Peacemaker

The Weight of a Chrome Helmet

I had no interest in spending more time with Christopher Smith. In *The Suicide Squad*, he was basically a walking punchline: a chrome-helmeted nationalist brute who bragged about murdering anyone necessary in the name of peace. That was the joke. So when HBO Max decided he deserved an eight-episode series, my first reaction was: why? Why center the guy engineered to be the least lovable person in a room full of killers?



James Gunn, though, is weirdly good at rummaging around in rejected comic-book junk and finding a pulse. *Peacemaker* clears away the team noise and looks directly at the damage underneath Chris's bravado. Under the trash talk, the eagle, and the killing, he's just a frightened man still begging for love from a father built to withhold it. Gunn drops him into a black-ops crew full of other bruised people, including the brilliantly reluctant Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) and the sociopathic fanboy Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), then tells them to fight an alien butterfly invasion. It's a James Gunn show. You just accept the butterflies and keep moving. The sci-fi plot is mostly camouflage anyway. Writing for *Vulture*, Matt Zoller Seitz called it "the most sincere, straightforward, and anguished work he's done in the genre," and that sounds right to me.



The show only works because John Cena is willing to make all that bulk look fragile. He is built like a toy-aisle action figure, but the performance lives in his eyes and in the way those huge shoulders start to sag. Early on, Chris is alone in his trailer, blasting glam metal, stripping to his tighty-whities, and howling into a vibrator like it's a microphone. On paper, that's just a filthy joke. But Gunn lets it keep going until the bit curdles. Chris drinks, the music keeps pounding, and then his whole body starts folding in on itself. His chest caves, his face floods with panic, and Robert Patrick's terrifying white supremacist father seems to fill the room. He's not partying. He's trying to drown out his own head. Cena commits so hard to the sadness of it that the scene becomes almost uncomfortable to watch.



Brooks is the show's ballast. As Adebayo, she walks into this ridiculous genre setup with the body language of somebody who would have preferred a quiet office and a lunch break. No costume, no catchphrase, just tight shoulders and a permanent expression that says everyone around her has lost their mind. The slow, awkward friendship that grows between her and Chris is the gentlest thing in the series and probably the best. They're both children of toxic parents, both trying to figure out whether the poison sticks forever.

I'm still a little amazed by how well *Peacemaker* handles its own contradictions. It is vulgar, messy, self-indulgent at times, and drenched in gore. Plenty of the jokes are pure middle-school filth. But maybe that coarseness is part of the design. Beneath all the stupidity, the show keeps pressing on a grown-up question: what happens when the weapon realizes the hand holding it is wrong?