Somehow, James Gunn Always Gets You: An Appreciation of “Creature Commandos” | MZS

Damn you, James Gunn. You got me again. 

That’s what I was thinking at the end of the fourth episode of the Max animated series “Creature Commandos.” Titled “Chasing Squirrels” and written by Gunn, the episode reveals the calamitous history of a bug-eyed, furry humanoid known as Weasel. There’s an obligatory early scene where the Commandos’ leader, Rick Flag, Sr. (voiced by Frank Grillo), is introduced to his future squadron in a high-tech prison. We can’t see Weasel’s face because he’s licking his own crotch. 

Weasel can’t speak. He can only make animal noises (supplied by actor Sean Gunn, James‘s brother). Weasel is not very smart nor self-aware, and in the first three episodes of the season, he’s treated as comic relief. But the end of this episode still made me tear up because that’s the kind of storyteller James Gunn is: the kind who can make you cry over a crotch-licking weasel. 

Gunn wrote and executive-produced every episode of the show’s first season. He’s a master of self-aware, jokey, but ultimately sincere Pop Art, the heart of which is a melodrama sucker punch that arrives after a long spell of mayhem and silliness. You’re lulled into thinking you’re watching a light adventure—usually a “bunch of eccentrics learning to work together on a dangerous mission” story with smart-alecky banter between thoughtfully sketched characters and inventive action sequences (often timed to a counterintuitive needle-drop). And then, somehow, he tears your heart out. Again.

Like the other episodes of “Creature Commandos,” “Chasing Squirrels” cross-cuts between the Commandos’ present-tense mission to the nonexistent country of Pokolistan to kill its leader, Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova) and the origin story of a team member. In this case, it’s Weasel, who was imprisoned for killing eight children. The flashbacks reveal that Weasel is innocent. He was actually trying to save the children from a fire that they accidentally started in the basement of a school, but because he lacks the power of speech, he couldn’t explain himself. Gunn and episode director Simon Liu unleash a tsunami of misery as Weasel fails to save even a single child and is dragged off by cops while wailing in agony and trying to claw his way back to the burning school. When the story returns to the present, Weasel flinches in his sleep, reliving the catastrophe in dreams, and an onlooker says he’s probably chasing squirrels. 

Nobody making movies or TV is better at using the wiseass action comedy template as a Trojan Horse for operatic melodrama. From the “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy to 2021’s “The Suicide Squad” (which is supposedly a sequel to the 2016 “Suicide Squad,” no article, but plays like a stealth reboot) through “Peacemaker” (essentially an epic bummer backstory for John Cena’s “The Suicide Squad” character, ending on a redemptive note), Gunn has taken the audience to the crying room plenty of times. (Will he do it again with “Superman”? Sure as sunrise.)

Think of the scene in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” when Peter Quill is told that his father—aka Ego the Living Planet—gave cancer to Peter’s sainted mother to spare her the sadness of missing him, and Peter explodes with a rage beyond anything the series had prepared us for. Or the scene in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” (also a tragic backstory flashback) where Rocket Raccoon’s best friend is shot in cold blood by their mutual creator, The High Evolutionary, and Rocket stands rooted to one spot and unleashes a primal scream so raw that it seems to have torn through the screen from our world. It’s the scream of a witness to violence so senseless that it broke them.

Or think of the scene in “The Suicide Squad” where John Cena’s Peacemaker takes aim at another character, Ratcatcher 2, and you see that he hates himself for being tasked with killing her but is going to do it anyway because he’s an obedient servant to his masters. Gunn told me in an interview that he wrote Cena his own series because of the “incredibly sad, vulnerable” look in Cena’s eyes as they filmed that moment. The resultant spinoff is about a credulous manchild so scarred by his violent racist father that he embraces the conscienceless “black ops” parts of government as an acceptable father substitute. “Peacemaker” has several heart-ripping scenes. The saddest is a quiet one where Peacemaker plays all of “Home Sweet Home” on an out-of-tune piano. It’s a beautiful interlude, even if you know nothing about the character’s story. And if you do know, it’s a killer.

The Creature Commandos are a continuation of the Suicide Squad by other means, conscripting non-human prisoners to get around a law banning the use of human prisoners in suicide missions.  It’s a perfect format to unleash a gallery of James Gunn eccentrics who somehow learn to work together, even though half of them can barely communicate at all, and the rest are so hardened by their awful experiences that they’ve given up on happiness. 

Dr. Phosphorous, aka Eric Sartorious, was a scientist working on a cancer cure funded by a mobster, who ultimately turned on him, framed the doctor for the murder of his family, and forced him inside the chamber he’d created, where he was cooked with radiation that gave him his deadly powers. The jaunty recreation of Dr. Phosphorous taking over the mobster’s empire (which includes a dance sequence evoking the axe gang in “Kung Fu Hustle“) is juxtaposed with melancholy images of the character visiting his one-time home in the present, contemplating mementos of the paradise he didn’t appreciate and that his hubris helped destroy. 

The Bride (Indira Varma), as in “of Frankenstein,” was created as a mate for the doctor’s first monster (David Harbour), but she got one look at him and screamed. The heartbroken creature then spied on her while she had sex with their mutual creator (a disturbingly Oedipal image of exploitation) and assuaged his pain by killing the doctor and putting his corpse on display for the Bride. The Bride is a hard-bitten badass elsewhere in the series, but in her flashbacks, we see how comparatively powerless she was at the beginning of her existence, and how she was exploited by her creator and then hounded across the centuries by Eric, a seven-foot tall whiny incel who thinks that wanting something means it should be his. In the present tense, a sex worker in a brothel is beaten by a sadistic, superpowered John. The Bride rips the man’s heart from his chest—literally doing to him what Eric metaphorically did to her by murdering the doctor and what James Gunn does to the audience.

G.I. Robot (also voiced by Sean Gunn) is a machine programmed to kill Nazis in World War II. He’s discovered decades after the war by a neo-Nazi antique dealer named Sam Fitzgibbon (voiced by Rooker, one of James Gunn’s go-to players) and is sent to prison for machine-gunning Sam and a roomful of fellow fascists. The tragedy of G.I. Robot is subtler and plays out on what you might call an installment plan: scene by scene, it gradually sinks in that the tragedy here is that G.I. Robot will never know what tragedy is. His character can’t understand anything but his mission, and only in the simplest of terms, and is therefore (like other characters) a kind of child, adrift in a universe so indifferent to human suffering that even the most brilliant adults can’t explain its machinations.

Eric Frankenstein seems like he’s being positioned as a permanent antagonist for the group after becomes convinced that the Bride and Flag are lovers. But after a brief and pathetically mismanaged attempt at friending Flag, he seems more of an unthinking bringer of chaos, misunderstanding or ignoring all attempts to civilize him. He is a hulking perpetual adolescent, narcissistically injured at every turn, fixated on a woman who would rather die than submit to him. 

The tearjerker moment in Eric’s subplot is a grotesque emotional inverse of the others, revealing that he’s even more broken and soul-sick than we thought: realizing he must leave his adoptive mother, a kindly old hermit woman if he is to chase the Bride again, Eric kills her. Is this a twisted attempt to relieve his caretaker of her presumably inconsolable sadness (like Ego giving Peter’s mother cancer) or an unconscious externalization of the idea that if she isn’t taking care of Eric, she might as well not exist?  A third scenario, that Eric doesn’t know why he did it and doesn’t think it was wrong, may be the saddest of all. He treats Flag the same way he treated his adoptive mother: out of compulsion, or maybe just habit. Here, as elsewhere in the series, tragedy doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

Nina Mazursky, the fish woman voiced by Zoe Chao, gets the culminating tragedy in the series finale, trying to kill Princess Ilana (whose character is the subject of a James Gunn quadruple switcheroo–we think she’s good, then evil, then good, but it turns out she’s evil). The character’s innocence and essential harmlessness (compared to the others) would seem to mark her as the one who’ll set everything right. But she turns out to be a humanoid version of what the writer-director, in an interview with me for Vulture, “Chekov’s sh***y gun,” after the drama principle that if you’re going to introduce a gun in the first act, it needs to be fired at the end. For James Gunn, the weapon is often a source of surprise, either pleasant or unpleasant: it jams or explodes or gets dropped off a cliff, and the heroes must achieve their goal some other way. That the sweetest, most trusting character in the group gets eliminated so pointlessly is wrenching for the viewer but very on-point for this filmmaker.

Liu and the series’ other episodic director, Matt Peters, have perfected a visual language that treats the juncture of past and present like a turned page in a comic book. They often use the black frames created by characters getting too close to the “camera” to create transitional cuts, and suggest that the character we are leaving and the character we are joining are similar, or linked in ways we don’t yet comprehend. Between the careful arrangement of bold but simple compositions and the furiously kinetic, at times abstract staging and editing of action (complete with blurred frames and tilted angles), we may feel as if we are perusing an intricately drawn comic on paper, admiring how the story’s narrative architecture has been made visible through design. 

Rather than dry out the story’s wet-eyed emotionalism, Gunn’s regular-as-clockwork flashback structures establish a ritualistic, at times parable-like rhythm that ennobles the characters’ suffering. These poor creatures are prisoners of conditioning and trauma, resisting their fates with the fervor of the Bride resisting Eric’s advances. The tragedies feel inevitable, and that makes them hit harder. The show is a crystal box with a bloody heart inside. I’m glad it’s been renewed for a second season, even though it’s difficult to imagine how it could top the one that just ended.