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In a feature spotlighting comic book plots lifted for TV and movies, CSBG shows who Amanda Waller sent after Rick Flag in the comics.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Suicide Squad, now in theaters and on HBO Max.
Today, we look at how James Gunn evoked a classic Suicide Squad comic book moment with Rick Flag and Amanda Waller’s conflict in the new Suicide Squad movie.
This is a still-new feature called “Written in the Book.” It is basically the reverse of another feature of mine called “Follow the Path,” where I spotlight changes made to comic book characters that are based on outside media, as well as characters who entirely came from outside media. Nowadays, there are so many comic book films and TV series out there that we can spotlight examples of TV and film adapting specific and less famous comic book stories to other media (so no “Spider-Man lifts up debris” or stuff like that).
James Gunn, more so than almost any other writer that I’ve seen adapting a comic book into a film, went DEEP with some of the adaptations in The Suicide Squad and I don’t mean stuff like using an obscure character, as that’s become a very common thing in these sorts of movies, but I mean the way that he has drawn true inspiration from excellent and less famous sequences in the comics (for instance, even before the movie came out I wrote about an obscure Suicide Squad/Doom Patrol one-shot that definitely inspired the movie a bit).
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MOVIE>
In The Suicide Squad, the team is sent into Corto Maltese to a special laboratory where an alien known as Starro the Conqueror has been experimented on for decades. The Squad believed that they were being sent down there to destroy the experiment, but in reality, Amanda Waller just wanted them to destroy the evidence that the United States government had been behind the experiments for all of these years. An unrelated coup in Corto Maltese has led to the United States’ involvement being at risk of being exposed.
Rick Flag, the leader of the Suicide Squad, couldn’t go along with this mission, as he felt it was their duty to go public with this information and let the world know what the United States is doing. Unfortunately for him, his teammate, Peacemaker, had a secondary mission of killing anyone on the team that he thinks would expose the United States’ involvement and so he turns on Flag and after a long and drawn out battle in the midst of the collapse of the laboratory (which, of course, frees Starro the Conqueror), Peacemaker successfully kills Flag.
The information falls into the hands of Ratcatcher 2, though, and the other leader of the Squad, Bloodsport, prevents Peacemaker from killing her and seemingly kills Peacemaker himself (we later learn that Peacemaker survived).
This is very evocative of a conflict between Waller and Flag in the comics. Flag discovered that the Squad’s NSC Laisson, Derek Tolliver, was blackmailing Waller into supporting the re-election campaign of Senator Joe Cray. What Flag DIDN’T know was that Waller had already secured blackmail material of her own to counter out Tolliver and Cray’s blackmail and the Squad was going to be fine. By this point, Flag had already gone rogue, heading to Washington D.C. to kill Tolliver and Cray.
So Waller sent the Suicide Squad after Flag, ordering them to keep Flag from killing the Senator by whatever means necessary…
Naturally, the non-criminals on the team like Bronze Tiger, who were friends with Flag, weren’t willing to hunt down their friend, but when Waller explained that either they brought him in alive or let the criminal members of the team take him out otherwise…
Things were particularly awkward since Deadshot had recently starred in his own miniseries and up until this point, Floyd Lawton was marked by his death wish, but that was partially based on him having no “reason” to live. In the miniseries, he discovered that he had a son that he did not know about, so now he had something to live for — and that just meant that he had more to be taken from him, as the son is murdered. So Deadshot is in a REALLY bad head space in the lead-up to this issue.
Flag tracked Senator Cray down to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and was about to kill him when he is interrupted by Deashot, who is sitting on Lincoln’s lap! Deadshot has his guns trained on them and Flag tells him that he won’t back down, so Deadshot…murders Cray himself!
Deadshot tells Flag (who had already murdered Tolliver earlier in the issue) to run as the cops arrive and Flag agrees. Deadshot opens fire on the police and he is gunned down, but miraculously, he survives the shooting.
Waller visits Lawton in the hospital and asks him why he did what he did and Lawton noted that she simply said to not let Flag kill Senator Cray, which he didn’t, so Deadshot completed the mission as instructed…
In an extra piece of irony, one of the cops who was investigating Tolliver’s murder finds the memo that Tolliver was going to use to blackmail Waller and the cop sells the memo and the newspapers reveal the existence of the Squad anyways, so everything that happened didn’t even have any real meaning, as Flag didn’t need to kill Tolliver and try to kill Cray, and it was in fact his killing of Tolliver that led to the secret of the Squad getting out anyways (Waller maneuvers around things and “resigns” and then just continues to run the Squad secretly).
If anyone has a suggestion for a future edition of Repeat the Past, be sure to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com. Remember, I’m not looking for the really obvious stuff, but more stuff that many people wouldn’t even necessarily automatically know was adapted from a comic book.
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