James Gunn’s Creature Commandos kicks DC’s Gods and Monsters era off with a blood-soaked bang of comedy, action, and tragedy.
Plot: Set two years after the events of The Suicide Squad, Creature Commandos focuses on a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for missions deemed too dangerous for humans. With Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) as their puppetmaster, a ragtag group of monsters led by Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) travel to a foreign kingdom to protect Princess Ilana (Maria Bakalova) before learning there’s more at stake than the lives of her subjects.
Review: The age of Gods and Monsters is here with the release of James Gunn’s Creature Commandos, an animated monster mash that starts the DCU off with an explosion of blood, unexpected swings, and surprising twists as an ensemble of antiheroes shred their way through another one of Amanda Waller’s experimental missions. Kicking off with a two-episode launch, Creature Commandos takes the best elements of 2021’s The Suicide Squad and the fallout from 2022’s Peacemaker to continue laying the foundation of a new DC Universe worth investing in.
If there’s one thing James Gunn is incredibly good at, it’s mixing action, comedy, and drama into a compelling narrative with characters that present depth and complexity. He’s a filmmaker who excels at changing the mood on a dime. One moment, you’re gasping at the absurdity of his taste for hyper-violence, and the next, he’s hitting you with an emotional story beat that reduces you to near-tears. Despite a pacing issue or two at the start, Creature Commandos steadily evolves into an exciting first chapter of what I assume are great things to come.
Unsurprisingly, Creature Commandos is highly cinematic in presentation and pace. Gunn sets up pieces on the board before unleashing a gambit of ultra-violence. It was a bold move, to be certain. Launching the series with a two-episode premiere is wise, though I worry about going week-to-week with the rest. Creature Commandos has immense “extended film cut” energy despite being a television series. Your mileage could vary while waiting for significant action set pieces to pop off, but trust me when I say the forward momentum doesn’t let up after the explosive end of the second episode’s knock-down-drag-out brawl. Episode 3 sets a new pace, and episode 4 hit me like a hammer to the heart.
Creature Commandos boasts outstanding voice performances, with standouts Frank Grillo, Indira Varma, Maria Bakalova, and Zoe Chao. Each member of the Creature Commandos is more than what they appear, with Gunn taking a “villains aren’t born, they’re made” approach to the squad. Even though the Commandos are more like antiheroes, you get my drift. There are reasons these characters don’t give f**k about collateral damage, human life, or consequences. Once you arrive at the third episode of Creature Commandos, the show takes a “monster-of-the-week” approach to telling each team member’s origin story to significant effect. Gunn places a lot of emphasis on people viewing these characters as monsters. They’ve spent their entire lives as misunderstood castoffs from society, with tragedy and cruelty at the core of every milestone. You don’t walk away from that sort of treatment unscathed, and that’s part of what makes the Commandos so compelling.
For those looking for a little bit of ultra-violence, Creature Commandos delivers over-the-top action that results in deaths only animation can pull off. Gunn and the team at Warner Bros. Animation go balls-to-the-wall regarding creative and excessive deaths. Like The Suicide Squad, Creature Commandos takes a “no one is safe” approach to its body count. Be careful who you become attached to, be it a member of the team or otherwise.
If there’s an element of Gunn’s work you can count on, it’s his propensity for inspired needle drops. The soundtrack for Creature Commandos is Gunn’s most festive mix tape yet, with “Let’s start a riot” tracks from acts like Juke Baritone, Firewater, and Johnny Hollow. There’s even a too-appropriate and fun cue for “Coin-Operated Boy” by The Dresden Dolls. The collection of songs didn’t bang as hard for me as the albums for Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or The Suicide Squad, but the Creature Commandos tracklist goes for a definite vibe. You’ll either fall into the groove or feel like the DJ left his big CD wallet in the car. Both outcomes are correct.
Characters like The Bride, Dr. Phosphurus, Nina Muzursky, G.I. Robot, and even Weasel excel at becoming more complex after learning their origins; David Harbour’s Eric Frankenstein is an outlier. Eric hit me as a slightly one-note behemoth, as he’s little more than a hulking stalker of The Bride throughout the series. It’s important to remember the limits of emotion for Frankenstein’s monster. He can feel and articulate, but he lets his loneliness define him. Upon laying eyes on The Bride, he’s unable to focus on much else, pursuing her throughout the decades, never grasping her hatred for everything he represents. David Harbour brings a tragic comedy to Eric Frankenstein. Still, more is needed to save the character from feeling like a lovelorn battering ram with little bearing on the overarching plot. I would love to see Harbour play Eric Frankenstein in live-action for the DCU, as the character has more to offer beyond what we get here.
At the end of seven episodes, Creature Commandos does everything you expect from a Gunn ensemble project and more. Gunn’s knack for exciting character chemistry shines, and the animated medium offers multiple action set pieces that would break the budget on Day 1 if filmed in live-action. It’s easy to see why Gunn presented Creature Commandos as an animated series, though I’d jump at the chance to see these characters in the flesh. Thankfully, the DCU’s new structure leaves the door open for such opportunities. Well, some of them are dead now, but there are ways around that.
James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU is off to a great start with Creature Commandos as its amuse-bouche to larger projects like Superman, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and eventually, Swamp Thing. God, give me a Swamp Thing movie in the vein of Creature Commandos right now. My body is ready. With the Snyderverse in the rearview, fans willing to give Gunn and Safran’s turn at the wheel a fair shake will likely walk away from Creature Commandos feeling optimistic about the DCU’s future. Sure, there will be those who rush to social media and Rotten Tomatoes to piss in people’s Count Chocula cereal because there’s something they don’t like, but that’s the way it goes. I’ve never been more jazzed to see what else Gunn and Safran have in store for their era of the DCU because they care about making their time with the franchise memorable and meaningful. Let’s f**king go!
