Have I talked about Sam Raimi before? Don’t think I have.
Well, for one, he’s certainly a filmmaker’s filmmaker—starting off from
virtually nothing, film with a home camera in the woods with friends and
family, until he launched his career with a delightfully gory little horror
flick called The Evil Dead. Even operating on a small budget, Raimi did not shy
away from awesomely dynamic camerawork, in-your-face style, and just having
lots of fun with what he was doing.
The Evil Dead sequels got funnier and more awesome, with
medieval-themed finale Army of Darkness being my favorite, and viewers of my
generation will certainly remember the Spider-Man trilogy he did in the early
2000s, which certainly made use of his spectacular sense of visual style—and
general over the top ness. But before he did that, he ventured into his own
comic-book inspire world in 1990, in the wake of Batman much like last time’s
Dick Tracy. The link here is that Raimi originally wanted to do a Bat-flick
himself before Burton beat him to the punch—and looking at what he made here
with Darkman, it’s certainly interesting to ponder what might’ve been.
The title is certainly of its time—the nineties is about the
limit when you could just call a superhero ‘Darkman’. These days, it sounds
like something you’d do to parody some of DC’s cinematic entries. Still,
compared to the sort of ‘heroes’ we got in that aforementioned decade, like
Spawn, this was just wearing the brooding-ness on its sleeve I suppose.
Anyway, our lead here is Dr. Peyton Westlake, played by Liam
Neeson, who growls his way through his performance in an accent that can’t make
up its mind. Peyton is working on a type of synthetic skin that apparently is
spot on perfect to the naked eye, but has the flaw of disintegrating on contact
with light after exactly ninety-nine minutes. As in, spot on the dot every
time. It’s almost comically specific, but it does play very much into the plot,
so I guess we can let it slide.
Peyton ends up running afoul of some gangsters trying to
grab real estate for villain Louis Strack (Colin Friels), who destroy his
laboratory and leave him horrifically deformed. He's left for dead by his
girlfriend Julie (Frances McDormand), and semi-luckily for him, is put through
a hospital treatment that gives him increased strength and immunity to pain at
the cost of any sense of touch. Now clad in bandages and a fedora, he heads out to get his revenge by
using his synthetic skin technology for masks and disguises, while being very
bombastic about it—the film ain’t shy about its Phantom of the Opera
influences.
It's definitely a sort of style you don’t really see in
comic book movies anymore; dark, but with enough style to get away with it, as
opposed to just turning down the color levels and making everyone mope around.
No, Raimi, as he did with Spiderman, embraces the comic feel—there’s momentary
weird backgrounds, every manner of camera angle used, and with scenery-munching performances to boot. Sure, Neeson might be yelling through the latex half the
time; sure, it’s rather strange how Petyon/Darkman can perfectly imitate people
despite having no lips, but it’s played with such sincerity that I did get enjoyment
out of it.
There are of course, flaws—the villain is kind of
forgettable, being a fairly generic corporate asshole, and the climax, like
both Batman and Dick Tracy, takes place on an elevated structure with some
possible death by means of high altitude asphalt contact involved. But hey,
there’s still some decent action with all the pyrotechnic goodness you’d want from
the pre-CG era, there’s lots of Raimi’s trademark close-ups and fast cuts, and
you’ve got Neeson hamming it up—that balances things out reasonably for me.
Darkman is somewhat of an obscure cult classic, but if you’re
looking for something different as far as nineties comic book movies—which were
a mixed bag at best—then this is a decent little ‘un to check out. Before he
was Qui-Gon Jinn, before he was snarling at seemingly never-ending parades of
terrorists and kidnappers over phones, before he was actually going up against
Batman himself—Neeson got his turns in funky little flicks like this. And hell,
he even turns into Bruce Campbell in the end—don’t worry, it makes sense in
context. If you want to find out how, well, dig it up and give it a watch….
Comments
Post a Comment