Bad or evil? 'Suicide Squad' blurs the line | USA Today 

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Brian Truitt, USA TODAY 5:31 p.m. EDT August 1, 2016

An unlikely team of supervillains must save the day.

Joel Kinnaman (from left), Margot Robbie, Will Smith and Jai Courtney star in 'Suicide Squad.'

TORONTO — They’re the bad guys, that’s for sure, but the criminals, outlaws and various ne’er-do-wells of Task Force X are having an exceedingly bad day even for them.

, and director David Ayer’s group of antagonistic protagonists is on a seriously bad streak. On the way to a rescue mission in Midway City, their Blackhawk helicopter was shot down; they’ve had to slice and shoot their way through an army of weird humanoid creatures; and they\'ve finally made it to the roof of a federal building for their ride home.

Then they realize somebody has stolen their chopper — namely the Joker (Jared Leto), clad in a tux and cackling madly as he opens fire with a machine gun.

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 is the Rolling Stones," says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. It\'s a hotly anticipated anti-superhero story, an "antidote to the mostly light and bright family fare that have provided most of the hits this season."

Since the premiere of first footage at last summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, pop culture has gradually come to adore these oddballs and outsiders. In June, 

 was the most-tweeted-about upcoming movie, according to Twitter, and it could be a massive late-summer hit just like 

The connection that folks have with the group is "a deep, powerful thing,” Ayer says. “There’s something about them that resonates, that people seem to instantly understand.”

Viola Davis works on a scene with director David Ayer on the set of 'Suicide Squad.'

Like how unfortunate it is when the Clown Prince of Crime commandeers your Chinook.

“Our bird’s been jacked! Light it up!” screams Joel Kinnaman, playing team leader and military man Rick Flag. Lethal assassin Deadshot (Will Smith) has just enough time to look perturbed before engaging the enemy with his nifty wrist guns. And Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Arkham Asylum psychiatrist turned Gotham City psycho, does what you’d imagine she would: She puts a finger in each ear, chomping on bubble gum and seemingly enjoying the complete chaos in front of her.

While things have gone south for the squad before, “this is the most south,” Ayer says with a laugh in front of a crew of monitors huddled away from the war zone above. “When you write a script, you can always throw problems at the heroes. When you throw solutions at them, people tend to get mad.”

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. With the rise of metahumans and otherworldly threats (see:

), intelligence officer Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) persuades the government to let her put together “the worst of the worst” so that they might be able to do some good.

Alongside Flag, Deadshot and Harley, the recruits include Australian nuisance Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), human reptile Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), pyrokinetic gangbanger El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), 6,373-year-old witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and ropemaster Slipknot (Adam Beach).

But there’s a catch to joining this black-ops group housed at Louisiana’s Belle Reve Penitentiary (its slogan? “Till death do us part”): Live through a mission and get time taken off your sentence; if you don’t, too bad; and if you get out of line, the Wayne Enterprises nanite bomb in your neck goes off.

Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) joins teammate El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) in 'Suicide Squad.'

Whereas such groups as the Justice League and Avengers offer A-list comic-book types, the Suicide Squad features more obscure personalities; they came into their own in the 1980s in DC Comics lore and have been a cult success ever since. “Very rarely do you get to do a film that has so much history and so much backstory and so much character and so much goodwill coming in, but that hasn’t been mined,” Smith says.

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The idea of creating a whole movie around a group of supervillains and its theme of bad vs. evil comes from a personal place for Ayer, who grew up in a gang neighborhood in Los Angeles.

“I watched people make really bad decisions that ruined their lives,” explains the filmmaker, who wrote

. “But when that’s all you’re presented, when those are your options, when you can join the local team and maybe get some kind of success and prestige and esteem, I understand how good people make really bad decisions that destroy their lives.”

Deadshot (Will Smith) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) discuss the mission in 'Suicide Squad.'

So how exactly did Ayer persuade Smith, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood the past 20 years, to play the ultimate hit man, plus get Robbie to put on pigtails as the Joker’s girlfriend and convince the Oscar-winning Leto to go down a very dark character path as Batman\'s most famous foe?

“Maybe I’m selling snake oil — I don’t know,” Ayer jokes. “Actors are like cops and soldiers and dogs and children in that they’re very honest with their hearts, and they immediately know if you like them or not. And I love actors.”

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Smith acknowledges he had a hard time wrapping his head around a character who kills people for a living. His breakthrough came when Ayer gave him

“I realized everything anybody does is because it feels good,” Smith says. “So no matter how absurd, how strange it is to you, when somebody does something, they do it because it felt better to do it than not to do it.”

Similarly, Davis was tasked to portray Waller, whose nickname “The Wall” is an apt one, since she\'s an immovable force who controls these extraordinary people like puppets and is pretty much the baddest woman on the planet.

El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) is haunted by the horrors his pyrokinetic powers have brought.

“That is cool I get to capture that, but at the end of the day, with me Viola, I’m still a girl, I’m still a human being. You can hurt me. I am not made of Teflon,” Davis says. “But Amanda Waller, that is stuffed way down in some place buried that I could not find. There was no sense of vulnerability there, only a sense of power, control, authority, winning, doing it my way, and that at times was very disconcerting. But ultimately it was very empowering.”

El Diablo was a transformative role for Hernandez, too, especially physically. He shaved off his hair and eyebrows so his head could be covered in tattoos to play a man burned by tragedy so much that he chooses a life of pacifism in which he doesn’t use his flamethrowing powers against another person.

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“Anybody who’s going to get any type of tattoo on their face is committed to whatever it is. And if you’re going to get a skull tattooed on your face, there’s a certain raw commitment: You’ve gone over the edge and you’re never coming back from that,” says Hernandez, who left his makeup on one night going out with castmates and scared a woman walking her puppy on the streets of Toronto. “She legit jumped out of her skin.”

One character who’s a walking dichotomy is Quinn. Robbie’s crazy villainess wears a jacket with “Property of the Joker" on the back and a “PUDDIN” necklace — a lovey-dovey name for her Mr. J — but is also very much an independent woman.

“Having the Joker be her Achilles heel is a great motivation for a lot of things,” Robbie says. “Anyone who has been in a relationship, which is all of us, has been in that situation where you’re with a person who just makes you behave in a way that you never thought you would, and you can’t control your feelings and you start feeling absolutely mental.”

Katana (Karen Fukuhara) wields a blade that has the power to trap souls, and she is quite handy with it in 'Suicide Squad.'

To bring these actors together as a family — and later their characters — Ayer had a rehearsal period that doubled as psych sessions where he had his squad engage in some real talk and discuss their deepest fears. “It was a little bit of a window into each other’s lives, and that really helps with teamwork in the end,” says newcomer Karen Fukuhara, who plays Flag’s sword-wielding right-hand woman Katana.

“They’re the bad kids,” Ayer says of his core cast. “If they’re having fun off camera, they’re having fun on camera, and that chemistry is priceless.”

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Kinnaman reports that their director often would give them a hard time if there was too much smiling.

“He’s like, ‘I don’t understand why everybody’s so happy all the time,’ ” Kinnaman says. “And then we’d go and give him a big group hug and he’d be like, ‘Ugh, stop it, please stop it!’ ”

Jared Leto (center, with Common and Margot Robbie) plays a more modern Joker in 'Suicide Squad.'

Ayer had another ace in the hole to bring everyone together: the Joker. Leto, who went the Method route and inhabited the role of the Dark Knight’s archest enemy anytime he was on set, was introduced to the rest of his co-stars in true Joker fashion.

“I had my henchmen break in and scare the living (crap) out of the cast,” Leto says. “It set up a dynamic that was really fun and a game that everybody was excited to play in their own way.”

Leto\'s Joker also sent gifts to alienate himself more, including bullets with everyone’s names on them, a dead pig with lipstick, a live rat meant specifically for Robbie (“I don’t like rats. I wasn’t screaming, I was whistling really loud,” Smith says, chuckling) and sex toys for Kinnaman.

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“I’m friends with Jared, and we go climbing sometimes,” Kinnaman says. “I was like, ‘You want those things back?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t even know what you mean.’ ”

The end result of all the shenanigans on and off screen for Ayer is something that may shock people: a comic-book movie with a level of heart, reality and humanity completely unexpected from a bunch of supervillains.

“At the end of the day, they’re good people,” Ayer says. “But don’t tell them I said that.”