Movie Mistakes You Totally Missed In Suicide Squad

The main objective of every Hollywood movie is to make money, and Suicide Squad was one of the highest-grossing releases of 2016, setting a new record for the best ever opening weekend enjoyed by an August release and going on to earn $745 million worldwide. Those numbers were at odds with critical opinion, however: Suicide Squad only managed a 25 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics lambasting the film over its "muddled plot, thinly written characters and choppy directing." 

DC fans were quick to come to its defense (one even went as far as starting a petition to have Rotten Tomatoes shut down over its supposedly biased reviews), but the general consensus is that the film was fun but deeply flawed—and here's all the proof you need.

We get our first look at both Deadshot (Will Smith) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) in the opening moments of the movie, but things really get underway when high-ranking government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) chairs a meeting of big shots. She announces that she's gathered "the worst of the worst" and will use them to "fight fire with fire," though her colleagues aren't immediately sold on the idea of Task Force X, especially Admiral Mackenzie. Or is it Admiral Olsen? Ted Whittall's character wears a name tag identifying him as Mackenzie, which can be seen several times throughout the scene. Bizarrely, when the end credits roll, his character is listed as Admiral Olsen.

It was a nice touch to bring Whittall on board (DC fans will remember him as Suicide Squad leader Rick Flag in the final season of Smallville), but the confusion over his character's name shows how little importance he actually had outside of being a foil for Davis.

The first Task Force X member Waller tries to sell her skeptical colleagues on is Floyd Lawton, better known as Deadshot. Waller explains that Deadshot is the world's most wanted hitman, calling him the "man who never misses." He seems to have an unfair advantage over regular marksmen, however, and we're not talking about his high-tech eye scope. As Deadshot does what he does best and takes out a police informant with a long distance headshot, his bullet seems to swerve in mid-air—in fact, that's the only way he could have pulled off the shot.

What's really going on here is a combination of bad direction and poor editing. The camera follows the trajectory of the bullet as it travels towards the back of the doomed man's head, yet when it makes contact and he drops, you can clearly see an armed escort walking directly behind him. The bullet should have hit this man's head, but instead it somehow bypasses it.

After extorting his client Angelo for an extra million dollars and carrying out the hit in impossible fashion, Deadshot makes a swift exit from the scene of the crime. The sequence that follows contains a glaring error, one that stands out like a sore thumb once you've had it pointed out. Lawton is perched on a rooftop across the street from the building his target is being transported to when he gets the kill, and the only way to get out of there once the job is done is to go down, fast. The assassin makes his escape by jumping over the edge of the building and rappelling down the wall, though before he makes a run for it he grabs his big bag of tricks. The rucksack he scoops up as he sprints for the ledge is nowhere to be seen when Deadshot leaps off it, however.

One thing director David Ayer seemed to enforce during Waller's meeting with her fellow bigwigs was that this is a woman who's done her research. Davis plays the part well, coming across just as steely and determined as the Amanda Waller DC Comics fans know and love. What lets her down is her attention to detail—or, more accurately, the prop department's.

Waller comes to the high-level dinner with a dossier labeled Top Secret, and in it she has detailed files on each proposed member of her task force. When she gets to Waylon Jones (a.k.a. Killer Croc), we get a glimpse of his profile—and if you pause it right there, it makes for some interesting reading. The bio describes him as being "over seven feet tall and weighing 360 pounds," yet that clearly isn't the case. There are multiple instances of Killer Croc standing next to other Squad members, and he never stands out as being particularly taller than any of them.

Getting someone's height wrong in a report is one thing, but misspelling a name is another entirely. While little things like this are only going to be noticed by fanboys and don't necessarily spoil the flow of the movie in any way, they do take away from the integrity of this scene once you know they're there. Waller is supposed to be the authority on these prisoners, yet in her document about Captain Boomerang his name is spelled incorrectly.

The character's real name is George "Digger" Harkness, an Australian crook who's traditionally an enemy of the Flash in the comics. It's the Flash who shows up to stop the Captain after he knocks his partner out with a boomerang during a robbery, foiled before he could escape. Before we see the circumstances of his capture and enlistment we see his case file, which reads fine until you get to the first line of the second paragraph, where he's referred to as "Hawkness" instead of "Harkness."

Harley Quinn's origins are summed up in a couple of scenes near the beginning of the movie, when we get a glimpse of what her life was like before the Joker became her Puddin'. Dr. Harleen Quinzel was assigned to treat the Clown Prince at a secure medical facility, gradually falling under his spell during their sessions. Before long she agrees to not only die for the Joker, she'll live for him, and to prove it she throws herself into a vat of chemicals from a great height. And they say romance is dead!

The Joker (who looks as though he's about to turn around and leave her to drown before changing his mind) goes in after her, diving headfirst into the same vat. We see from ground level shots of the vat and shots from below the surface of the chemicals that the container is pretty deep, at least deep enough for a person to jump into it from a huge height and not be killed. Yet after the Joker jumps in to rescue Quinn, he's able to cradle her in his arms while apparently touching the bottom.

We also get to see the circumstances of Harley Quinn's capture, which come at the hands of the Joker's arch-nemesis Batman. The villainous couple are tearing through Gotham in a souped-up Infinti sports car when the Dark Knight shows up to ruin date night. Quinn fires at Batman through the roof of the car, which finally spins out of control and goes crashing into the waters of the harbor. Wanting to take them alive, the Caped Crusader goes in after them, where he finds the Joker missing and Quinn unconscious.

In this moment her hair is entirely blonde, free from the pink and blue highlights she sports for the majority of the movie. She comes to and tries to stick a knife in her rescuer as he approaches, getting a Bat-fist to the face as a result—which draws blood even though crashing through the windshield of the car somehow left her without a scratch. The biggest error in this sequence comes after Batman pulls her from the water, however. As she hangs limp in his arms, the pink and blue tints that were missing a moment ago have returned.

There's another Harley Quinn-related goof during the scene in which the Squad get out of their prison rags and get suited up. After reluctantly agreeing to take part in Task Force X, the motley crew of criminals are wheeled into an airport hanger and informed that they've all had explosive devices planted in their necks that mission leader Rick Flag will set off should they try to run. They're then given access to their personal belongings, and during the following sequence, there's an obvious framing error.

Deadshot loads and checks his guns, Captain Boomerang sharpens his boomerangs, but it's the contents of Harley Quinn's case that the scene is centered around. As she slips into something a little more comfortable, the camera pans up Margot Robbie's body slowly as if to mimic the leering of nearby men, only there don't seem to be many people around. Nobody can be seen standing behind Quinn as she squeezes into her "Daddy's Lil Monster" t-shirt, yet when the angle is pulled back for the next shot, she's suddenly surrounded by gawking men.

During the scene in which the Squad retreat to a bar to lick their wounds after a scrape with Enchantress' minions, we get to learn about Chato Santana (a.k.a. El Diablo). The Pyrotechnic Homeboy initially took a back seat when they were ambushed in the previous scene, only revealing the true extent of his firepower after being provoked by his teammates into joining the fight. The sulky metahuman explains how he accidentally burned his wife and kids alive after losing his temper.

Before he opens up, however, there's a moment in which Harley Quinn gets everybody a drink of their choice from behind the bar. If you watch El Diablo's hands during this scene, they reveal that it's comprised of footage from different takes. During his close-up, a gold chain sits high up on his wrist and his left hand is on top of his right. When the shot snaps back to include the other Task Force X members, the chain has slipped down his wrist and his hands are the other way around.

During the aforementioned fight between the Suicide Squad and the Eyes of the Adversary, Harley Quinn pulls ahead of the pack so she can secretly arrange her escape with the Joker, taking the elevator before anyone can stop her. During her error-laden ascent, she's attacked by one of Enchantress' foot soldiers, who drops down into the elevator by removing a panel in the ceiling. Quinn dispatches it with a bullet to the head (that somehow doesn't break the glass, despite the powerful Chiappa Rhino 60DS revolver she's using) and then a second attacker smashes through the window.

There are three glaring mistakes during the short fight sequence that follows. Firstly, the body of the creature she shot dead seconds earlier has vanished, giving her enough space to fight the second one at the expense of sense. Secondly, during that second fight, Quinn runs up the wall and flips over her assailant, and when she does, we get a shot of the elevator ceiling. The panel that was removed moments ago is now back in place. Lastly, the display screen showing the different floor numbers switches on and off randomly between cuts. A bad day at the office for the editing team.

When director David Ayer posted the first image of Will Smith in his full Deadshot costume, the reaction from DC fans was overwhelmingly positive. CinemaBlend praised the Suicide Squad costume team for how faithful they'd been to the comics, taking this promotional photo as proof that Deadshot would be wearing his famous white mask in the movie. Smith's face is also famous, however, and Warner Bros. weren't about to pay him to wear a mask for two hours.

In the end, Smith wore the mask on just two separate occasions (DC fans weren't happy). Loyalty to the source material aside, the main issue with having him slip in and out of his mask was that it made for some clumsy cuts. In the shot above, Deadshot pulls his mask on while chatting to Harley Quinn, and you can see that his high-tech eyescope isn't in place. Yet in the next shot, the scope has appeared out of nowhere.

There are a number of mistakes in Suicide Squad that involve Cara Delevingne's Enchantress, in her superpowered form as well as her alter ego June Moone. In the comics, Moone is a freelance artist who becomes the Enchantress after stumbling across a hidden chamber in a haunted castle and freeing her spirit. It worked on paper, but you can forgive the filmmakers for updating her origins to make them a little less Scooby-Doo.

In the film, Moone is an archaeologist who finds a totem containing the Enchantress' spirit in an ancient Peruvian temple and is possessed by it. The spirit remained dormant in her until she said the word "Enchantress" aloud. It's easier to believe, but still a little out there, which is why everything around the character had to be watertight for her to work. One scene in particular that loses credibility on the grounds of a factual error is the one in which Enchantress obtains a binder from the Weapons Ministry Vault in Tehran. It reads from left to right, though Persian script actually reads right to left.

After hearing about Dr. Moone's unfortunate incident in that ancient Peruvian tomb, Amanda Waller decides she'd make a perfect addition to Task Force X and sends Rick Flag to keep an eye on her. As Waller had predicted and hoped for, they fall for each other. As the two cosy up before Enchantress comes out to play and sends their relationship into difficult territory, there's a moment of shockingly bad continuity that you won't be able to ignore upon future rewatches.

When the camera is on Cara Delevingne, we can see she's holding a beer bottle in her hand as she fiddles with Flag's shirt. The angle changes as Moone leans in for a kiss, and somehow the bottle she had in her hand a second earlier is now in Flag's instead. The Enchantress trying to keep her host's body healthy, or a major goof? Our money is on the latter.

Of course, Enchantress doesn't become part of Task Force X, refusing to play nice and escaping custody with a vial containing the spirit of her brother Incubus. The pair were once worshipped as gods by the people of pre-Columbian era Latin America, though they were later betrayed and trapped by their followers. Now that they're free in modern day Midway City, they plan to take revenge on humankind, though first Enchantress needs to find her bro a human host.

In the wrong place at the wrong time is a man called Gerard Davis, the random businessman Enchantress chooses as a vessel for her powerful sibling. After being possessed, Davis wanders along the platform at Central Station and then stops dead, his eyes glowing red. You can see a man wearing a light cap standing right behind him as he does, but when the shot cuts to his rear a second later to watch him fall, that man is nowhere to be seen.

Staying in Central Station for a moment... Or are we? There are several signs that state the underground subway station in this scene is called Central, yet when the Squad exit the same station in a later shot, the signage outside claims that this is in fact Bay Station. Which it is. Bay Station is in Toronto, a city that has doubled as many American cities on the big screen over the years. Lots of Toronto landmarks can be seen in Suicide Squad, though none are quite so blatant as this one, a revealing error that should have been spotted on the day the scene was filmed, never mind caught in post-production.

Lower Bay Station (an out-of-use platform directly below Bay Station) is actually an extremely popular location with American filmmakers and has popped up in numerous movies over the years, including Repo Men, Total Recall, and Resident Evil: Retribution.

This is another continuity mistake involving Cara Delevingne—and it's a rookie one. It comes when June Moone, still being watched by Rick Flag, mutters the word "Enchantress" in her sleep, which frees the ancient spirit to take over. Flag draws his weapon, but is immediately plunged into a vision in which his beloved June is lying on a stretcher, unresponsive. Flag crouches by Moone's side and begins slowly dissolving into tears as paramedics work on keeping her alive, though from the look of it they need to slow down and check their work.

One of the pads monitoring June's condition is clearly not hooked up to any machinery in the first shot of the vision sequence, yet when we cut to a closer angle in the next shot, a wire has suddenly appeared. Of course, this is a vision, and in theory anything could happen, though this seems less like Enchantress messing with Flag's mind and more like somebody messed up on the set.