‘The Peacemaker’ enshrines the James Gunn formula as the most stimulating thing that has happened to DC superhero cinema

We talked about it in connection with ‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘The Boba Fett Book’: it is much more interesting to look for heroes and antiheroes in the footers of the canon. Often the secondary characters, not so constrained by the narrative conventions of heroes and villains, are more interesting than the traditional protagonists and their nemesis. And James Gunn knows a long time about that subject.

We already verified it in his two ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, where turned semi-forgotten characters from the Marvel Universe into one of the MCU’s most beloved groups, brimming with charismatic characters who have already become icons of the franchise, such as Groot or Rocket Raccoon. In DC he is carrying out a more personal and less complacent work, and that connects with the best of his career: the superb pre-MCU superhero satire ‘Super’.

The powerful and contradictory appeal of ‘The Peacemaker’ had already been felt by Gunn in ‘The Suicide Squad’, the lucky sequel to David Ayer’s terrible ‘Suicide Squad’, and that made a clean slate with that first and failed one snyderización of a group of DC villains. Keeping the inevitable Harley Quinn, Gunn grabbed a group of disastrous anti-heroes from the house, such as Ratcatcher 2, King Shark or Rick Flag and injected them with an astonishing charisma. The result was not overwhelming at the box office, but creatively returned to DC some of the sympathy that the Zack Snyder style refuses to bestow on its heroes.

And that is what Gunn transferred to ‘The Peacemaker’, which premieres HBO Max with three initial episodes that cThe adventures of the hick played by John Cena where the film left off directly continue. He survived the fateful end that the film destined for him and reluctantly returns to work for the Government, this time with a new mission under the code name Project Mariposa that starts at the top: with an assassination.

Pure James Gunn

James Gunn has been in charge of writing all the episodes of the series and directing practically all of them, so We can understand ‘The Peacemaker’ as a more or less unofficial sequel to ‘The Suicide Squad’. And the truth is that the Gunn seal is everywhere: ultraviolence, swear words, cartoonish characters, funny and abundant sex, compassionate look towards social waste (but not the Nazis, those Gunns do not even give water) and terrible numbers musicals, here in the best header for a superhero series we’ve seen in a long time.

And of course, take advantage of the series leftovers from the DC catalog. In these first three episodes he recovers not only the Peacemaker himself, a Charlton hero who was later acquired by DC and who has had several incarnations as a ridiculous vigilante to the limit, as well as being the inspiration for The Comedian of ‘Watchmen’. There is also the infamous Judo Master and Vigilante, a Punisher-style vigilante who had a glorious and very murky stage in the eighties with scripts by Marv Wolfman, and who Gunn uses to put in solfa the very concept of “urban vigilante” and its implicit ridiculousness.

At the moment this start runs like the concise, well-oiled product Gunn has accustomed us to. His vision of the author prevails over any other consideration and we do not find that annoying sensation of interchangeable and / or filler episodes that there is in the worst moments of the Disney + Marvel series. This is a series with a clear goal and global vision, not approved by a committee of marketing strategists, and it shows.

It shows not only in Gunn’s portrayal of heroes and villains, but in things like the action sequences, creative and extraordinarily well shot (there are some sequences with stunts in chapter 2 edited in the oriental style, that is, light years away from the confusing hodgepodge of Marvel medium shots). ‘The Peacemaker’ is not only violent and corrosive, but an aesthetic and conceptual shock to so many television heroes one piece. The only problem: there is only one James Gunn at the moment.