So here I am, a full year and change after everyone else. I knew I was going to like it, and Wacky's gentle nudges to get me to watch it and telling me it was good mean it's been on the list for a while, and well, I just binge-watched the show in three days. This is pretty rare since even 2 hours of TV a day is a lot for me. I
REALLY liked it. I enjoyed the James Gunn
Suicide Squad (the first one was fucking terrible), but I feel this handily surpasses it in pretty much every way. I know it's a bit messy to compare a feature to a show, but
Peacemaker just does it better. The "11th Street Kids" in the show just work much better than the film's namesake for me.
John Cena is actually great. As I was watching the last episode, it dawned on me just how much he had to do. Obviously, he's playing the title character, but given how dialogue-heavy the show is and the emotional journey, comedic timing, and action that he had to do, it's... a lot. OK, he's not Daniel Day Lewis but he's pretty fucking good. This must have been a demanding shoot for him, and he absolutely crushes it. The Rock could never.
As a pro wrestling fan, I've had my eyeroll times with the "CENA WINS LOL" days, but he is a remarkable person, and I'm glad that he's getting proper critical acclaim for this because it's well deserved.
There is a lot of James Gunn brand humor on display and overextended dialogue scenes that follow a certain formula of absurdity and reactions to said absurdity. It works
most of the time, but there are points where it does get a bit overbearing and even a little samey. Luckily, when it does hit, which
is most of the time, it's genuinely funny stuff.
Murn's increasingly exasperated nature at the collection of morons he was trying to save the world with got me good.
Reading about how Vigilante was played by a 51-year-old (at the time) Chris Conrad for the first 5 and a half episodes before departing over "creative differences" is an interesting trivia piece from production. Going back and having to reshoot everything with Freddie Stroma must have been an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. I also feel the term "creative differences" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I wonder what actually happened.
Stroma, like Cena, killed it, and I felt everyone worked off each other really well and that the team all had fun scenes to do with each other. Everyone had funny interactions with everyone else, everyone had their hero moments, etc, and it made it easy to quickly start rooting for them as an ensemble. It's very well written and paced in that regard.
Can't not give a shoutout to Robert Patrick for playing "Dad of the Year" so well, and of course, Eagly. Surprisingly good CGI, which it needed to be or it just wouldn't have worked. Oh yeah, and James Gunn's wife is ridiculously hot. The lucky bastard.
Wow, I'm actually rambling on here. THE PLOT. It does it's job well enough. It's an interesting backdrop and vehicle for the characters, who are obviously the main attraction. It might have been a little heavy-handed with the messaging at the end, but whatever. The Justice League turning up late (well, Momoa and Miller) was a fun cameo at the end and basically capped off the untold joke of "why not just call Superman" that some of these extended DC stories have to contend with.
It's just a really good and FUN show, which we probably won't get a season 2 of because Gunn is busy rebooting the DCU, which a season 2 of
Peacemaker isn't going to be on a high priority list for, and if they do, it's going to be years before he has time for it unless he delegates it to someone else. So that sucks.
I did watch the intro for the show last year, and it's still great. I watched it all eight times in a row without skipping once.
SHOW GOOD.
