Review Tuesday: HAWKEYE

 

 

HAWKEYE

Clint Barton gets drawn into a war with the underground when some artifacts that can be tied to him and his family come up on a black market auction. 

Of all the Avengers, Hawkeye always seemed like the most underwhelming. Green Arrow is the archer for DC, and Hawkeye is the one for Marvel. Superpower? Shooting arrows. Yawn. When I heard that they were working on a Hawkeye solo project, I wasn't very interested. 

However, I have been following my fellow nerds on social media and how excited they were getting over the entire series, and since it appeared to be in a Christmas setting, why not give it a shot?

Like all the recent Marvel projects, this one intertwines with the Avengers movies. It starts off from the perspective of Kate Bishop, a child living in NYC as Loki commences his attack on NYC and she witnesses the heroism of Hawkeye on that day, and how he saved her life, specifically. Fast forward a bunch of years and Kate (played by Hailee Steinfeld) is a trouble making socialite, daughter of a rich and powerful business-person, Eleanor Bishop, played by Vera Farmiga. During a Holiday Party Kate discovers that her mother is engaged to a man she dislikes, so she wanders off for a breath of fresh air and stumbles upon a black market auction, which is raided by Slavs in tracksuits who are looking for a watch. In an effort to sneak out without anyone knowing who she puts on the uniform of The Ronin, a violent crime-fighter who made things hard for organized crime during "The Blip." Since this was the alter-ego of Clint Barton / Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), he had to get out there and make the hubbub go away. This bring you BARELY halfway into the first episode. The rest of the series is about following the trail of clues to who were really behind the initial heist and what was really going on and who was pulling all the strings. 

 

I had read a lot of complaints, as this show is grooming Hailee to become the Hawkeye replacement for the next phase of the M-SHE-U. Regarding that, I am still groaning internally. Regarding this series, however, I thought is was a lot of fun. Thank goodness they didn't make the young girl an instant super-hero. She did stupid things and got her ass handed to her several times. In addition, they didn't make Clint some broken down old soldier looking for an excuse to hang up his bow and arrows. He was smart, collected, wise, and relatable. What's also fun is the way Marvel managed to make TWO references to the Daredevil series in different franchises in one month! (Matt Murdoch showed up to represent the Webhead in the most recent movie, and Kingpin turned out to be the big bad behind everything in this series.) Of course there is bad. Kate is a really annoying character. She reminds you of the friend who is always bugging you to do something, because she keeps bugging Clink to do things. The Slavs in Tracksuits were being run by Latins who took orders directly from Kingpin. Seemed like an odd progression to me. I guess it's okay to have the bad guys being white men being run by Maya (played by Alaqua Cox), a Latin lady, who happens to be deaf and missing a leg, right? Oh, inexplicably, Maya seems to have some super powers because she can kick you clear across a used car lot. Yeah, seems legit. They also include Yelena, B lack Widow's sister, as you would expect from the post credits from THAT movie earlier this year.  

 

All that aside, Jeremy Renner really makes the show. He's great in this solo Avenger position, even though he kind of was never alone, and he makes the show fun to watch. I would say this was worthwhile to watch.  

It's available on Disney+

IMDB