--Doctor Fate, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay
"If any of us truly deserves Hell, it's Waller. And that bitch knows it. Playing God the way she does."
--Captain Boomerang, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay
"You joke about Heaven and Hell, Deadshot. But trust me, they exist. There's not a morning goes by I don't get up wondering if this will be my judgment day. Will I end up with the woman I love, or face the lake of hellfire with the same vermin who brought me down? The only thing any of us can hope for is divine intervention. Only through the grace of God can we be saved from eternal damnation for all the blood we spilled. Everything else is just talk."
--Bronze Tiger, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay
Jumping into some of the more spiritual metaphysics of the DC universe/multiverse, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay not only puts the moral issues of forming and using Task Force X at the center, but it also very much brings up the personal stakes of a heaven and hell. The premise is about Amanda Waller trying to secure an item that might send her to heaven despite her unrepentantly egoistic past of treating humans as a means to her personal end, using the threat of death as a motivator for the likes of murderers to engage in more murder. There is almost nothing lighthearted about the plot or its execution other than Harley Quinn's very vocal admiration of a male stripper fairly early on and the narcissism of that same man. This film uses animation to "get away with" content that would be right at home in The Boys, all as it brings DC characters like Amanda Waller, Killer Frost, Vandal Savage, Doctor Fate, and more into an almost unrelentingly dark story.
Production Values
Aside from the animation itself, it is the voice acting that really helps convey the plights and often very elusive, selfish allegiances of the characters. Tara Strong voices Harley Quinn as she does in most of the Arkham video games and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, wonderfully realizing the chaotic personality of the now very renowned character. Christian Slater lends his voice to Deadshot, popularized by Will Smith's version in 2016, and is able to emphasize the gunman's threatening sarcasm and tormented relationship with his daughter very well. Deadshot does have a very discernable arc between his first and final scene. For Amanda Waller, Vanessa Williams channels the manipulative, dehumanizing arrogance of the character in the specific context of her getting closer and closer to dying, with a quick scene establishing why she is so hell-bent on ensuring Task Force X completes the main mission of the film. Other characters like Captain Boomerang, Killer Frost, and Professor Zoom, to name only some of them, are similarly acted with excellence, contributing to what is ultimately a very character and concept-driven movie.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Amanda Waller's Task Force X, with Deadshot in the team, infiltrates a train to retrieve a USB with private intel, and Deadshot alone survives the ordeal. He lives to participate in another mission for Waller. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, she has Task Force X depart to bring her back a special card that she says little about. A former Doctor Fate is sought out because of his previous exposure to the card, which he says might allow whoever possesses it at their death to directly enter heaven and avoid going to hell. Waller hints at her own personal stakes to Deadshot as she increases the amount of years she will remove from their sentences if the mission succeeds.
Intellectual Content
The concept of forcing a group of evil people to cooperate with an even more ruthless figure in exchange for smaller prison sentences is one that is ripe for storytelling. Unlike the two live action Suicide Squad movies, only one of which has significant philosophical depth, Hell to Pay does not waste time in exploring why so many of its characters desire the "Get Out of Hell Free" card. It also has Bronze Tiger, a man who refuses to kill innocent people and is ashamed of his past, as a prominent member of Task Force X, which brings additional layers of moral and personal complexity to the idea of a suicide squad. Bronze Tiger says he answers to a higher authority, a moral reality above Waller and her whims, even as she is desperate to escape what she expects to be an afterlife in hell. He, however, openly talks of heaven and hell as if the experience of both is everlasting, and without ever actually identifying as a Christian, he very much sounds like a conventional evangelical when it comes to his philosophy of the afterlife.
At one point, Bronze Tiger says without flinching that only divine pardon will spare the members of Task Force X, which seems to even dissuade Captain Boomerang from his former sarcasm. The hell described by Bronze Tiger seems to match up with the very popular, extreme misconception of the Biblical hell where all sinners are supposedly tormented without end, not a realm that leads to the "second death" of the soul as the Bible truly describes (once again, see Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, or Romans 6:23). It appears that many other characters take the possibility or threat of hell seriously enough to slaughter others to obtain this card, one that they would not even know the powers of until they actually die. Even Vandal Savage is among those who seek the card, despite having lived for 50,000 years with no indication that he will die anytime soon. Though entertainment at large does tend to perpetuate the logically false (and unbiblical) idea that if there is a hell, all thrown in it must reside have an eternal, conscious existence, the in-story desperation to avoid such a place treats the possibility of an afterlife with a worry that reflects how philosophically important an afterlife really would be.
After the laws of logic that dictate all necessity and possibility, the uncaused cause that directly or indirectly created contingent existents, and the moral obligations that imbue certain things with objective value (if the uncaused cause has a moral nature, that is) and all that these entail, it is the afterlife that is the most pressing thing of all. Without logic's necessary truths, nothing is true or knowable. Without God, the uncaused cause, nothing could be in existence besides the laws of logic, empty space, and himself, if he exists without end. Nothing would have ever brought other things into existence. Without morality, there is no such thing as even the deepest truths and the totality of human actions having value beyond either being true or false. Without an afterlife, there is no continuation of consciousness and all of its potential joys and pleasures beyond biological death, and with an unpleasant afterlife, there is something objectively threatening to wellbeing ahead. There is nothing trivial about the philosophical issue of an afterlife, though it is still by necessity secondary to things like the laws of logic that govern and reveal possibility itself.
Conclusion
Dark in ways that go beyond the occasional grimness of James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, Hell to Pay does not shy away from the gravity of the premise of Task Force X and the very somber nature of pointless, unjust bloodshed. Although DC's The Presence, or its uncaused cause inspired specifically by the Christian Yahweh, is not mentioned, somewhat conventional ideas of heaven and hell are taken very seriously. It is unfortunate that Bronze Tiger's references to hell perpetuate the incredibly erroneous, damaging myth that eternal conscious torment is the just fate of all unsaved beings in Christianity, but it nonetheless helps put the stakes of what Amanda Waller longs for in very direct light. Great voice acting and a story that naturally incorporates a diversity of DC characters make this tale about fleeing from an unwanted afterlife all the more dramatic in its execution.
Content:
1. Violence: For an animated movie, there is an awful lot of blood. Body parts are sometimes removed from still-living people, softened by the fact that it is not live action.
2. Profanity: "Fuck, "shit," "bitch," and "bastards" are used in dialogue.
3. Nudity: A woman is very briefly seen walking away from the "camera" naked.
4. Sexuality: Women and men are seen engaging in erotic dancing for the pleasure of the opposite gender. A man is shown with a delighted crowd of women around him as he removes some of his very minimal clothing--nudity and sensuality are nonsexual in themselves, but in this case, they are used to invite sexual reactions.
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