A formative trauma befell Christopher “Peacemaker” Smith when he was around 12 years old, and he’s never gotten over it. The psychopathic quasi-superhero (his power is mostly just having the body of star John Cena) leading the new HBO Max series spun off from the Suicide Squad franchise is reintroduced to us fresh off a four-year prison stint, but he’s really been locked in a state of arrested development since tweenhood. His is a world of rocket launchers and fleshlights, bong rips and dick jokes, junk food and cheap beer. He certainly has the boastful, non-stop libido of the newly pubescent, not just game for the odd barfly hookup or MMF threesome, but fully assured that his prowess could sow doubt in the staunchest of lesbians. His idea of wit is naming his bald eagle sidekick Eagly. He swears as if he’s just learned the words.
The eight episodes spent with this defender of justice – no matter how many men, women and children he has to kill to do it – are dialed into his same set of immature predilections, in tune with his description from showrunner James Gunn as “the world’s biggest douchebag”. Characters bicker with the juvenile circularity of kids who need to be separated, constantly pointing out the flaws in each other’s equally absurd logic. (Every episode reiterates the “why would someone put penises all over the beach?” exchange from its big-screen predecessor in some form, to diminishing returns.) The hyper-charged sensibility of violence treats each explosive headshot like one of the power chords in Wig Wam’s Do Ya Wanna Taste It, the theme song for the inexplicably lengthy opening titles in which the cast members all do a silly dance. The soundtrack favors this stripe of cock-rock, all hair metal and 80s-styled guitar lixx. In one of Peacemaker’s tenderest moments, he bonds with an agent over their shared love of Finnish glam progenitors Hanoi Rocks.
That scene encapsulates the usual appeal of Gunn’s work, which tends to raise the low ceiling on the taste of adolescent boys through earnestness and pop-cultural fluency. Those virtues have yielded one of the more accomplished entries in Troma Entertainment’s canon of Z-grade cheapies as well as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing greater proficiency to the bottom of the barrel and a looser sense of personality to the blockbuster. Caught in the awkward middle ground of quasi-prestige TV, however, his technique as a director lands in a less satisfying in-between, too polished to be schlock and too modest in scale to run with the superhero big dogs. Gunn works well in close quarters, the first season’s highlight sequences almost all being contained mano-a-mano fights. But too often, the televisual terrain proves inhospitable for him, as a storyteller and stylist of action.
Like so many streaming series in recent years, with their odd run times and small episode orders, this one’s trying to fill its 40ish-minute installments with a feature’s worth of narrative. Peacemaker, his BFF Vigilante (Freddie Stroma, doing Rorschach from Watchmen as a huge dork), and his black-op handlers face a twofer of threats, the combined might of which still leave these episodes feeling padded and sparse. As the head honcho of the local neo-Nazi contingent, Peacemaker’s father (Robert Patrick) lands at odds with his monomaniacally driven son, and an invasion of the body snatchers plays out elsewhere in their Pacific north-west suburb of Evergreen. Assorted subplots checking in with such members of the squad as disrespected tech nerd Economos (Steve Agee) and newbie Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) go nowhere, their personal business offering more distraction than character shading.
Cena himself is the show’s strongest attribute, his veiny musculature lending a much-needed weight to face-offs that falter when ramping up the plastic-looking CGI. It’s something like physical comedy that the bass has been cranked into the red every time he hits a wall or floor, letting us feel the heaviness of his elephantine body. He’s well-suited to the role as a budding comic performer too, his alpha-man-boy bluster the ideal fit for Gunn’s sophomoric hijinks. (Cena’s goofy bulldog self-seriousness brings to mind Danny McBride, a comparison that really clicks when that actor’s constant collaborator Jody Hill stops by to direct an episode.)
In spite of his dedicated douchebaggery, Peacemaker’s a likable lunkhead easy to spend time with, the main raison d’etre for a series that dims whenever he’s not onscreen. He’s locked on to a serviceable shtick, even if its pull-my-finger gags worked better alongside an ensemble of equally colorful wackos in film form. At his best, he wears down our grownup defenses and taps into the Mountain-Dew-chugging, loogie-hocking teenage dirtbag laying dormant within all of us.
