Peacemaker Season 2 premieres on HBO Max, Thursday August 21
I do not mind saying one of the most pure pieces of cinematic joy I’ve experienced in recent memory was the first time I saw the title sequence for Season 1 of Peacemaker.
The character had already taken most of us by surprise with John Cena’s comedy chops in Suicide Squad. He was an interesting pick for the star of a post-credit scene, let alone an entire spin off series. From a scene-stealing towel rack in Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, to headlining a second season as the title character of a superhero series, a stretch of only 10 years, Cena’s Hollywood career has been a fascinating string of surprises. The guy knows what he’s good at and how to play to his strengths.
Meanwhile, James Gunn had been fired after two very good Guardians of the Galaxy movies and promptly took a job with the competition to sort of re-do the nearly universally disliked first attempt at Suicide Squad movie. There was very little way of knowing how any of that was going to turn out.
So that was the world into which Peacemaker sprang; the world in which I felt pure joy to the strains of “Do Ya Wanna Taste It” by Wig Wam. The first season of Peacemaker was such a weird and fresh thing, it was very hard to have a bad time watching it. It’s been equally hard to not be excited about season 2. But the thing that’s not fair to a follow-up of an Act 1 the audience might not have seen coming, is that it’s already lost the element of surprise. And that is the biggest challenge facing Peacemaker in Season 2.
The first 5 episodes of Season 2 serve up more of the same raunchy blend of action and comedy you’d expect from Gunn and Peacemaker. The good news is, “the same” in this instance is a pretty high standard. Season 2 (so far) is very funny in moments, very gory in others and crude the whole way through. Episode 1 in particular goes so far beyond gratuitous with one sequence that it lands in some other place altogether. Ludicrous maybe? Farcical, I think works. I honestly thought it was a hallucination for a few scenes.
But front and center through all of it, is John Cena’s incredible ability to give dumb, metalhead energy while also hinting at a vast depth of emotion and regret is really something. Christopher Smith is a guy capable of truly horrible things, but thanks to Gunn’s writing and Cena’s performance, he’s a relatably tragic guy for whom you can’t help but feel sorry.
That was established expertly in Season 1 with scenes like Peacemaker playing a piano ballad version of Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” There’s really no better way to boil down this character’s inner turmoil in an interesting way on screen. There’s certainly not one thus far in Season 2, which leads me again to my biggest quibble with these 5 episodes and the bad news about “more of the same.”
There’s not much in Season 2 so far, the title sequence dance number included, that has impressed in quite the same way. The second time you do anything, it’s inherently less original, so it’s not exactly fair to hold that against Season 2. In fact, one of the most impressive things about this first batch of episodes is, weirdly enough, how predictable it is.
Season 2, in a move that should surprise nobody familiar with James Gunn’s work, is thoroughly character-based. It’s not a show that’s concerned about where it’s going so much as where these characters have been, and being truthful to that. The arc of this season, all to do with the pocket universe closet in Chris’ dad’s house, and the opportunities it represents to explore other realities, is a story uniquely fitted to everything Chris went through in the first season. After learning about the trauma that created him, his awful father and accidentally killing his own brother, in Season 2 we find Chris getting a chance to look at ways that all could’ve been different. How tempting is that for a guy trying to turn over a new leaf?
Meanwhile, the central antagonistic force of the show comes in the form of Frank Grillo’s Rick Flagg Sr., now running ARGUS and out very specifically to dish out some vengeance on the man who killed his son. For Peacemaker, how can you possibly change your ways, or get the people around you to appreciate how hard you’re trying when some of those people are trying to kill you because of the things you’ve done that you’re actively trying to change? It’s a difficult target to hit, especially for a marksman as emotionally confused as Peacemaker.
And if all of that sounds familiar, good! That’s because it’s a storytelling playbook that’s worth studying. Every movie and TV show should have a plot that challenges a clearly drawn protagonist. All of the 11th Street Kids are also so well portrayed and familiar at this point, you can kind of see where things are going the whole time. When they start down a certain path, we have a good idea where that path will lead, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. The negative way of looking at it would be that they’ve telegraphed what’s going to happen in the final three episodes. And honestly, that may be true, but if they’re as well put together as the first five, it won’t matter. It’s like seeing a friend repeat some bad decisions. Maybe you know how that story ends, but it doesn’t make it any less tragic to watch. That’s the kind of thing that Peacemaker achieves and, for a superhero spinoff series trading in blood, raunch and profanity, that’s a pretty incredible feat.
But that’s a whole lot of waxing poetic about the big picture of Peacemaker Season 2, and while I’m not going to get into spoilers here, I will say that even though a lot of things are working just as well as they did in the first season, there are some flaws beyond lacking the novelty of Season 1. These first 5 episodes are more than a little inconsistent.
The comedy is a little more hit and miss this time around. The highlights, I think, can be found in the 2 episodes directed by Greg Mottola, who’s got directing stints on shows like Arrested Development and Dave on his resume in addition to Superbad. The pace of the jokes, in particular, the speed with which people react to a joke with another joke really makes the comedy sing in ways the other episodes don’t quite match.
There are a few running gags that also lose steam throughout the season, particularly with Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante. He was a real highlight of the first season and he doesn’t have much to do yet in Season 2 outside of a runner about his obsession with animal facts that never quite does what I think it set out to do, but I’m hopeful that the direction he’s headed at the end of this batch of episodes is well paid off.
The same is true with Tim Meadows’ Agent Fleury. He’s such a smooth and dry comedian, though, he gets away with it. Fleury has the added benefit of mostly existing for his absurdity, a characteristic in which he is joined by Michael Rooker. Playing yet another character in yet another James Gunn project, Rooker’s Red St. Wild is just such a weird guy with an equally weird premise. He has a moment or two that lean more towards ‘just sort of bizarre’ than ‘genuinely funny,’ but mostly he exists in a sort of story vacuum. His deal is of the off-to-the-side-weirdness variety, with no real impact on the story happening with the main characters, and it’s not quite funny enough to justify the screen time.
The other issue with Peacemaker, particularly in this post-Superman era of James Gunn’s DCU is what’s canon and what’s not. Gunn has publicly said they’re going to deal with it somehow, and they do, but in an extremely simple way that is just as extremely unconcerned with drawing a hard line anywhere. But the approach that I’ve spent a thousand words talking about, making honest character-based choices, is the thing that also allows Gunn to just move forward with the stories he wants to tell. For all the issues that might’ve been caused by that Justice League cameo in season 1, there is zero baggage here in season 2.
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