If you’ve been watching Peacemaker, you know the titular, anti-heroic douchebag has been having a rough time of it lately. If you haven’t been watching Peacemaker, good news — you don’t really need any context to enjoy this incredible moment from yesterday’s episode, “Murn After Reading.”
Basically, a melancholy Chris Smith (John Cena) ends the episode by sitting down at his piano and playing a solo cover of Motley Crue’s 1985 rock ballad “Home Sweet Home.”
What’s amazing is that really was Cena playing the piano himself, as Peacemaker director/creator James Gunn confirmed on Twitter:
For those of you asking, yes, that was really @JohnCena playing the piano version of Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home” in the latest episode of #Peacemaker. It has been added to the Peacemaker Official Playlist, or you can listen to it directly here: https://t.co/GTJPdiXHpe pic.twitter.com/sUNb2rlgFn
— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) February 4, 2022
Now, if you want to know why Smith was playing a cover of “Home Sweet Home”…
Not that anything’s gone particularly well for Peacemaker, but things got particularly dire in yesterday’s episode. “Murn After Reading” sees the police discover a diary in Smith’s trailer that frames him for murder (well, murders he committed because the victims were humans possessed by evil aliens, but the cops don’t know that). He also saw a guy execute three innocent cops in order to help Chris escape. Meanwhile, his team is still pointedly and awkwardly keeping him in the dark about just about everything, despite Chris knowing big secrets are being kept from him.
And during all this, he’s having a crisis of conscience about his role as Peacemaker, realising maybe he doesn’t want to murder men, women, and children on behalf of peace anymore. Basically, he’s not in a particularly good place at the moment — and he’d probably feel even worse if he knew his racist piece-of-shit dad Auggie (Robert Patrick) was also coming to kill him. All in all, it’s a perfect time for him to belt out a glam rock ballad, although I might have swapped it out for Poison’s “Something to Believe In.”
It’s a great scene, but I was already annoyed with John Cena for being good-looking and having excellent comic delivery, which strikes me as thoroughly unfair. Now that I know he can also play the piano, and well, it’s almost enough to make me stop watching Peacemaker in disgust. Almost.