Review of Darkman (1990) by Itay M — 26 Jun 2011

A comic book style movie about a doctor who became disfiguredly deformed by a bunch of mobsters and survives an explosion. He comes back to get revenge on them by using his artificial masks that he invented in his secret lab during hsi pursuits.

Judging on this film, Sam Raimi must've still been in his Evil Dead phase while filming Darkman because of how crazy the visuals are, the graphic content shown and the over-the-top scting from some of the actors. But since this isn't based off any source material and coming from the mind of Raimi, I'll let it pass.

Liam Neeson was great, yet creepy as Peyton Westlake/Darkman, and I say creepy because of some of his dialogue and how he delivered them. It's hard to accept him as the hero because of his immoral ways of delivering justice. But this is a man who isn't restrained by responsiblty.

Sam Raimi was very well on the dot when he was making Darkman look like a comic book, just from the wackiness from Liam Neeson's Darkman and from few of the mobsters. Also, it used plenty of close-ups and zooming in still shots, which helped catored to the old 70s comic books. What finally convinced me to watch Darkman was a scene where Peyton flips out over a pink elephant at the carnival, which was really hilarious. I also really liked the helicopter scenes, where Darkman/Peyton is dangling on a cord, while high up in the air. This sort of effort was often used when Raimi directed the Spider-man movies.

My complaint about the film is the villains just happen to be mobsters and a rich business man named Louis Strack. I know the protagonist isn't really super human, but those kinds of villains feels like a cliche to me. There were also a few choppy scenes like when they transition Julie, Peyton's girlfriend played by Frances McDormand from one scene to the cemetary.

In conclusion, this is a very underrated Sam Raimi film that needed to be recognized because I would've liked to seen some special features on the DVD/Blu-ray release. With all that said, keep this out of children's hands until they turn 14 if they're huge fans of Spider-man because the film is very dark in tone, content and even intention. Lastly, I thought how Raimi sneaked Bruce Campbell's cameo into this was brillaint, and he was going to play the title character at one point, I heard.