James Gunn’s Superman was designed as a fresh start for movies and TV shows based on DC Comics characters. Henry Cavill and the desaturated edgelord aesthetic of Zack Snyder, out; David Corenswet, vivid colors, optimism, and rambunctious superdogs, in. As Gunn and Peter Safran reboot a franchise that largely wasn’t working, they were prepared to set aside nearly all of the remnants of the DC Extended Universe.
But the “nearly” doesn’t include Gunn’s own creations, which is why midway through Superman, there was a cameo by John Cena as everyone’s favorite knuckle-dragging, bucket helmet-wearing, alt-right doofus quasi-hero Peacemaker, who debuted in Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and then moved to the center of his irreverent, charmingly ridiculous self-titled HBO Max series.
The first Peacemaker season concluded in 2022. At the time, Gunn was filming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and he said he intended to move immediately from that to making Peacemaker Season Two. Instead, he and Safran were placed in charge of DC’s whole film and TV apparatus, and the return of Cena and friends was put on a long hold. The Superman cameo served as a reminder that the character had survived the regime change in a way that Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman had not, and the series finally returns next week.
Though Gunn continued his practice of writing every episode, he only had time to direct the first of the five episodes HBO Max provided for review. But even with Greg Mottola (Superbad) and others getting behind the camera more often, Season Two still feels very much like a James Gunn production — including a revamped version of the delightful opening credits sequence where the cast does a new choreographed dance to a new song.
But in taking Peacemaker himself more seriously, and putting more of the comedic burden on the supporting cast, Season Two feels much more akin to the second Guardians film than the first.
Because the show’s been gone so long, we get a blessedly thorough “previously, on Peacemaker” montage, including one scene with new footage that retcons the series into taking place in this new fictional universe. From there, Gunn gives the people exactly what they want, opening up with Peacemaker (a.k.a. Chris Smith, son of an abusive white nationalist supervillain) being harassed by his pet eagle, Eagly. Eagly wants to go out flying, but it’s too cold, so instead Chris takes him into the pocket dimension where his father Auggie (Robert Patrick) stored his gear. The idea that this idiot could just casually walk through a rift in space to get to an infinite closet was just an absurd throwaway gag in the first season. But after Superman dealt with Lex Luthor endangering the planet by building his own pocket universe, Peacemaker’s secret hideaway becomes the central plot point of these new episodes. Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) — father(*) of Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman), whom Peacemaker killed in The Suicide Squad — is tasked with finding and shutting down any portals like this. But before that happens, Peacemaker finds that he can use this space to visit a parallel universe where his life turned out much better.
(*) In Gunn’s Creature Commandos cartoon, Flag Sr. has gray hair and looks just old enough to have fathered Flag Jr. But Grillo — who has only 14 years on Kinnaman — doesn’t dye his hair for the live-action role. So the references to the father-son dynamic — including several The Suicide Squad clips used as flashbacks — can feel on the silly side.
As we’ve been finding with the last few years of DC’s rivals in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, multiverses can be a more exciting idea in theory than in practice. Often, they’re just used as an excuse to bring back dead characters (or, in the case of Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, to bring back old actors as new characters), which robs any current story of dramatic stakes. Gunn is trying to use this tactic for a smaller story, where Chris gets a taste of a life where he’s not a joke, and where his backstory isn’t as horrific, which forces him to confront how unhappy he is in his own life.
Steve Agee and Tim Meadows in Season Two of Peacemaker.
This means we get a lot less of Peacemaker, lovable moron, and a lot more of Chris Smith, regretful and sensitive guy who’s trying to do better. John Cena’s developed enough acting chops over the years that he can play this angle well, and make Chris into a genuinely sympathetic figure. But just as the later Guardians films lost a bit of their energy by making Star-Lord a primarily dramatic character, there are definitely stretches of this season that had me wishing Gunn would go back to giving Cena retrograde, infantile lines to deliver so that co-stars like Jennifer Holland and Danielle Brooks could roll their eyes at him.
Instead, Holland’s bitter ex-spy Harcourt and Brooks’ empathetic Adebayo are mostly on Chris’ side from the jump this season. So the humor is placed on ancillary characters: Freddie Stroma’s Adrian “Vigilante” Chase, who was already the more extreme/dumb version of Peacemaker; Steve Agee’s John Economos, who can’t believe how much trouble his friends keep getting him into; and a couple of new cast additions in Tim Meadows as John’s coworker Langston Fleury, and longtime Gunn favorite Michael Rooker as renowned eagle hunter Red St. Wild. Rooker unsurprisingly embraces the lunacy of his character, who dresses in Native American drag and tastes bird poop to track his prey. And Fleury more or less fills Peacemaker’s old function on the show as the wildly overconfident guy who will say whatever tasteless, ignorant thing that comes into his head. Meadows is incredibly funny doing this, but it lands differently when those jokes are coming from the periphery rather than from the main character.
The soundtrack is still loaded with over-the-top rock songs (Foxy Shazam is a big musical presence this year). The fight scenes are still inventive while everyone works with a far more modest budget than Gunn gets in his movies. And the cast still has good chemistry. But there’s definitely a tone shift. And it remains to be seen in the concluding episodes whether Peacemaker is fully built to get more serious, or if Gunn would have been better off leaving the series primarily as an outlet for the kind of humor he can’t really put into movies about Superman or Batman.
The second season of Peacemaker debuts Aug. 21 on HBO Max, with episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first five of eight episodes.
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