The trailers sold the first Suicide Squad as a wild, edgy comedy. In practice, it wasn’t particularly edgy (it was rated PG-13) or very funny. (It was written and directed by David Ayer, whose specialty is exceedingly grim action, not wacky comics hijinks.) There are legendary rumors about Suicide Squad getting retooled in the editing room to better match the tone of those trailers (and the tone of Deadpool, which opened earlier in 2016 to shockingly huge grosses). In the end, they never quite found the movie, and it wound up being a mess of different styles all clashing together.

If you believe one of the stars of both Suicide Squads, the upcoming sequel is a lot clearer about what it is and how it’s going to work. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Joel Kinnaman — who plays Col. Rick Flagg in the series — says The Suicide Squad is actually the edgy (and R-rated) comedy that the trailers for the first movie promised. He promises that the movie is going to be “insane”:

Every page of that script was funny, and every page made me laugh. [Writer/director] James [Gunn] just has this command of that genre, but also over every aspect of comedy and even the marketing. He just understands the world so well, and since he wrote it, he really reinvents not just the concepts, but also the characters. For me, it was like I did my first comedy, but it’s like heavily R-rated. It was a real learning experience for me too because I’d never done a comedy in that way before. So I asked James to work with me and teach me this sh—. And yeah, we had so much fun doing it.

Kinnaman still has a lot of kind things to say about the original Suicide Squad, and about the group of people who made it. But he promises the sequel will be a “f—ing monster” and that even those he’s in it he “can’t wait to see it as a fan.”

He’s going to have to; The Suicide Squad is scheduled to open in theaters on August 6, 2021 at the very earliest.

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