Warning: SPOILERS ahead for The Suicide Squad.
Thor: Ragnarok and What We Do in the Shadows director Taika Waititi has a cameo role in The Suicide Squad as Ratcatcher 1, the father of Daniela Melchior's Task Force X team member Ratcatcher 2. Though Waititi only appears in flashbacks, the two Ratcatchers' shared affection for rats is at the heart of the movie's message, as well as being the key to defeating the final boss.
Directed by James Gunn, The Suicide Squad is a sort-of sequel to 2016's Suicide Squad that features a mostly new lineup of bad guys tasked with saving the world. The brainchild of the ruthless Amanda Waller, Task Force X is a black ops team made up of supervillains recruited from the cells of Belle Reve prison, who are promised time off their sentences in exchange for carrying out top secret missions, and are kept in check by explosive devices implanted in the base of their skulls. Among The Suicide Squad's new team members is Cleo Cazo a.k.a. Ratcatcher 2, who has the power to control an army of rats and landed in Belle Reve after using her tech to rob a bank.
Cleo Cazo is an original character created for the movie, but Ratcatcher a.k.a. Otis Flannegan is a minor DC Comics villain who made his first appearance in Detective Comics #585 (1988). In his original iteration he was a former Gotham City ratcatcher with homicidal tendencies, but The Suicide Squad reinvents Ratcatcher 1 as a loving father and mostly harmless criminal. Waititi appears in flashbacks when Cleo reminisces about her childhood, revealing that she was raised by her father on the streets of Portugal, and that he was a brilliant inventor but suffered from a heroin addiction that eventually killed him. Ratcatcher 1 taught her how to use his rat-controlling tech, and the rats stole trinkets for them to live off and kept them warm on cold nights by swarming over them like a large blanket.
Waititi first appears in his cameo role midway through The Suicide Squad, when Ratcatcher 2 is telling the other members of Task Force X about her father, and he returns in the movie's final act. As Cleo summons a swarm of rodents from the streets of Corto Maltese to attack Starro the Conqueror, she remembers a night when she asked her father why he had focused all of his scientific brilliance on learning to control rats. The original Ratcatcher explained to young Cleo that rats are the "lowliest of creatures," and that if they can find a purpose in the world then so can anyone else.
The touching scene not only gets to the heart of Cleo's relationship with her father, but also to the heart of Task Force X. The "Suicide Squad" is so-called because its team members are considered expendable by virtue of being supervillains whom no one would miss if they died. By saving Corto Maltese from the rampaging Starro, both the rats and the Suicide Squad prove that they can do great things - no matter how despised they are.
