With HBO Max’s ‘Peacemaker,’ writer-director James Gunn packs a gloriously goofy superhero parody and a sincere character study into one irreverent series. Alan Sepinwall’s review
In the movie, Peacemaker was an alt-right caricature, and ultimately an antagonist to the more sympathetic Squadders. Here, he is given friends, including Freddie Stroma as a fellow homicidal vigilante called, well, Vigilante, and Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Holland, Steve Agee, and Chukwudi Iwuji as spies who recruit Peacemaker to take down a mysterious threat to America.
Those moments of reflection wind up complementing the comedy rather than undercutting it. Peacemaker remains an insensitive moron much of the time, admitting, for example, in one episode that for years he believed his older brother’s explanation that ugly children were “butt babies” who came out of their mothers’ rear ends.
takes a fundamentally irreverent approach to the superhero genre as a whole and to DC Comics in particular. Peacemaker claims that Superman has a poop fetish and name-checks obscure comics characters like Bat-Mite and Matter-Eater Lad. Where Disney+ shows likeare cogs in a much larger Marvel storytelling machine, Gunn seems to have been left alone in his own filthy corner of the DC universe.
films, making for a striking contrast in production values whenever we get flashback clips from Peacemaker’s big-screen adventure. But Gunn remains an inventive writer and director of action even within these limitations, and each episode features at least one absurdly choreographed fight scene, whether it’s the lumbering Peacemaker struggling against the diminutive but quick Judomaster , or Peacemaker getting some graphically violent assistance from his pet eagle/best friend, Eagly .
Between the blood and guts, the slapstick, the political satire , and the musical digressions , there is a lot going on here. Yet the series functions as a sincere character study of its flawed hero — and the unfortunate souls who have to work alongside him — just enough for the joke to never quite wear thin.
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