he flipped, I was left wondering if he was a double agent working for Waller or if upholding America’s reputation was part of his psychotic pathology.
Likewise for Flag. There really wasn’t enough foreshadowing that the veteran field leader of Task Force X would be willing to betray Waller and the US government over this particular mission. If Flag had been the character with a young daughter, and he’d witnesses children being experimented on for Project: Starfish, maybe his decision would have felt more organic.
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