Peacemaker Season 1

 2022, d. James Gunn, Jody Hill, Rosemary Rodriguez, and Brad Anderson - 8 episodes - HBO Max
series created by James Gunn

I loved James Gunn's The Suicide Squad.  I know it's not the best movie of 2021 but it's probably my favourite (in tight competition with Barb and Starr Go To Vista Del Mar).  It's the first film in a very loooong time I have actually sat an watched with the audio commentary, and I just ate up every other bonus feature on the blu-ray.  

That blu-ray exposed how James Gunn likes to make a film, how he likes to interacts with his performers, and how much fun everything seems on his set.  The technical challenges seem to be at an exceptionally high difficulty level, but with Gunn in command, everyone is game and giving it their all.  He seems to cultivate an atmosphere that rewards hard work with a good time.  But my biggest takeaway was how Gunn likes to play music during the scenes he's shooting.  

Like a lot of directors of the post-Tarantino era, cultivating a killer soundtrack is a major part of the film.  But for Gunn, it seems, he gets clearance on the music for his productions before he even starts shooting, because the tracks are used during the shoot to capture the mood, to get the total vibe of the scene across to the performers just as it does to the audience watching.  It's a tangible thing in his movies, and even more tangible in The Suicide Squad spin-off series Peacemaker.

The soundtrack is a mix of vintage 80's hair metal and the modern Eurotrash version of it, but it ever present throughout the series 8 episodes, starting with the completely unexpected, but never more welcome opening credits where the cast perform a choreographed dance on a pink-neon lit soundstage to "Do You Really Want To Taste It".  I cannot underestimate how much that opening sequence sets the tone for the entire series.  It's both hilarious and serious, silly and deadpan, tough yet vulnerable, aggressive and delicate.  The cast, all do their best, and some get it down more than others, but it doesn't matter.  It's charming as fuck, and it's endlessly watchable.  Watching Peacemaker week-to-week, I eagerly (Eagly?) looked forward to each instalment, but even more was just amped to watch the opening credits again, even though I can (and have) watched them outside of watching the show over and over.

But unexpected is kind of Peacemaker's whole deal. If you were to take one character out of The Suicide Squad to follow, John Cena's Christopher Smith would have been, like, fourth or fifth choice at best.  Cena certainly was entertaining as Peacemaker in the movie, but he was a raging asshole, and kind of one of those guys you find amusing only for so long.  There was a real big chance this was a huge miscalculation on Gunn's part.  But I've seen enough of Gunn's work to know that the man knows what he's doing.  More than anything, even more than the music, the action, the comedy, he finds the beating heart of his characters and stories.  This is the guy who got us to deeply love a talking raccoon and a living tree who only ever says the same three words (not his creations, but he adapted them for the masses into something beloved).

Peacemaker then digs into what makes Christopher Smith who he is.  Coming out of a coma after the events of The Suicide Squad Smith returns home to his abusive, racist father (who also happens to be his armourer) to get more weapons as well as his best friend, Eagly, his pet bald eagle.  But before he knows it, he's conscripted once again by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to work on a special assignment alongside John Economos and Emilia Harcourt (Steve Agee and Jennifer Holland, respectively, both returning from The Suicide Squad) with new recruit Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), who is, unbeknown to them, Waller's daughter.  They're operating to uncover the conspiracy behind Project Butterfly, an alien invasion that seems to have gone completely unnoticed.

Almost every character in this show is, somehow, amazing.  Christopher Smith is humbled by his experience from the film, having killed a good man, and having had his "peace at any cost" mantra challenged by that man's dying words.  Smith's backstory, the trauma he experienced as a child, and clearly the father he was raised by, have formed who he is, a man who has nothing but a pet bird and a cause.  That he's not a white supremist is a miracle, but it's clear his path here is one of realizing that maybe there is meaning in connecting with other people, and that using self-satisfying humour or abusive rhetoric to push people away isn't the course of action he wants to take anymore.  Cena is hilarious in the role, but also soulful.  He finds the humour and the pathos in the character, sometimes at the same moment, delivering one of Gunn's crushing lines (or even one of his own ad-libs) while his face or physicality betray the truth of the man.  

Adebayo is another gem of a character.  Being Amanda Waller's daughter, she's had training all her life to be a badass secret operative, but it's not anything she's ever been interested in.  Having lost her job recently, she took her mother up on an offer for work, and kind of regrets it immediately.  She connects with Smith in a way that nobody else has, because she sees his pain, she sees past and gets through his defence mechanisms almost instantly like nobody else has.

I could spend hours dissecting the cast of characters here, because they're all so richly formed. As someone pointed out on a podcast recently, it seems like every character, even the tertiary characters, all have their own lives and stories outside of the one we're seeing here.  They don't just exist to facilitate an end game, which is a far cry from the majority of stories told. 

Much of that exists in the form of Gunn's dialogue, which constantly takes off in unexpected ways, into frequently hilarious tangents that just as often reveal layers to the speaker as they do become weird non-sequiturs Vigilante, aka Adrian Chase -a neuro-atyipical, pretty much psychopath, who calls Peacemaker his best friend and follows him around like the hyperactive little dog to Cena's big dog - is the king of these in the series.

It's a comedy-action-scifi-superhero story that, just like The Suicide Squad, found complexity in its bad guys, well the butterflies at least, and in the end the mission of the butterflies reflects Smith's own mantra of "peace at any cost".  Smith's racist dad (Robert Patrick) is a whole other matter. 

As much as the story is about a group of disparate, isolated people coming together and finding, if not likeminded souls, companions who remind them that being emotionally cut off from the world is lonely and sad, it's also making a statement that some things in life are just hard to shake.  The teachings of a parent, the attitudes and unintentional thought processes, can haunt us, no matter how we try to distance ourselves from them.  It also, by the end, states that ugliness in the world, like racism, can't just be simply killed off.  It will linger and still haunt.  We may not want to acknowledge it, but it's there.

As I said, I eagly looked forward to Peacemaker each week, opening dance number and beyond.  It was a delightful romp from start to finish, and also thoroughly satisfying.  As much as I have really enjoyed all the Marvel Disney+ shows, they spend so much time universe building in them that I come out of them more excited for more than satisfied with what I got.  Here, if these 8 episode were it, I would feel satiated.  

But it's not it.  Season 2 has been greenlit, and I hope Gunn has the time and energy to crank out another season of scripts on his own.