Darkman

You know, back in 2001 when the hype behind the first “Spider Man” movie was hitting full force, I was hit with my first moment of movie geek self awareness.  A group of my friends and I were sitting down to lunch, chatting up coming movies as my more movie inclined friends were want to do, and the subject of the upcoming super hero movie came up.  One of my friends mentioned this:  “I can’t see why they gave it to Sam Raimi, I mean, why give it to the guy that’s only really known for ‘Evil Dead’?”  That’s when I piped in, “Because he did ‘Darkman’.”  I was the only one that knew about this movie apparently and that was just a moment of personal pride for me.

I digress, “Darkman” was a 1990 mid-low budget action movie directed and co-written by Sam Raimi.  The story behind this lost gem of the masked hero genre, is that Raimi wanted to make a movie version of the pulp radio drama “The Shadow” but was unable to get the rights, so he just threw his hands up and said “Screw it, I’ll make my own dark, pulp style super hero!” (not actual quote).  This film was the result, basically taking influences from things like The Shadow, but also the old universal horror movies most especially “Phantom of the Opera” and in fact I’ve summed this movie up as a super hero version of Phantom more than once.  The premise is that a scientist, played by Liam Neeson, is developing a new form of prosthetic that basically acts as a skin substitute for people to far gone for traditional skin grafts, the only problem is that the material is sensitive to UV light and only lasts 99 minutes before it melts.  Tragically, due to circumstances beyond his control, his lab is blown up by gangsters with him inside and he ends up with burns covering almost half of his body.  He then ends up as a John Doe and is subjected to a new medical treatment that involves serving the pain receptors to his brain and due to lots of other medical techno-babble, he basically doesn’t stop producing adrenaline giving him enhanced strength and endurance.  Armed with this and his ability to replicate other people’s faces, he goes onto to seek revenge against his attackers and tries to re-establish his connection with his girl friend.

This movie is really damn good, it’s not perfect, but it’s extremely well done.  The movie moves at a good pace and has plenty of well built up and executed action beats peaking with a crazy chase towards the conclusion involving Darkman hanging off a helicopter.  A lot of this goes back to the two things, the cast and the director.  Most of the time in late 80’s/early 90’s the things that, depending on your opinion, kills the movie is that the actors tend to either be really really bad or not taking the movie seriously enough.  I personally feel that even if you want to make fun of bad or over the top acting, it’s better when the people involved take their work seriously, part of why I like watching “Battlefield: Earth” so much is that even though his performance is insanely stupid and bad, John Travolta is taking himself so seriously that he makes it real entertaining.  The same kind of thing can be applied here, only here it’s a movie that’s kind of silly, but the actors take it at face value and honestly try and make it work seriously.  Liam Neeson in particular is praise worthy playing the title role, a part that was actually written for Bruce Campbell, and you can really tell this from how the character plays out.  But Neeson is able to pull off the over the top moments and add a tragic depth to them that, while I love Bruce Campbell, I don’t think Campbell could have pulled off as good and Neeson just has such great chemistry with the awesome Frances McDormand.  Likewise Larry Drake really goes whole hog on the villain Durant, he’s just a slimy, evil for the sake of evil gangster character that makes you feel that while Darkman is somewhat an anti-hero, these bad guys really really have it coming.

All these performances are well used by Raimi who I seriously think does some of his best work here, the man clearly had a low budget, but you got every penny of that money on the screen and it was really entertaining.  His kinetic style really makes you laugh and glue yourself to the screen because it’s just super entertaining.  This energy is kept up by what I think it one of Danny Elfman’s better scores where he comes up with themes and atmosphere that’s just awesome to listen to.

I really don’t think I could say this any more loudly folks, “Darkman” is just awesome.  It’s fun, dark, entertain and a great little super hero action flick.  Check it out.

4.5 duplicated bad guys out of 5.

Since it’s October now, I have a lot of people that ask me about horror films to see and which to ignore, so coming up is going to be a bunch of top 10 lists, starting later this week/sometime next week with the top cheesy horror movies, followed by a list of the top 10 underrated horror movies, the 10 worst I’ve ever seen and finishing off with my own top 10 favorites.  Get ready for it!