The problem with Peacemaker is John Cena's character seems like an adult Kyle Rittenhouse

Pajiba

Cena's Peacemaker/Christopher Smith character "reminds me of no one more than Kyle Rittenhouse, and it’s a comparison that smacks me in the face multiple times per episode," says James Field. "Do I mean Rittenhouse is good at heart? Hell no. Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer. He armed himself and went looking for trouble. He killed two people because he put himself in a situation far beyond his control and understanding. He made those choices. He’s also a product of his environment. He’s a young man programmed by his mother and hometown and then, after he murdered Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, thrust into an adulating conservative media spotlight he’s clearly too dim to see for the manipulative sham it is. Rittenhouse is, as Wayne describes Daryl on Letterkenny, so awkward. The kind of overenthusiastic guy everyone humors because having an actual conversation with him is too damned difficult. If he were a Marvel fan he’d spend hours on message boards arguing the minutiae of character biographies, but he chose to worship law enforcement instead. None of this excuses his actions. He’s still a murderer. And so is Christopher Smith. Peacemaker is who Rittenhouse would grow into given access to heavier weaponry and governmental carte blanche to murder more people. James Gunn — like many authors and filmmakers — takes fictional murderers and turns them into heroes. He did it with the Suicide Squad. He did it with Drax and Gamora. In Brightburn and Super he flipped that script, showing us the monstrous side of superheroes and vigilantes. I don’t think he intends anyone to admire Peacemaker. Quite the opposite. But a substantial percentage of the population will miss the subtext and see in Peacemaker an American hero, just like they do Rittenhouse. Wrapped in the flag and deluded by whitewashed US history classes, confident that whatever they do is the right course of action because they’re the ones doing it. Once I saw the resemblance it became impossible to ignore and colored everything on the screen."

ALSO:

• James Gunn says DC almost didn't allow Peacemaker to put Batman on blast: “I was very surprised, because they were not too fond of Peacemaker calling Batman a p*ssy,” Gunn told The Hollywood Reporter's TV's Top 5 podcast. “I’m like, ‘But he talks about all these other terrible things about all these other superheroes that are much worse than calling Batman a p*ssy.’ Not only that, Batman is the only one he makes a fair point about; everybody else he’s really just believing stuff that he read on the Internet. Everything that he believes is kind of nonsense, and Batman is the only one has a point of view on that makes any sense whatsoever.” In the end, the DC overlords “were great,” Gunn said. “They let me get away with what I got away with at the end of the day.”
• John Cena and Jennifer Holland discuss filming the opening credits dance sequence: “Man, (James Gunn) found a way to get people not to hit the ‘skip intro’ button. That’s a feat in modern entertainment engineering,” Cena tells The Hollywood Reporter. Holland adds: “When (Gunn) first told me about it, I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me about some sort of dance where everyone was going to be very stoic and kind of robotic. And I was like, ‘Cool! This is another one of those James Gunn things that you’re just going to have to see.’ But if you know James and you like his work and he tells you to jump, you’re going to say, ‘How high?’ So I was really stoked to take it on.”
• Watch Cena and his Peacemaker co-stars dance in the opening credits set to Wig Wam’s “Do Ya Wanna Taste It"