Here Is How Peacemaker Survived Bloodsport’s Shot

Being a member of the Suicide Squad means being the most expendable human being (or creature) possible. The idea of this superhero, or supervillain team, to be exact, is pretty simple. The team consists of incarcerated villains who are recruited by the secret government program to be sent on a mission where they’ll most likely die. And if they try to escape, they still die. Not really a team you’d want to get an invitation for. In 2021’s ‘The Suicide Squad,’ we witnessed a confrontation between two members, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and John Cena’s Peacemaker, which ended with Peacemaker being shot in the neck. However, the post-credit scene revealed that Peacemaker survived, and in this article, we’ll try to explain how.

The movie’s post-credit scene revealed that Peacemaker was found in the rubble, with his heart still beating. In the first episode of the spin-off series, the doctor revealed that the only thing that had to be replaced was Peacemaker’s clavicle, and she called him “the luckiest man alive.” It’s unknown what part of his neck was hit by Bloodsport’s bullet that he managed to survive, given that neck is one of the most sensitive parts of the human body.

In case you were closely following everything DCEU at the time, you already knew that Peacemaker survived the shot since his spin-off series ‘Peacemaker’ was already announced. However, the movie ended with his defeat in a shooting duel against Bloodsport, who defeated Peacemaker due to firing a smaller bullet that went through Peacemaker’s. Although he was hit in one of the most sensitive parts of the human body, he was lucky enough just to fall into a coma and eventually fully recovered. In the rest of this article, we’ll dig deeper into Peacemaker’s story, his rivalry with Bloodsport, and what led to their showdown that Peacemaker survived despite being defeated.

The rivalry between Peacemaker and Bloodsport was one of the highlights of ‘The Suicide Squad.’

As we all know, the very first debut of the Suicide Squad team was in 2016’s movie written and directed by David Ayer. The movie received a negative response from critics and audiences, but it was a big commercial success, with over $747 million earned worldwide. That ensured that a sequel had to happen, but some things needed to be changed due to a negative critical result.

That’s when James Gunn stepped in and decided to make a standalone sequel with a couple of characters from Ayer’s movie but also introducing a whole new lineup. Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman, and Viola Davis reprised their roles from Ayer’s movie, while a good new stack of characters was introduced for the first time on the big screen, including Bloodsport, played by Idris Elba and Peacemaker, played by the WWE star John Cena.

Gunn wrote Elba and Cena’s characters as basically the same but very different characters. Both of them were described as characters that can make a deadly weapon out of anything they hold in their hands, and both of them had fathers who were soldiers that trained them to kill from the moment they were born. That rivalry is perfectly presented in the forest scene where Peacemaker and Bloodsport compete with who does the killing better, and the climax happens in a shooting duel after Peacemaker kills Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag.

The movie’s plot twist happens when Rick Flag realizes that Task Force X wasn’t sent to Corto Maltese to destroy Project Starfish but to cover up the US government’s involvement in the project. Disgusted by what the government he works for was involved in, Flag decides to share the records with the press to expose the project, but Peacemaker stops him and kills him since Waller gave him a special task to make sure the records won’t go public.

After Flag’s death, the drive was picked up by Ratcatcher 2, who Peacemaker plans to kill as well, and he would have if Bloodsport didn’t arrive just in time to save her. After a build-up that kind of reminds us of duels in old-school Westerns, two master marksmen pulled their triggers. Both bullets were fired with incredible precision, but since Bloodsport’s bullet was smaller, it managed to go through Peacemaker’s bullet and eventually land in his neck. We don’t know if a smaller bullet going through a bigger one obeys the laws of physics, but the scene was really cool.

What happened to Peacemaker after Bloodsport shot him? Is there a medical explanation for how he survived?

After he was shot in the neck, Peacemaker was conscious for long enough to ask how Bloodsport managed to defeat him, and the answer for simple: smaller bullets. After that, Bloodsport and the rest of the team saved the people of Corto Maltese by killing Starro the Conqueror. If we didn’t know that Cena was set to return as Peacemaker in his spin-off series, it would’ve been easy to believe that Peacemaker was dead.

The movie’s post-credit scene served as the prelude to the series when Emilia Harcourt and John Economos visited Peacemaker in a hospital. It was revealed that he was saved from the rubble where Bloodsport left him for dead. The next thing we know after that is the first scene in the ‘Peacemaker’ series when Peacemaker wakes up from his coma, and the doctor explains to him that his clavicle was replaced, and that was the only medical intervention needed for him to recover.

The neck is one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. It connects the head with the rest of the body, and we usually see in movies and tv shows that cutting the throat is a quick way to die since it quickly prevents blood flow to the brain. However, when a superhero movie or a tv show needs a character to survive, there’s nothing that can kill him, regardless if that can or can’t be explained with any logic. As we said, sometimes you just need to get along with it.

After all, even though we probably all hated Cena’s Peacemaker after he killed Flag, we can be happy that he survived because that brought us the terrific spin-off series in which Amanda Waller and her black ops Task Force X were ultimately exposed.

John Cena will return as Peacemaker in the second season of his own series, which is still pretty far away since James Gunn needs to finish his work on ‘Superman: Legacy’ first. But we’ll also watch Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller dealing with the consequences of her actions in her own spin-off series, which is currently in development.

‘The Suicide Squad’ and the first season of ‘Peacemaker’ are now streaming on Max, aka HBOMax, in some regions.

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