Well, this is somewhat unexpected. While John Cena stole The Suicide Squad movie’s spotlight by portraying the biggest, stupidest, most lethal moron in the semi-elite Task Force X, it looks like HBO Max’s upcoming Peacemaker show will show us the melancholy behind all the idiocy and gunfire.
We got a hint of this in the first trailer for the show, released at October’s DC FanDome event, when Danielle Brooks’ Leota Adebayo mentioned “there’s something about him that’s… sad.” This new trailer leans into that hard — first, we get more of the rocky relationship between Peacemaker and his emotionally abusive father Auggie (a perfectly cast Robert Patrick). But then, the anti-hero defies Clemson Munn (Chukwudi Iwuji) to murder a bunch of kids without an explanation. It’s a noble choice by the antihero, but it looks like it’s also going to land him — and America, maybe — in hot water. Maybe that’s why we got so many shots of him looking forlorn and even flinching as he remembers a certain bit of gunfire.
It’s not really what I expected from the Peacemaker TV series, and it’s not what I really wanted from it, either. As Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante so aptly puts it, “Cut it out with the introspection. The mind is a den of scorpions better left running from, not towards,” especially when that mind is Peacemaker’s. However, if there’s anyone who’s going to successfully explore the emotional core of an imbecile who shoots first and asks questions never (well, almost never), that person is undeniably The Suicide Squad director James Gunn.
Peacemaker also stars Steve Agee as John Economos, Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt, Annie Chang as Sophie Song, Lochlyn Munro as Larry Fitzgibbon, Christopher Heyerdahl as Captain Locke, and Nhut Le as Judomaster. The show premieres on January 13 on HBO Max.
Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.