Summary
Creature Commandos still has lots of potential, but Episode 3 is a bit bogged down with trite political messaging, and Gunn is taking it too easy.
I still like Creature Commandos, and I still think it has a lot of potential, but Episode 3 made me wonder if the concept was being deployed more as a mouthpiece for tired political messaging than as a genuine story with its own value. “Cheers to the Tin Man” has its moments, but the underlying gag – Nazis are everywhere, even in the present day – is clear from the outset and never evolves beyond its most simplistic form. James Gunn has a lot of comedic aptitude and can manage a wacky ensemble like nobody’s business, but there’s a self-satisfied quality to some of the messaging here where his belief in the correctness of his own views – which, to be clear, I largely agree with! – has conned him into believing they’ll do on their own in the absence of anything else.
As if it wasn’t clear from the two-part premiere, each episode is clearly going to focus on a single member of the team while developing the overarching plot steadily in the background. In Episode 3 it’s GI Robot, which to be fair is the easiest lay-up possible for Gunn’s political gags, so I’m hoping it isn’t quite as prevalent as we move on to other characters. It’s going to be hard to get much anti-conservative commentary out of, say, The Weasel.
But in the meantime what we get is a hodgepodge of very obvious flashback sequences detailing GI Robot’s origins as a Nazi-killing weapon, while the gang races back to the royal castle to protect Ilana from Circe and the Sons of Themyscira. Then there’s a big blowout battle at the end, which is where things shine in my estimation.
GI Robot’s backstory involves being conceived during the war and then having little function after it beyond as a PR tool, which his moderate self-awareness didn’t make him ideally suited to. After that, he became a research subject and then a collector’s item. The fella who acquires him turns out to be a white supremacist who takes him to a meeting of like-minded “patriots”, all of whom GI Robot kills for being Nazis.
Creature Commandos still | Image via WarnerMedia
This is a perfectly serviceable joke but it’s really predictable and also Gunn at his most obviously smug. Kingsman also did it better, I think. Yes, we know, far-right ideology is eerily close to Nazism, but that’s not exactly a scathing analysis these days. You can’t move on X for similar takes. And a lot of the 20-minute episode is devoted to this gag while the present-day storyline – an illegal team of black ops monsters protecting a foreign sovereign state from extremists! – surely has more legs for incisive political commentary.
I dunno – I just feel like this is too easy for Gunn. It feels like more of a point-scoring exercise against people who call him woke on social media than something that exists for the betterment of the story being told. GI Robot worked better when his background was implied and his enthusiasm for Nazi-killing could have potentially led to funny mix-ups in the present-day sequences. Having this whole sequence makes everything too explicit.
There’s a bit of that elsewhere in Creature Commandos Episode 3 too. I really like Gunn’s stuff generally speaking, but he might be struggling with the format a little here. He’s retreating into a structure of setup-flashback-payoff in every episode that feels restrictive, instead of letting each character’s unique quirks determine their own story. The lurch away from the cliffhanger climax of the previous episode doesn’t sit well, since it doesn’t imply that much of what happens will be treated with any degree of seriousness. There’s a bit late on here in “Cheers to the Tin Man” where Weasel and Dr. Phosphorus maul Circe while Rick Flag Snr looks on in horror, but the entire production’s so deliberately wacky all the time that it doesn’t land with the kind of impact it’s hoping for.
We’ll see as we go, of course. But thus far I’m not sure about Circe – and certainly not the Sons of Themyscira, who’re all depicted as dopey, thuggish misogynists and are completely inept; yes, I know that’s the point – being a villain with legs for the long-term. Hopefully, some of the characters will offer up more interesting backstories with less obvious open goals for political points, and Gunn will flex his writing muscles. He’s almost uniquely talented at making silliness sing and finding legitimate emotion in even the most outlandish concepts, but thus far that latter aspect is what’s really lacking in Creature Commandos.
