Suicide Squad is something of a B-team affair for the DC Universe, given that it features bunch of baddies teaming up to fight someone even worse. But the movie does—sparingly—feature two marquee names: Batman and The Flash. At this point, it’s no surprise that they show up, but what are they there to do? Well, we can tell you, if you’re so inclined.
(Obviously, we’re about to to discuss plot points from the movie, so if you want to go in with no prior knowledge, why are you even reading this?)
Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), as one might expect, has more to do than young Barry Allen (Ezra Miller). During the first, exposition-heavy section of the movie, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) explains how these two were instrumental in catching some of the villains she’s going to use as weapons. Batman previously helped capture both Deadshot (Will Smith) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). In the first case, the Bat swooped down while Deadshot was out with his tween daughter, a.k.a. his weakness; although the two adults tussled in front of the girl, she intervened before her dad could shoot and Deadshot surrendered. Then, to get Harley, Batman interfered with her joyride alongside The Joker (Jared Leto), forcing them to crash into a body of water. Harley can’t swim, so Batman dove in and rescued her, even administering some mouth-to-mouth. Meanwhile, The Flash was responsible for stopping Boomerang’s (Jai Courtney) bank-robbing spree. Barry’s appearance, we hate to break it to you, is rather uneventful, which is disappointing given that Warner Bros. is trying to sell Miller’s comic relief as the saving grace of their franchise.
Bruce does show up one more time, in the movie’s mid-credits sequence. In order to win his protection, Amanda Waller hands out files on metahumans, like The Flash and Aquaman. Bruce, not so keen on the whole Suicide Squad idea, tells her to put a kibosh on the program. The scene is a very obvious Justice League tease, but it really doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t get from Batman V Superman. After all, Bruce became aware of these folks when he watched those little movies Lex Luthor had saved. We guess Amanda just has more detailed information, which may be all well and good for Batman, but isn’t terribly exciting for us viewers.