Review: Darkman (1990)
★½
“Darkman” is such an odd chapter in the history of superhero movies. An original creation by Sam Raimi, Darkman is heavily inspired by such fictional characters as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein (a character Raimi much more successfully riffed on with Dock Ock in Spider-Man 2), the Phantom of the Opera, The Shadow, and Batman. This movie deserves credit for making a truly creative attempt at synthesizing those characters in both style and story. But “Darkman” really struggles to realize anything interesting or compelling.
I wanted to like this movie. I really did. It has all the building blocks of the kind of movie I would like: a tortured protagonist, a gothic aesthetic, art-deco architecture, superhero melodrama, and a Danny Elfman score. And while there are momentary bursts of genuinely interesting and compelling ideas, they are always succeeded by painfully awkward writing, stylistic sensory overload, poorly-shot and contrived set pieces, or all of the above.
Raimi is much more subtle and focused when bringing Spider-Man to the big screen, but he has no sense of restraint here. At first the hyper-stylized visuals and many montages are nice to look at and effectively convey the brooding, nightmarish tone but they quickly amount to little besides unwieldily and bizarre, even random, collections of shots, colors, and symbols. After a while it feels like the camera is just assaulting the viewer with all its harsh, incomprehensible imagery and when that happens “Darkman” becomes painful to watch.
The villains are cheesy, but not even in an entertaining or funny way. They’re just kind of bland and generic. The romantic relationship always feels artificial and forced, totally wasting the wonderful talents of McDormand. The hero himself has lots of potential, but Neeson’s acting is hobbled by his prosthetics and mask. And the story itself is so uninspired and rote, there is no real feeling of momentum or stakes.
Coming out around the same time as “Batman” and “Dick Tracy,” Raimi’s “Darkman” is another installment in the sub-genre of hyper-stylized comic book noir. But, unlike those other films, “Darkman” is so haphazardly frenetic it loses any coherent sense of style at all. And unlike those other characters, Darkman didn’t have the privilege of a well-told story and compelling performances.
