With his medicine-ball biceps and chin worthy of an Easter Island moai, the wrestler turned actor John Cena can actually pull off wearing a daft comic book outfit, shiny silver helmet and all. That’s what makes Cena’s spandex-clad Chris Smith AKA Peacemaker so inherently funny: he looks the part but is a demonstrably terrible superhero. Being a hard-charging, self-sabotaging meathead with a propensity for violence and a hair-trigger temper will never make you as beloved as Superman. But it can be highly entertaining to watch.
To give Peacemaker his due, he is a survivor. He was first introduced in James Gunn’s 2021 movie The Suicide Squad, a film that bumped off cast members with glee, before getting his own small-screen spin-off overseen by Gunn in 2022. That brash and blackly comic first season shaded in some childhood trauma – Smith accidentally killed his older brother in a brawl instigated by their racist father – but also gave Peacemaker his first big win: saving the world from an alien invasion by sparkly butterfly creatures.
Gunn has been on an upswing too. After being promoted to co-running DC Studios, he recently rebooted the entire DC superhero screen universe with a generally well-received new take on Superman. Back at the helm for Peacemaker season two, the writer and director seems keen to demonstrate that he has not lost his punk edge. Clark Kent may never curse, but the Peacemaker cast are happy to take up the sweary slack. (Notable additions to the ensemble include Tim Meadows as an oddball government agent and Frank Grillo as a ruthless colonel with a distinctly non-military pompadour.)
The action picks up a month after the events of Superman, and Smith is struggling to parlay his alien invasion foiling into a sustainable superhero career. Things aren’t going much better for his local cohort of found family. Tetchy hacker Economos (Steve Agee) is being forced to surveil Peacemaker by the shady Argus agency, the usually sunny Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) is struggling with a breakup and flinty butt-kicker Emilia (Jennifer Holland) is now a pariah in the intelligence community. (In a fractious psych evaluation, Emilia snaps and calls her doctor “a fucking cunt” but quickly recovers: “In England, cunt means friend!”) Only semi-reformed serial killer Adrian (Freddie Stroma) seems to be doing OK, even if his new interest in owls verges on the obsessive.
After a particularly crushing career setback, Smith digs out a cocaine baggie marked “for a rainy day” and tries to party away his pain. What follows is an expansive and sustained orgy scene that must have required bringing in intimacy coordinators by the busload. Plenty of other HBO shows have featured group sex scenes, but Peacemaker is the first where the post-orgy logistics of cleaning up and turfing participants out are addressed in a subsequent episode.
Bubbling away beneath all this self-loathing is Peacemaker’s discovery that the Tardis-style storage unit he uses to stash his guns and helmets is actually a quantum gateway to 99 other universes, including one alternate reality where things turned out better for Chris Smith. Should he keep plugging away in a world where it feels as if he can never do anything right? Or rush toward a dimension where Peacemaker is beloved and has a cool customised motorbike called the P-Cycle? As Adebayo sagely notes: “This is becoming some fucked-up Twilight Zone shit.”
The sporadic bursts of The Boys-style ultraviolence – with geysers of blood, smashed teeth and even eyeballs going flying – will be as much of a barrier to entry for some as the constant hair metal needle drops. But underneath all the crunching fight scenes and crass jokes there is real heart. Gunn clearly loved these damaged characters enough to carry them over to his shiny new universe, but he is also never afraid to put them through the wringer. It makes even the tiniest victories in their lives feel momentous.
The show would also collapse without the full-body commitment of Cena. He has long nailed the petulant side of Peacemaker while hurling himself into the physical comedy. As the longstanding attraction between Smith and Emilia intensifies this season, he also gets to play goofily romantic. Is he a good actor, or a great one? In an upcoming episode there is a scene where Smith is deeply hungover and blearily begins checking his phone while relieving himself. Mid-stream he realises how late he is going to be for a vital meeting. The sight of Cena angrily shouting “PISS!” at himself to try to speed things up is an Emmy-worthy masterclass.
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