Obviously, we will be discussing the events of The Suicide Squad, so if you have not seen it yet, this gets into spoilers. Consider yourself warned.
As we discussed with Joel Kinnaman, he was pretty thrilled for the chance to come back and play Rick Flag again in a role where he could inject some fun and humor into the characters instead of being, his words, a “plot donkey.” But, alas, Kinnaman’s Rick Flag perishes at the hands of John Cena’s The Peacemaker – one of the only deaths in the movie not played for laughs – going as far to show Flag’s heart being punctured so that there’s little doubt Flag isn’t going to recover from this one.
I asked Kinnaman about that scene in particular. If he though, maybe, there was a way for Flag to survive these injuries for future installments, and if he had his hopes dashed when he finally saw the finished animation of Flag’s heart stop beating.
“Well, we’ll see,” says Kinnaman. “No, I think if you bring everyone back to life, then there are no stakes. Then you’re just playing games.” But then he added, “But we’re figuring some things out. There are other versions of this, as well.”
Well that doesn’t seem quite as definitive as one might have thought while watching Flag’s heart literally stop beating. So, what does other versions mean?
Kinnaman clarifies, “No, no, no. There’s a timeline that happens before.” Then Kinnaman, probably wisely, stopped talking about that.
Okay, so, it sounds like we, just maybe, haven’t seen the last of Kinnaman as Rick Flag. And who knows, considering how many characters are killed off in the first half hour of The Suicide Squad, (this is me purely speculating) maybe a bunch of them will get adventures set before the events of this movie. But I do enjoy Kinnaman as Flag (especially, as he said, with more humor in the latest version) so maybe this “other version” in a “timeline that happens before” will become a reality.
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