At any other point in the history of film and television, James Gunn would be plying his trade on lurid back-alley pulp – and loving every minute of it. But this former protégé of schlockmeister Lloyd Kaufman came of age as a director just as comic-book blockbusters were on the rise, which means he’s now regularly entrusted with budgets that would have made Cecil B DeMille shriek. 

Fortunately, the results have been terrific. In 2014, his Guardians of the Galaxy proved there could be more to the Marvel Universe than updating and repackaging established brands, while his thunderously entertaining 2021 reboot of The Suicide Squad was trash with substance – the kind of film for which you turn off your brain, only to realise the switch has been stealthily flipped back on again while you’ve been gurgling at the guts and gunk. 

His eight-part TV series Peacemaker (Sky Max) pulls off the same trick. Picking up more or less exactly where The Suicide Squad tied things up, it’s a crass, gunge-smothered action romp and a moving drama about the death of the American Century: come for the thick, gooey substances, stay for the substance. (It’s also a riotous workplace comedy into the bargain, on which more in a moment.) John Cena reprises his role as the titular beef-brained mercenary – real name Christopher Smith – who has again been let out of prison in order to assist a shadowy government department with an outlandish black op. This one’s called Operation Butterfly, and even the broadest details are at first amusingly opaque. 

In The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker’s thoughtless loyalty to the patriotic cause was one of his defining traits, and ended up ultimately turning him against his more anarchically minded comrades. Here, Gunn further chips away at the square-jawed facade, introducing a poisonously cruel father (a perfectly cast Robert Patrick) to provide a jumbo dose of formative trauma, and situating the action across a pointedly unsexy string of suburban and rural locales. 

If Marvel’s Captain America is the US’s fantasy self-image in superhero form, then Peacemaker is the unflinching 2022 self-portrait: a preening, pumped-up, ideologically incoherent egomaniac whose usefulness as an ally looks a good generation out of date. Yet you still can’t help but love him, in spite of all of the above.