‘Peacemaker’ – ‘Better Goff Dead’ – Review

The mayhem keeps rolling forward in James Gunn’s Peacemaker and it’s now time for this gun-totting vigilante to gear up and get out into the field….with very interesting results.

Now firmly entrenched in his new mission, super-villain killer turned reluctant government agent Christopher Smith aka Peacemaker (John Cena) is given his first mission: assassinate a US senator who is secretly a ‘butterfly’. But if Peacemaker thought this mission was gonna be anything but normal, well, he was strangely mistaken. And things get weird very quickly.

So far in Peacemaker, we’ve been introduced to supervillain/wannabe superhero and the world’s biggest douchebag Christopher Smith/Peacemaker (John Cena), but we haven’t seen him out in the field yet. Yes, he has caused a whole heap of carnage, but that wasn’t a result of any kind of mission, that was just Peacemaker, well, being Peacemaker and now in Episode Three, ‘Better Goff Dead’ we get to see Smith in action, And there are some very surprising results. With ‘Better Goff Dead’ Gunn looks to open up the world and action of this series and along with some questionable actions from Cena’s Peacemaker we also get a whole heap of gore and carnage, And it’s delivered as only Gunn knows how.

We also come to see Peacemaker’s existential crisis have even more of an effect on his actions, and even when he comes close to the disgusting truth of what the butterflies are, and it is some seriously deranging horror courtesy of Gunn’s creative mind, he still has difficulty pulling the trigger. This lack of action on Peacemaker’s behalf also throws in the action and it’s here that we’re introduced to the leap-frogging martial arts assassin Judomaster (Nhut Le). Punches and kicks are thrown and it all goes to hell quickly, and it seems that Peacemaker’s conscience is starting to become a very real issue.

‘Better Goff Dead’ also firmly clarifies what the ‘Butterflies’ of ‘Project Butterfly’ are, and damn is it a horrifying sight! With a good helping of gore and full explosive power, James Gunn delivers a decent wallop of action to this third episode of Peacemaker and in the midst of all this carnage we come face-to-face with the reality of the ‘Butterflies’ and it’s a genuinely horrifying reveal. There is also a hell of a lot of questions left unanswered and we’re going to have to wait and see where all of this leads to. But I have a feeling it’s going to get very strange from here.

Peacemaker is about to lean into some very weird territory and whether this would-be hero can find the guts to stand up to a crazy new threat is still to be seen. But James Gunn has us wanting to watch more and I’m very keen to see where this goes from here.

Peacemaker is available on Neon and Sky Go.

Image: SKY TV