The Suicide SquadSave

Belle Reve Federal Prison, present day. The film opens with Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, reprising her Suicide Squad role) deploying her latest Task Force X team for a beach insertion on a fictional Caribbean island nation called Corto Maltese. She's been monitoring activity on the island for years. Corto Maltese is now ruled by a Soviet-backed military junta that overthrew the democratically-elected president three weeks earlier. The junta has been operating an illegal experimental laboratory at a former Spanish colonial fortress called Jotunheim, where scientists have been working on a top-secret bioweapon called Project Starfish. Waller wants the lab destroyed and any evidence of American involvement (the lab had been originally funded by a CIA black-budget program) erased.

Team A. Waller deploys the team — Savant (a wealthy reserved metahuman), TDK (a metahuman whose ability is detaching his own arms and throwing them as weapons), Mongal (a giant Korean warrior princess), Weasel (a giant mutant weasel-creature), Blackguard (a small-time mercenary turncoat), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, reprising his Suicide Squad 2016 role), and team leader Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, also reprising his role). Then Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, in her third DCEU appearance after Suicide Squad (2016) and Birds of Prey (2020)) is added at the last second. They parachute onto Corto Maltese's beach at dawn.

Team A's catastrophic deployment. Almost the entire team is killed within the first five minutes of the film. Blackguard is shot in the head. TDK is shot in the head. Mongal's helicopter parachute snags on a tree and she's electrocuted. Savant drowns in shallow water. Weasel can't swim and drowns on the beach. Captain Boomerang is shot in the head. Colonel Flag is captured. Harley is captured. The Task Force X mission — its public, sanctioned deployment — is a total failure. Waller has been preparing for this. The film's opening is a five-minute massacre of a half-dozen recognizable characters, an audacious Gunn-trademark dark-comedy opener.

Team B. While Team A is being slaughtered on the beach (deliberately as a diversion), Waller's actual mission team is being deployed on the other side of the island. Team B includes: Bloodsport (Idris Elba, replacing Will Smith's Deadshot character from the original Suicide Squad), Peacemaker (John Cena), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior, a young Portuguese woman whose father had developed a rat-control machine), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone in voice work, a giant humanoid shark named Nanaue who is the world's strongest mutant), and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian, a metahuman with energy-polka-dot weapons that he hates having). The B team is the actual mission team and is far better-equipped than the A team.

Corto Maltese. The B team navigates through Corto Maltese's jungle, encountering the local resistance — the Sol Soria, a guerrilla group fighting the junta. Sol Soria is led by Sol Soria (Alice Braga). The Sol Soria allies with the Task Force X. The combined force begins moving toward Jotunheim.

The Thinker. The team learns that the Jotunheim facility's lead scientist is Gaius Grieves, codenamed the Thinker (Peter Capaldi), a brilliant British scientist who has been performing experiments for decades. The Thinker had been hired by both the CIA black-budget program (originally) and then the Corto Maltese junta (after the CIA pulled out years earlier) to develop Project Starfish — a controlled-mind-control superweapon that uses a giant alien starfish entity called Starro the Conqueror as a brain-altering host.

Harley solo. While Team B is en route, Harley Quinn — separately captured during Team A's failure — is taken to the junta's presidential palace where the new dictator Silvio Luna (Juan Diego Botto) wants to recruit her as his queen. He had been a Harley Quinn fan from her social-media posts. He proposes marriage. Harley initially accepts — Luna offers her dinner, attention, and a chance to escape Belle Reve. Then she discovers Luna's plans for the bioweapon. She kills him with his own dinner fork. The film's standout solo set piece is Harley breaking out of the presidential palace solo — fighting through fifty palace guards in a flowing red dress with floral CGI flowers blossoming around each kill. The flowery-CGI-blood sequence became one of the film's most-cited visual choices.

Reunion. Harley joins up with Team B at the Jotunheim facility. The eight-person team — Bloodsport, Peacemaker, Ratcatcher 2, King Shark, Polka-Dot Man, Harley, Colonel Flag (who had been recaptured by the resistance), and Sol Soria — infiltrate the Jotunheim laboratory together. They find Starro the Conqueror — a giant cosmic alien starfish the size of a four-story building, kept captive in a giant aquarium tank in the facility's central chamber. Starro is sentient. Starro has been used in mind-control experiments on local Corto Maltesean civilians for years. Starro can project smaller, eye-shaped facehugger-like organisms that attach to a victim's face and take over their mind.

The truth about Starro. The Thinker, in his explanation to the team, reveals that Project Starfish was originally a CIA black-budget operation. The American intelligence services had been studying Starro since the 1960s after the alien creature was found in a crashed Soviet space probe. The CIA wanted to weaponize Starro's mind-control abilities. The Corto Maltese junta inherited the program and has been continuing experimental development. Waller's actual mission was to destroy the lab to erase evidence of CIA involvement in the program, even though doing so would kill the captured Starro and potentially weaponize Starro if it escaped containment.

Peacemaker's betrayal. Peacemaker, who has been operating under Waller's separate orders, is revealed to be the team's plant. Waller has tasked him with personally killing Colonel Flag if Flag tries to expose American involvement in the program. Peacemaker and Flag fight one-on-one in the Jotunheim facility. Flag, dying after Peacemaker stabs him, gives the others Sol Soria's evidence of American involvement before he dies. Bloodsport recovers the evidence. Peacemaker is wounded by Bloodsport in the fight and presumed dead (he survives to lead the spin-off TV series Peacemaker (2022-2024) on HBO Max).

Starro escapes. The Thinker's experiments cause Starro to break free of containment. The giant alien starfish climbs out of the Jotunheim aquarium tank and proceeds to rampage through Corto Maltese's capital city. Hundreds of Corto Maltese civilians are infected by Starro's facehugger-like spores and turned into Starro-mind-controlled zombies. The team realizes that Waller had been planning to allow Starro to escape and overrun Corto Maltese — Waller had calculated that a controlled escape would be a more-tolerable outcome than the lab's evidence reaching public news.

The team rebels. The Squad refuses Waller's mission objective. They go off-mission to save Corto Maltese civilians from Starro's spores. Waller, monitoring from Belle Reve, orders the team's neck-bombs detonated for disobedience. Her staff, finally horrified by Waller's tactics, knock her out and refuse to detonate the bombs. The team is now operating without Waller's authority.

Final battle. The team fights Starro through downtown Corto Maltese. Ratcatcher 2 — who has been the film's quiet emotional anchor — uses her rat-control device to summon every rat in the city. Tens of thousands of rats swarm Starro. The rats climb up Starro's body and into its central eye. They tear apart Starro's central nervous system from inside. Starro dies. The film's biggest setpiece, a thousand-rat-swarm killing a giant alien starfish, became a Gunn-trademark moment of dark-comic absurd violence.

Aftermath. The Squad survivors — Bloodsport, Ratcatcher 2, King Shark, and Harley — bring their Corto Maltese intel evidence back to America. Bloodsport blackmails Waller into ending Task Force X and reducing all surviving Squad members' sentences. Ratcatcher 2 returns home to Portugal. King Shark is allowed to relocate to the South Pacific. Harley resumes her solo criminal-celebrity career. The Suicide Squad disbands. Cut to credits.

Coda. Polka-Dot Man — the film's most-misfit character — has died in the Starro battle. Colonel Flag has died. Peacemaker is in a coma but survives (he gets his own HBO Max series afterward, also directed by Gunn). The film closes on a quiet aftermath shot of Harley boarding a plane to fly back to America with her three surviving teammates. She has finally found another family — a small, criminally-trained, broken family she chose. The film's tone — Gunn's signature blend of profane comedy and unexpected emotional warmth — landed strongly with critics. Cut to credits.