“The Boys", move over: a review of the series “Peacemaker” - a cynical superhero from James Gunn
A witty and tragic spin-off of Suicide Squad: Missions Through, starring John Cena as a patriotic superhero who begins to question his ironclad beliefs.
After the events of Suicide Squad: Missions Bang Bang, Peacekeeper (John Cena) finds himself in the hospital - surprisingly, he is not killed by either a Bloodsport bullet or a building that has fallen on his back. An even bigger surprise awaits the hero ahead: after completing the treatment, the doctors release him on all four sides, and do not take him back to prison. To enjoy freedom and play with a hand-held eagle, however, the Peacekeeper will not be allowed for a long time. Almost immediately, Amanda Waller's special squad visits his trailer decorated with the colors of the American flag and re-recruits the cynical patriot. They have a new assignment: The Peacemaker must eliminate people from the mysterious "Project Butterfly" without asking too many questions.
It may seem strange to some that of all the characters in the new Suicide Squad, James Gunn liked the Peacemaker the most: at first glance, the hero is completely transparent, built on a single joke that he is ready to bring the world by any means - and it doesn’t matter how many men, women and children will have to be killed. The fact that at the end of the film he went over to the side of conditional "evil" makes him a very dubious protagonist of a solo spin-off. But Gunn never looked for the easy way out: he had already made the obscure Guardians of the Galaxy into new pop culture icons, and was able to build a great movie out of the ruins of the first Suicide Squad.
And if you dig deeper into his filmography, it becomes clear that the Peacemaker is the perfect Hannian hero. Ever since Super, the director has portrayed warriors in tights as mentally traumatized losers who go to fight villains for completely the wrong reasons. And the Peacekeeper in the series turns out to be just that. Broken, doubting, tormented by the ghosts of the past: the murder of Rick Flag, the death of a brother and the terrible image of a tyrant father, a redneck racist with the face of Robert Patrick, who in his youth operated as a villain named the White Dragon, and now designs high-tech weapons for his unloved son in his house . The peacekeeper is beaten, laughed at, and he is just trying to find the ground again, which life has knocked out from under his feet. From a symbolic character, he turns into a tragic hero who seeks redemption, while everyone around him demands that he remain a psychopathic killer.
It's easy to make the series sound like it's a dark exploration of the underside of the superhero life. Or a family drama where a character crippled by a cruel childhood finds himself in a group of the same renegades: Starlord had the Guardians, Bloodsport had the Suicide Squad, and Peacekeeper had the Waller team. Gunn juggles with very serious topics: here are the traumas of the past, and the problem of fathers and children, and the crisis of self-identification of a person who has become disillusioned with the simple imposed truths that he used to live. But the beauty is that he is still a witty writer first and foremost. Like his “Squad”, and the same “Super”, “Peacemaker” is an eccentric comedy that does not shun black humor, blood, guts and jokes below the belt.
It's this balance between genuinely dramatic and outright idiotic that makes Gunn's series so entertaining. The peacemaker is determined not by his psychological problems - let's say, there are enough of them on modern television - but by the fact that, despite his tragedy, he remains the same ridiculous idiot as in Suicide Squad. John Cena's eccentricity fits this image perfectly: even when he finds himself at the very bottom and just sobs, lying in bed, it's impossible not to laugh at him. The former wrestler in general seems to be truly shining as an actor for the first time: he has already proven that he can play bright secondary characters, but here Cena drags an entire eight-episode show.
By the way, it is worth mentioning that only four out of eight episodes were given to the press for review - and in theory, all the praise can break on the unsuccessful final episodes. But so far, Peacekeeper looks to be one of the most interesting superhero shows, made more interesting than the Marvel shows and written funnier than The Boys. It's a shame that with all this, he may well repeat the fate of "Suicide Squad", which failed loudly at the box office. But who knows, maybe this time Gann will find his audience. He himself, it seems, is sure of success - it’s not in vain that he has already begun to prepare the next series.
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