Peacemaker: A Calibrated Series, by James Gunn and John Cena

Foreword: This review focuses on the first episodes of the series.

Another foreword: it's spoiler-free, but be careful anyway

Thrown out of Marvel Studios, until things calm down, the situation becomes clearer, James Gunn decided a few years ago to accept the outstretched hand of Warner Bros. to come to the aid of DC Films productions. The entity was then at a crossroads, with the desire to turn the Zack Snyder page, and to capitalize on the unexpected success of the first Suicide Squad by trying not to repeat the same mistakes (one time, Deadshot or Gotham City projects Sirens had even been considered). Gunn will offer himself to take over this team of second knives, with a huge facelift: both a sequel, both a reinvention, his project would be based on a new team modeled on his own obsessions.

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Namely, the magnificent losers, the loners who have never been able to trust, the traumatized in search of a new family. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, the idea was to do James Gunn, stupidly, with the characters from the house opposite. The project is then launched, the team assembled, and the film ready to be launched. But from there, two things will happen. On the one hand, Gunn binds a solid friendship with John Cena, interpreter of the Peacemaker, a character described as an absurd parody of Captain America - or a caricatural decal of the US Agent if the US Agent was a kid from fifteen years trapped in the body of a hypertrophied bodybuilder strangely wedged in valves of zguègues. The two jokers will continuously interact during the filming of The Suicide Squad to flesh out this anti-hero, responsible for the reversal in the last third of the scenario. On the other hand, the pandemic strikes. And, with considerable free time on his hands, while he finishes editing the film from home confinement, Gunn is once again approached by Warner Bros. for a second project.

The studio is looking to compose a catalog of exclusives for the young platform HBO Max and, convinced by the first images of The Suicide Squad, offers the filmmaker to produce a television series for it. He had planned to take a break between the end of the previous shoot and the start of Guardians 3, but, stuck at home and with nothing better to do, he finally decided to accept and got to work on the film. writing and pre-production of the Peacemaker project, spin-off or continuation of the feature film articulated around Christopher Smith, still played by the good John Cena. A series of fortuitous coincidences - with an astonishing starting point, an army of pissed off Trumpists who, by seeking to oust the director, will above all have allowed him to find even more work - which today allow Warner Bros. to communicate on the first series of canon superheroes in their universe, as if to catch up with Marvel Studios and the empire built around the Disney+ platform. Believe in your dreams: write disgusting tweets, and maybe in ten years you will be offered a job.

Go to war to live on rue de la Paix

The Peacemaker series picks up a few months after The Suicide Squad film, synced to the post-credits scene that heralded Christopher Smith's survival from the events of Corto Maltese. Convinced that everyone has forgotten him, and out of his convalescence, the character flees to return home. In the county of Charlton (in reference to the publishing house where his first adventures were published), towards a small town in the Midwest supposed to represent deep America. The hero is however quickly overtaken by a small team formed by Amanda Waller to exploit his talents as a professional killer: Peacemaker, along with agents Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) and Economos (Steve Agee) as well as the leader of game, Clemson Mern (Chukwudi Iwuji), will have to assassinate an American politician, supposed member of the mysterious Butterflies Project. Two of the members of this team are back after The Suicide Squad, punished for knocking out Waller and preventing the death of Task Force X during the fight against Starro. Charlton County is also home to more personal memories for Christopher Smith: his father, played by Robert Patrick, and the Vigilante, a sort of doting little brother by adoption, who thinks he's a superhero. Given his track record vis-à-vis the Donald Trump electorate, the choice to focus on Peacemaker says perhaps more about the direction James Gunn intended than the exposition presented in the first episode. Already, because the director draws on different interpretations of the character to compose this original reading, starting with that of the Blue Beetle series, more muscular, more American. The aesthetics and the lexical field developed around the version camped by John Cena evokes these United States of the Republican camp. Smith represents a heroism compatible with this mentality located on the right of the political spectrum. Military, climatosceptic, reduced to the lifestyle of "white trash", these poor populations often close to mobile home neighborhoods, the character was raised by an openly racist father, and less interested in justice than in armed insurrection and the elimination of minorities or descendants of immigrants. Peacemaker also has his own pet, Eagle, an eagle from the bald eagle family that just happens to be the official emblem of the United States. This arsenal of referents, crossed with a writing that allows itself to drift towards racist or homophobic humor - assuming that the characters in question are bastards, the series allows itself to place these markers, from the moment where the rest of the environment assumes the discomfort provoked (à la Michael Scott) or the filthy aspect of the process - Peacemaker pushes his parody of Captain America further, with John Cena wearing his hair like Arnold Schwarzenegger and a father in transfer of movements of the far right of the present, at Unite the Right or QAnon. Which is not a betrayal on paper: during the migration of the character of Charlton to DC Comics, screenwriter Paul Kupperberg had posed the idea that Christopher Smith was in fact the son of a former military officer. Germany smuggled into the United States. However, because too much time has passed since the Second World War, or because the modalities of Nazism are expressed differently in the present, Gunn modernizes, going towards the closest referent in the immediate environment. The series inserts also a theme on sexual harassment, daily or routine, through the prism of the character of Harcourt, and an openly lesbian character. And before drawing the usual panoply of "ah yeah so they politicized my superhero commando' raised by a Nazi who kills for world peace", calm down: the bulk of the series is more about a festival of gags and an arsenal of strong action scenes only on an openly declared statement. Gunn just decided to play fair, with a more right-leaning Star-Lord decal to better deconstruct his own parody of the Patriot Avenger. The two characters have a lot in common. Like Michael Rooker's Yondu with Robert Patrick's August Smith, two scumbags unable to properly raise a child - the child in question happens to be, in both cases, a grown-up a music fan, a big thirty-five-year-old child incapable of forging solid bonds, a big obsessed with all things "cool" and a blundering idiot surrounded by more serious or more competent people. Except that, in the case of the Marvel Studios character, Gunn had to stick to a sharper moral spectrum. A little crafty, a little loser, Star-Lord was still a hero. On the other hand, Peacemaker is an authentic murderer, obsessed and idiot in full consciousness. A more vague compass, which allows the director to go towards what interests him: a cinema (well, a series) of a more abnormal genre in which the hero appears at the start as a finished moron, then as an assassin who is finally quite sympathetic . Without forgetting the great leitmotif of James Gunn's career: trauma, loneliness, the broken teenager.

Peacemaker? what a joke

The scenario of these first three episodes allows us to put the character's choices in the film The Suicide Squad into perspective - and to understand why the director actually decided to take an interest in him. Beyond the resemblance to Peter Quill, formed in the same mould, and his desire to write about the America of fans of guns and patriotic symbols, the filmmaker clearly wants us to appreciate a figure he had done everything to make it hateful in its first attempt. An exercise that goes through a more human writing, with some beautiful sequences (especially for the character of Danielle Brooks, immediately endearing), and many, many gags.

Gunn deploys his talent for nonsense writing from the first dialogue, with an MIT physicist inexplicably converted into a hospital janitor who loves green plants. The valves will then follow one another at a steady pace, in a series where all the stars, with the notable exception of Harcourt, operate within the standards of the comic register: big children, incapable of remaining serious over an exchange of more than two replicates. The bulk of the gags come less from the visuals than from the dialogue, in a series that takes directing seriously and leaves little room for slapstick humor, except in the case of a few flashes. Like the credits, a parody of musical comedy or neon rock opera where the stars lend themselves to a brilliant second-degree metafictional exercise (the kind of credits you don't want to skip, but not necessarily for the same reasons as Succession, Game of Thrones or Mad Men). Corto Maltese). Gunn is also very comfortable with the duration effect: the scenario sometimes insists heavily on the same gag, which has the effect of amplifying the effect or trapping the spectator in the same laughter, but will also have the failure to prolong a sequence that will seem long or heavy if you do not adhere to the joke in question (shady circles speak of the "Lighthouse on" effect). Gunn enjoys having free rein in the comfort of an adult classification, far from the limits posed by the normative register of Marvel Studios. Like a kid far from the supervision of his parents in a candy store, the filmmaker explodes in this world where everything can break, where everything is parodic and where everything can go further. The characters can swear, the jokes are often confined to skimming below the belt, and this critique of normal racism or the Peacemaker's peculiar upbringing also allows Gunn to go for dirtier gags. , as long as the lighthouse calls "not to be reproduced in society" remain activated. The series exudes freedom of tone, by a genre fan with a greasy humor who can finally have fun blowing everything up and pushing his obsession with big teenagers further. What can have the defect of its quality of pure personal product: more sanitized productions seduce by raking wide, where this series asks to adhere to the general delirium. The fights are generally quite violent, with bloody knife fights or sometimes dry murders, a hero who takes it hard and never seems invincible or frankly superhuman. Without falling into the trap of comparison, Peacemaker proves that the model was possible, without sacrificing humor, writing or general quality, to entertain with a character as funny as his colleagues in the house opposite, but where the author at the head of the project does not seem to have been crushed by the system of producers. And where the visual and sound criteria, the ambition and the shot values ​​once again surpass the simple formatted commissioned product: at a more restricted level, Peacemaker is up to the level of James Gunn's cinema, with relatively reduced means which evoke these beginnings, more economical, in smaller productions.

Peace-Shake-That-Money-Maker!

The most obvious example of this proximity is to be found in the choice of soundscapes. Peter Quill had his cassette player, Christopher Smith has his turntable. Known for making films in the hope of making playlists, James Gunn does not deviate from his habits with a relatively discreet original soundtrack (by Clint Mansell) against music drawn from his own discophilia, on a more rock tone, less pop than in the case of Guardians of the Galaxy, to stick to the atmospheres of this deep America. The musical aesthetic animates and dresses the series, the characters and the rhythm of the scenes, like another leitmotif of a director unable not to make his main character dance on the slightest project. On the directing side, the series is again a notch above the flat formalism of most modern superhero productions, to sail towards other referents (in the tragicomedies, if the guts Barry remains difficult to surpass, the style gravitates towards the same production values ​​as a good Netflix series, à la Sex Education, stuffed with color filters to nourish the warmth of the compartmentalized atmospheres and the pop spirit of a project out of the ordinary. weather). Gunn has fun using Eagly as yet another mascot à la Groot or King Shark, both to nurture his character by necessarily making him more human through his love of bugs, and both as the marker of a constant absurdity in every scene where he appears. The eagle comes for example to break the surprise of the end of the first episode, where to introduce an overlay of debility in the famous scene where Vigilante and Peacemaker have fun shooting empty bottles in the forest. The series uses a few slow motions here and there, and still lacks a standout action scene in the style of The Suicide Squad's Rebel camp infiltration or Harley Quinn's escape, whereas these first three episodes are more there to set the record straight. The only really interesting fight literally breaks with the spirit of the action series marked superheroes - far from the usual panoply of jumping kicks and great leg movements by heroes of which one guess they know kung fu. This first fight in an apartment is immediately more violent, more visceral and also dirtier, by the choice to make the hero fight naked (understand: without his equipment - or understand: naked, because he is almost naked ), between the crossroads of the filmmaker's strengths, the kind of sequences that freezes a style. The direction of the actors in general works, no one does anything and everyone seems to get along well, to react well, to place themselves well in relation to the tempo of the dialogues. Special mention to Danielle Brooks, as pleasant as when she was discovered on Orange in the New Black. A little less convincing, Steve Agee struggles to get out of the archetype of the annoying nerd of this kind of productions very comfortable in these stereotypes. Iwuji gets a little less screen time, although his rather interesting character takes a step back from Amanda Waller and participates more actively in group dynamics by following his men into the field. Cena plays the card of sincerity to the fullest, never interior or withdrawn, to compose his child who plays the superhero, unable to operate without his costume like a kid who would take a game too seriously, unable to assume his flaws, and unable to behave like an adult despite the weight of his decisions. As if the death of Rick Flag had revealed anything to this former "villain" - that this was not all a fancy dress party and that the cool side of the murders or the arsenal of big guns caused real victims behind this plastic soldier game. The actor is very convincing, perfectly at ease with the writing and what the director expects of him - obviously having fun with this constant self-parody of his former roles as tough guys. Hollywood. Note that the first three episodes released this week were all directed by James Gunn, which will not be the case for the next two, filmed by Jody Hill and Rosemary Rodriguez, to see for a possible break in rhythm. good introduction, in the colors of a filmmaker who is beginning to be used to operating in the landscape of costumed heroes, Peacemaker fulfills all its promises. Funny, rhythmic, entertaining, the product of a successful reflection on what the public generally expects from this kind of project without falling into the trap of "format" or stylistic refinement. Better, James Gunn, in this television series narration which allows you to go more slowly, takes the time to present and get to know his character through small comic skits, one flaw at a time. Still lacking a memorable action sequence, or more background plot answers, but on the scale of what the competition was able to offer, Peacemaker has more to do with Loki than The Falcon & the Winter. Soldier: a project where we feel the hand of a captain, with demanding visuals, a team that gets along well and deliberately vague moral markers to appreciate the essential qualities of genre cinema - having fun with dirty. The director signs a kind of curious love letter to those who had tried to censor him the day before yesterday, to the Republican camp who opposed what a Marvel author gives in political commitment, pushing the sliders more far. A logical sequel to The Suicide Squad, more economical.