Navy Vet David Ayer Wants a Chance to Release the Real ‘Suicide Squad’

The release of the 2021 DC superhero movie called “The Suicide Squad” has ripped open a lot of old wounds connected to the 2016 release of the original “Suicide Squad,” an unloved and not particularly successful movie credited to director and Navy veteran David Ayer.

Ayer was a hot property when he signed on with Warner and DC to make “Suicide Squad.” He’d just released the beloved World War II tank movie “Fury” with Brad Pitt and had made a reputation as a guy who knew how to portray men and women in the tactical professions by writing and/or directing movies such as “End of Watch,” “Training Day,” “Dark Blue” and “Sabotage.”

That seemed like a bold choice at the time. DC was going to let one of the few directors dedicated to presenting tactical drama on screen have at shot a making a movie about a military suicide mission. Even if the operators were all comic-book weirdos, Ayer was sure to give the movie a unique spin for the genre.

That spirit is still evident in scenes featuring Ayer’s longtime collaborator, former Navy SEAL Kevin Vance. The opening mission looks different than anything we’ve seen before in a DC (or Marvel) movie, and then things go wrong.

Apparently, DC wanted to lighten the mood and make “Suicide Squad” more of a comedy to fit in better with the studio’s overall vision for an interconnected movie universe. Whatever they did caused the movie to implode, and Ayer slowly has become more vocal about his lack of input in the final product.

After HBO Max funded a new cut of their 2017 bomb “Justice League” by original director Zack Snyder, a group of fans has been clamoring for Ayer to have a chance to release his personal version of the movie. “Justice League: The Snyder Cut” has been a huge streaming hit and universally proclaimed as a better movie than the one released in theaters.

So, this week we get “The Suicide Squad,” written and directed by James Gunn, the mind behind Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. Gunn only agreed to sign on for the new version if he had control of the movie he made. The new one (in theaters and streaming on HBO Max) is getting rave reviews, so maybe DC finally has learned a lesson.

Once Gunn’s movie started getting raves, Ayer finally decided to talk about his experiences on Twitter.

After a rough childhood, Ayer joined the Navy and served on a nuclear submarine. He writes that he “experienced things that seared my soul. Try 67 days underwater in a steel tube when you’re running out of food. The Navy broke me. And the Navy saved me. I learned discipline, and the Navy gave me a work ethic.”

Ayer describes how tough it was for a working-class veteran to break through in Hollywood and then turns to “Suicide Squad.”

“I put my life into ‘Suicide Squad,’” he writes. “I made something amazing. My cut is [an] intricate and emotional journey with some ‘bad people’ who are sh*t on and discarded [a theme that resonates in my soul]. The studio cut is not my movie. Read that again.

“And my cut is not the 10-week director’s cut,” he continues. “It’s a fully mature edit by [editor] Lee Smith standing on the incredible work by [editor] John Gilroy. It’s all Steven Price’s brilliant score, with not a single radio song in the whole thing. It has traditional character arcs, amazing performances, a solid 3rd act resolution. A handful of people have seen it. If someone says they have seen it, they haven’t.”

Ayer wraps up by talking about his service. “I’ve never told my side of the story and I never will. Why? Same reason no one will ever know what happened on my submarine. I keep my covenants. I’m old school like that. So I kept my mouth shut and took the tsunami of sometimes shockingly personal criticism. Why? That’s what I’ve done my whole life. Real talk I’d rather get shot at.”

There’s a clip that WB showed at the San Diego Comic Con in 2015 that someone recorded on a phone and posted online. Once the footage got out, the studio gave in and posted the footage. It’s the only evidence to back up Ayer’s claims about his version, but the tone of this footage makes it seem like he’s telling the truth about his movie.

So here we are. Since “Suicide Squad,” Ayer has only worked as a director-for-hire on the pretty good Netflix supernatural cop movie “Bright” and made a 2020 independent streets-of-LA crime movie called “The Tax Collector,” a film that was doomed by the theater closings during the pandemic.

Ayer is a Hollywood director who didn’t learn his craft in the privileged bubble of expensive film schools. He’s a working man and a veteran who’s brought his fascinating perspective to the kind of movies usually made by people who learned everything they know from watching other movies instead of experiencing life.

Gunn is rightfully getting a lot of credit for his take on these characters in “The Suicide Squad.” Here’s hoping that the new movie is a big enough hit that Warner Bros. lets us see what Ayer wanted to do back in 2016.

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