Hawkeye: Really Fun, Really Weird
It’s Christmas and believe it or not, Hawkeye is actually a Christmas show. And it actually pulls it off to an alarming degree. It’s an incredibly fun holiday watch. It’s also pretty weird in a lot of ways and makes no sense with pretty consistently. The Grinch wouldn’t like this show but I actually did.
Hawkeye is pretty much the crazy fun non-serious aunt of the Marvel TV shows. While She-Hulk is the one who thinks she’s fun but actually takes herself a little too seriously and Wandavision is….whatever the hell that was, Hawkeye is the quirky thrift store aunt who grows suspicious plants. It’s very charming, almost too much so. It’s not only campy, it knows it’s campy and I swear that sometimes it leans into it. I cringed watching this show, but it was a fun cringe, not like the cringe when that guy with no neck on 90 Day Fiance seriously thought that Phillipino girl was going to marry him. Hawkeye hits the right notes, even when those notes feel wrong at first.
So, first things first, Hawkeye is not actually about Hawkeye. Well, not fully. The real star is Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld). Bishop is the daughter of Eleanor Bishop, who runs a private security firm called Bishop Security. Kate’s backstory is that her father dies during the Chitari invasion of New York and she is saved by Hawkeye, inspiring her to become a world class archer. Funnily enough, during hours of shared screentime, she never mentions this to Hawkeye. Anyways, Kate gets kicked out of college for literally destroying a bell tower with a crazy trick shot (the physics of this show are incredibly spotty at times) and gets to go home for the holidays early. Upon arriving home she learns her mother is engaged to a Mr. Jack DuQuesne (Tony Dalton AKA Lalo from Better Call Saul). Kate Bishop doesn’t like this and proceeds to investigate him, following him into a black market auction. The auction is attacked by a criminal group called the Tracksuit Mafia (actual name) who are there to seize a watch…for some reason. Kate Bishop acquires the gear of the legendary Ronin, which leads to her somehow instantly becoming a superhero and fighting all of them as well as trying to chase down the watch. No seriously. That’s what happens.
Meanwhile Hawkeye is in New York with his kids, whom he supposedly never sees. Specifically, he is watching a painful musical, partially because it is a depiction of the Battle of New York (from The Avengers) and also because it is the worst musical ever. Later that night he sees news footage of “The Ronin’s Return To New York” and decides to take to the streets to find the culprit. He does so instantly, on foot. In New York City.
During this time Kate Bishop has investigated a murder and saved a dog but is then attacked by the Tracksuits. Hawkeye saves her and they hang out at her apartment, which is then attacked by Tracksuits again because this is a very unserious show and the Tracksuits (and their associates who we meet later) can literally always find them and their plans are always stupid, In this scene an enemy throws a Molotov Cocktail, then when it is thrown back at him is confused at how the projectile works. It’s a shit show but it’s so much fun.
After sorting this out and escaping to another crash pad (Kate’s aunt’s apartment), they have to try and figure out how to get the Ronin suit back, because they had to leave it in Kate’s apartment that was destroyed. But…it’s gone! It was taken by a police officer who is using it to, no shit, LARP in Central Park. So Hawkeye goes to get it back. He’s an Avenger. There’s probably 100 ways he could get it back, without harming anyone, I might add. The option I did not expect was an incredibly fun and goofy 15 minute scene of Hawkeye LARPing to get the Ronin suit back.
I know that sounds stupid and it probably is, but at the same time it really was a breath of fresh air. I love dark, ugly superhero movies but it’s hard not to appreciate some good pastiche. What makes Hawkeye a joy to watch is that it is fully aware that it’s tone is all over the place, it’s plots are sporadic and occastionally unserious and its characters are extremely zany. It just doesn’t care. The show feels like $150 million dollar spoof dramedy that is performed as opposed to actually taking place. It’s a very meta show.
For example, at the end of the second episode, Hawkeye and Kate Bishop are tied up and there is 3 minute discussion between Kate and one of the henchmen about dating advice and Imagine Dragons tickets. All while while being Kate is being held hostage. This specific henchman reappears later in the finale, where he thanks Kate for her advice in the middle of a fist fight. It’s a quirky scene that feels like it’s rapping on the fourth wall, as the dramatic encounter pauses a scene for some comic relief.
One of the best examples of this is when Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) shows up at Kate Bishop’s apartment after a battle they had in the previous episode. But rather than battling Kate, Yelena makes macaroni and the two girls share a meal and discuss…NYC tourist sites and eating reindeer. The entire scene feels like improv, with the specific goal of Florence Pugh flexing the Russian accent and it actually works, mostly because of the absurdity of so many other elements of the show. Florence Pugh crushes this part too and makes Yelena a likeable character who you quickly understand is not to be trifled with. She even forms something of a friendship with Kate Bishop that makes their adversarial status all the more interesting. It’s another mark of a show so unpredictable that very little is truly implausible.
You can tell the script is very loose in this show and the writers and cast probably had a good deal of fun. There is a lot of joy here and lot of whimsy, to such an extent that some of the drama feels a little forced. The “Hawkeye needs to get back to his family” subplot exists solely to give his character slightly more stakes than the fact he simply wants to be there. Also why is his wife so cool with him hanging out with a 22 year old college girl who shares all of his hobbies?…..I digress.
There’s some other interesting new characters too, notably Echo and Kazi, who are sort of like siblings. Echo is a deaf amputee who is taken in by Wilson Fisk and Kazi is essentially her handler and translator. Their relationship is a little engaging but their entire arc feels very messy. The main thing is that Echo doesn’t talk and kicks things with her metal leg.
These characters also bring a lot of the classic MCU tropes to the action scenes, such as Echo being unstoppable in her first fight scene and then very mortal from there on out. Kazi is just a named mob character but is able to battle Hawkeye. Kate Bishop is basically overpowered from the start, with the exception of her battle with Kingpin. Hawkeye actually gets his ass kicked a lot, despite being the most experienced fighter there and lacking any of the classic aging superhero disabilities (“Mr. Wayne, you have no cartilage in your knee”).
The most dangerous character in Hawkeye, from a combat standpoint, is Yelena, who coasts through every encounter with relative ease. A lot of this is due to the comic setups of her action scenes, which don’t lend themselves to tension. She is typically trading quips with Kate Bishop or whatever opponent she fights, smoothly switching between having the perfect plan and improvising on a dime. She seems completely unflustered by anyone she encounters save for Hawkeye. Kingpin is probably the winner of second place but like…Kingpin’s power level is always up in the air. On one hand he’s just a guy but on the other he’s just a guy who’s 6’7 450 pounds. Mind of a mob boss, body of a Eagles D Tackle.
The action in the show is strong but’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Loads of handfighting, a less than reasonable amount of gunplay and a surprising focus on swords are all integral to the combat here. It’s entertaining, especially early on, but wears thin as you begin to notice inconsistencies and ineffiencies in the combat. Why is everyone bum rushing our heroes with melee weapons? Are guns that hard to find in New York City? It’s a lot of the little details that hurt the action sequences, such as how implausible it is to get moving 10 trucks back to back to back to…on the streets of New York. Characters suffer injuries that should probably sideline them but they are fine. Hawkeye gets knocked out by a metal leg. Kingpin gets hit by a car. Kate Bishop gets banged up in like every episode. At one point she tries to fight Kingpin in a melee brawl as opposed to using her arrows for some reason and gets absolutely clobbered.
I felt like one problem with it was that it didn’t really do much to feature Hawkeye and Kate Bishop’s archery ability and when it did, it felt like it was silly. There’s a lot of cool trick arrows in the show, such as explosive arrows, purple gas arrows and spiky ball arrows but the problem is all of these kind of feel pointless when in 80% of the time it would’ve just been more efficient to use a normal arrow. While there are a few really unique arrows, the show used trick arrows far more often than it needed to and it felt like an overused gag.
The use of gags and jokes in general could be argued as being overused for a superhero show. But at the same time the dramatic comic book plots could also be argued to detract from what is in many ways an excellent comedy. All of the elements work well together in a quirky blend that kind of eschews traditional genre conventions. It’s too funny, too serious and too bizarre to fit cleanly into something like the MCU, which lately has begun doubling down on it’s straight and somewhat bland aesthetic. This leaves us with the question: who is this show for?
It’s a little too humorous to draw in the Daredevil fans, a little too action packed and dorky for the Steinfeld stans and a little too weird and obscure (character wise) to be a mainstream attraction. It does have a holiday slant but that’s far from the driving theme of the show. It’s not a show for nobody, it definitely deserves an audience but it seems like that audience is far from built in. While watching it, I laughed, I was engrossed in the action and I really liked the characters but the whole time I was wondering…who is this for?
Pumping out media that seems to exist at the request of no one has been a specialty of Disney lately, especially with Disney+. No one really wanted Hawkeye just like no one wanted that Shang Chi movie or any of the DC movies since Justice League. That’s not to say they’re awful and have no place. In a weird way I think Hawkeye carves out a niche as a show that can do its own thing. I’ve never seen anything like it and I wish it was more than just a mini-series. But it’s not without it’s problems and a lot of those problems come from having to do so much to justify both its budget and its existence.
To conclude what has already been far too long of a review, if you like comic books and superheroes, the art form, you will like Hawkeye. It turns many of the familiar tropes and expectations of a super hero miniseries on their head and isn’t afraid to explore a larger range of possibilities that exist in the superhero genre. It feels somewhat experimental in its writing and plotting at times and I liked how it kept me on my toes. It does have some issues with tone and occasionally doesn’t seem to know where it’s going but the cast and performances are great. If you like superheroes, the MCU or you just watch a lot of TV I would recommend this. It’s definitely a doozy.
