Darkman (1990) Dir. Sam Raimi Universal Pictures Rating: B-
Several, actually. But we'll get to that.
Sam Raimi, despite apparently
contracting the same parasitic brainworms that infect fellow
once-talented director Tim Burton, is reasonably good at
his job when he actually cares about what he's producing. Most of the time. He's basically the Great Illustrated Classics version of Peter
Jackson, who happens to be the Publix version of Guillermo del Toro, who is in turn the Temu version of Ridley Scott, who is a distant descendant of the divinely inspired F.W. Murnau. Tolkien writes extensively about this concept in The Silmarillion.
I grew up on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man
films. The first two, anyway. I saw them both in theaters multiple
times and watched the DVDs so often I've nearly got the
screenplays memorized (see also: Batman '89). I did not see
Spider-Man 3 (2007) in theaters and put off watching it for
many years because I heard that it sucked. As alien as it may sound
to some, hate-watching did not become a mainstream phenomenon until
around the time YouTube started allowing videos longer than ten
minutes in length. If word on the street was that a movie wasn't
worth plunking down the seven bucks to see in one of the three
theater chains within a twenty minute drive of your house, you could
take that assessment at face value and wait a few months to rent it
at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video for four bucks. We did not know how
good we had it in the Bush era. Eventually I snagged a DVD copy of
Spider-Man 3 during Hollywood Video's going-out-of-business
fire sale and yes, it was just as disappointing as I was lead to
believe.
But lo, I also picked up a different DVD around the same time. A lovely three disc set out of a Walmart bin called the DARKMAN TRILOGY. It featured this flick and the following two Darkman films which got straight-to-VHS releases and starred Imhotep from the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies in the lead role. Yes, I am planning on eventually watching those as well. Especially since I cannot remember a damn thing about them.
"The Mummy movies or the Darkman sequels?" you ask.
"Yes," I respond.
- - -
To
repeat the same cliffnotes version of the movie's production that
every hack video essayist has cobbled together, Darkman came
about when Sam Raimi couldn't get the film rights to either Batman or
The Shadow and decided to create his own OC instead 'cause he's an OG
like that.
The
point where I differentiate from other hack essayists is that I
unironically love this character more than either Batman or The
Shadow. Batman is a dead franchise; totally played out in every
logical and illogical extreme to the point it has no stories left to
tell and the character is a perfunctory part of the bleached,
threadbare American psyche being kept on life support for merchandising rights. Similarly, The Shadow is a really
cool idea that is sadly never coming back into prominence again no
matter how much psychic energy RazörFist
expends in attempting to manifest it as a tulpa of bygone better
days. Whenever he's not hypocritically stealing from it for his own
stories, that is.
I'm just teasing, Razör. I love you. We bald men need to stick together.
- - -
Our movie in question stars part-time actor and full-time douchebag Liam Neeson trying and failing to pull off an American accent as Dr. Peyton Westlake, who in typical superhero fashion is an overworked scientist of unclear doctorate working upon a cool invention that he's gonna find multiple alternative vigilante justice based uses for. In this case it's a synthetic skin he's attempting to master the formula for so it can be mass produced and replace skin grafting for burn victims. Trouble is he just can't get the damn stuff to hold form after an hour and thirty minutes. Fortunately for him that's just enough time to watch this movie without anyone suspecting a thing.
Peyton, despite being an emotionally stunted Reed Richards type, has somehow managed to land a supportive girlfriend his own age named Julie Hastings (played by the very pretty Frances McDormand) who works in a law firm. Julie inadvertently gets mixed up in a RoboCop-esque landgrab scheme by her obviously evil corpoboss Strack (Colin Friels) and his paid off gangster gang ran by finger collecting miniboss psychopath Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake; not to be confused with the more famous Larry from Den of the Drake).
Strack's EVIIIIIIIL plan is to demolish the crumbling side of the city and rebuild it, thereby creating thousands of new jobs and cleaning up a polluted riverside while also stimulating the local economy and running off the ghetto crime lords inhabiting the slums. The fiend! Because he utilizes Robert G. Durant's gang to dust the local bangers and pays bribes to the city zoning committee this makes him a villain in the fiction. In the real world this makes him an efficient civil contractor and a potential gubernatorial candidate should he later choose to enter politics.
Just once I want a competency porn movie where these guys are the protagonists and the myopic hippie fuckasses who don't understand how the game of politics is played are the meddling morons paid off by the real villains. It'd basically be Thank You For Smoking (2005) but played straight.
Strack is not memorable in the least and his grand evil scheme is entirely inconsequential to the plot. You could have cut him out entirely and the story would've been better for it. Robert G. Durant, following in the fine tradition of minibosses, is far more interesting and has some real rizz to him, as the TikTok Americans say. In fact, the main villain plot and the vast gulf between supervillain and miniboss memorability harkens back to the aforementioned RoboCop to the point I wouldn't be surprised if Raimi had it on in the background while hashing out the script.
Peyton has the absolute worst timing in the world as he has a major scientific breakthrough regarding his synthetic skin - that it is photosensitive and will hold form in the dark - right before Durant shows up and has his goons beat him near to death in an extremely memorable extended torture sequence that includes fire stunts, claymation hands getting electrocuted, and ends in the supremely hilarious sight of a burning Peyton getting shot straight into the air out of his exploding laboratory toward the camera while screaming like a Roman candle.
POV: Satan witnessing John McCain arrive in Hell on 25th August, 2018
Fortunately Peyton kicks out of this thanks to
an experimental procedure (the Rangeberitz Technique) performed on him by Nurse Alex Price (whom
is laying low in America after her last patient
turned into a werewolf and mauled all those people in Piccadilly
Circus). Said procedure deadens all his nerve endings (and apparently
somehow prevents infections from taking root in his multiple open wounds). As a result
of this Peyton cannot feel pain. In fact, Peyton cannot feel any
tactile sensation at all. He basically gets turned into a babyface
version of Superman: TAS's excellent take on Metallo. And much like
Metallo, the complete loss of the most basic of all the senses drives
Peyton completely mental as he begins lashing out physically and
verbally to compensate for a locked-in brain starving for
stimulation. Understandable.
Nurse Alex Price will finally have her
karmic balance come due later that year when Charles Lee Ray rather
lamely cuts her throat off-screen.
Peyton stumbles back into the ruins of his laboratory, salvages what little he can from it, then hides out in an abandoned factory (which looks really familiar - I think it might be the same one from either the finale of A Nightmare on Elm St. 2 (1985) or Dirty Harry (1971)) and begins rebuilding.
I'm also 90% sure that's the same cat actor from Pet Sematary.
The remainder of the movie is rather good scenes of angst acting from Liam Neeson intercut with him trying to rekindle his relationship with Julie and systematically murdering the shit outta Robert G. Durant's gang using misdirection tactics and pure force. I'm a sucker for a good supernatural revenge story. See also: The Crow (both the 1994 movie and the original James O'Barr series) and the very underrated grimdark furry comic "Cliff" by the team of David Hopkins and Roz Gibson.
After a few months in hiding, Peyton finally gets a working mask of his old face and proceeds to meet up again with Julia in the most romantic and reassuring way possible: stalking her to the cemetery and standing stiffly in the distance, silently glaring right at her in broad daylight while she's standing over his gravestone in a shot that looks straight out of The Innocents (1961) or The Haunting (1963). She understandably nearly has a heart attack. This is a man of charm and tact.
I say this as if that isn't exactly how I'd do it, too.
Peyton's attempts to woo Julie are hampered by his extreme self-confidence issues stemming from being horrifically deformed and his attempts to hide it from her. This isn't a deal breaker for Julie once she finds out, ironically enough. I guess she always suspected him getting exploded into a fireball would leave some lasting marks.
Following a very out of place, much too long, and not too terribly well done helicopter chase stunt scene that almost certainly ate up most of the budget and ends with Durant getting violently blown up (he gets better), Peyton follows Strack to the top of his construction site in order to rescue a kidnapped Julie and they have a standard superhero movie finale that ends withPeyton dropping Strack off the rigging to his death. Julie tries to comfort Peyton and convince him they can still salvage this and have their old life back... but Peyton is having none of it. Juiced up on adrenaline and mentally wrecked from the whole sequence of events, he admits to her that he doesn't feel right anymore. He doesn't feel human anymore. He flees from her, using his synthetic disguises to blend into morning foot traffic. As he does so he declares that Peyton Westlake is dead. From now on you can call him... Darkman. Chef's kiss.
- - -
Now... why do I like Darkman so much as a character? Largely because he scratches my angst itch. He's an outsider. A loner. A man desperate for connection. He's also his own worst enemy. He's trapped within himself, unable to feel pain or pleasure and believing he's no longer deserving of either. He could use his synthetic skin to look like anyone. Hell, he's legally dead - he could go anywhere and start again. There's nothing stopping him from letting the world know he's alive and picking right back up where he left off. But he's been so decimated emotionally that he may as well not even be a man at all. Basically, I dig him because all those things people superimpose upon Batman and The Shadow in a flailing attempt to make them seem deeper than they are? That's what Darkman textually is. He is a man who is not really a man. Not anymore. Fully formed right outta the box. No decades of fanwankery or haphazardly incorporated retcons required.
Cannot wait to see how they fuck that up in the sequels.
- - -
Danny Elfman's score is a mixed bag. While the main theme is pretty underwhelming and comes off as a less cool version of what Jerry Goldsmith would do for The Shadow (1994) some of the ambient tracks like the music inside Darkman's warped DIY laboratory are appropriately great and really get across how this dude is a mentally unstable Universal Horror character in spirit.
The VFX are also a coin toss. While the costuming and the stylized in-camera stuff that's supposed to look like a comic book are great and the handful of digital images utilized are surprisingly good for the time, the blue and green screen stuff is really, really quite bad on the whole. Everyone knows bad CGI is bad. Bad blue screen is even worse because you'll have people with nostalgia goggles on tell you that it's charming and not engagement destroying trash.
Raimi's ever interesting framing and editing is what makes this movie as good as it is. The plot and acting is so-so, the music is Danny Elfman's cutting room scraps from Batman '89, and the action sequences actively detract from my enjoyment. All you need to make a movie like this work is to have a cool character concept and shoot it in a fun way. Either things will come together or they won't. Raimi's experience as a horror director really shines through in this. His innate understanding of how goofy and unnerving are two sides of the same coin has always been the main appeal of his work.
Seeing as how this is a crime movie filmed like a horror movie and follows a good man in a bad situation, this meets RazörFist's criteria for being a film noir. Unlike The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942). But I'm sure he'll throw in some other arbitrary qualifier if he ever reads this.
- - -
FAVORITE QUOTES
PEYTON: [his flaming silhouette flying by the camera as it gets exploded] GAAAAARAAAAAAAAH-!!
[Peyton inadvertently sets one of his bandaged hands on fire with a Bunsen burner. He stares at it curiously before putting it out with a wet towel.]
PEYTON: My... my hands. They took my hands. [Begins sobbing; in the exact same voice as the famous "I could have done more" speech from the end of Schindler's List] THEY TOOK MY HANDS!
[Peyton utterly snaps; puts a funnel on his head and begins dancing around]
PEYTON: See the dancing freak! Pay five bucks! To see the dancing freak! Only five bucks!
JULIE: [to Strack] If you're not going to kill me... I have things to do.
[Peyton holds Strack by the ankle over the edge of a building.] STRACK: You let me die and you'll become as bad as me! Worse! You can't! I know you too well! Dropping me is not really an option for ya. That's not something you could live with.
[Peyton drops him like a sack of moldy oranges; Strack screams]
PEYTON: [deadpan] I'm learning to live with a lot of things. [Distant CRASH of Strack's body hitting the road]
JULIE: [looking upon Peyton's deformed face fully for the first time] You'll perfect the skin. You'll make it work. It doesn't matter. PEYTON: Julie... don't you think I told myself that, night after sleepless night? It's just a burn. Skin-deep. It doesn't matter. And if I covered it, hid behind a mask, you could love me for who I was inside. Without pity. But a funny thing happened. As I worked in the mask, I found the man inside was changing. He became... wrong. A monster. I can live with it now, but I don't think anyone else can. JULIE: I want our life back. [Peyton turns to leave; Julie calls after him]
JULIE: Peyton! Peyton! DARKMAN: Peyton is gone.
[closing narration] DARKMAN: I'm everyone. And no one. Everywhere. Nowhere. Call me... Darkman.
