[Sr. Mints]

I loved the attitude, the gritty, black america ambiance they were going for, but Luke Cage suffers from horrible pacing, bland characters, sloppy writing, and really hard-to-meet expectations after the exceptional second season of Daredevil earlier this year.

Being more of a DC guy as a kid, I’ve been going into these Netflix-Marvel movies as a relative noob, and while I’ve of course been exposed to Daredevil/Punisher over the years simply by virtue of reading some Marvel comics (mainly X-Men, Thor, Silver Surfer, some Spider-man,) characters like Luke Cage are as foreign to me as robust Cuban coffee.

I guess I’ll mainly talk about the characters, because they were the show’s biggest issue.

Luke Cage: He worked so much better as a part-timer in Jessica Jones. After about episode four, it became blatantly apparent that, hey, watching a guy who's basically invincible is really boring. Maybe that's partly why the 2008 Incredible Hulk movie didn’t work. Or the 2003 one. And why Hulk hasn't gotten another movie of his own. And don’t get me started on Superman. The same goes for Cage: you can only take characters like that down so many roads, especially when you have to take into account television-sized FX budgets and a continuous story arc you’re trying to play into (i.e. an alien invasion story of Harlem probably isn’t in the Netflix-Marvelverse plan.) On top of that, Cage himself didn’t have much depth, but to be honest, I’m still trying to decide if that’s more a symptom of Mike Colter’s inability to evoke any emotion whatsoever, or I just didn’t buy what they were selling.

Misty Knight: Simone Cook--first in her class at the William Shatner School of Overacting--grated on me pretty ####ing quick. I mentioned the show’s attitude, and I think Cook laid it on really thick in an attempt to play into this. Throughout the show it was one boneheaded cop move after another, and by the time the final episode rolled around, all I could think was, ‘Jesus, why the hell does she still have a job?!’ Granted, pedantry is one of my…stronger qualities, but it usually doesn’t get in the way of my suspension of disbelief. I just couldn’t get past Misty Knight, and everything I just said about her can be applied to the whole New York/Harlem police force as portrayed here: over-acted, bumbling idiots.

Cottonmouth: He was easily my favourite character of the show. Now this character had depth—he was more nuanced, complicated, and interesting than any character on the show, and the over-the-top street gangsta’ performance just worked. Killing him off mid-way through the season was not unexpected, but then to just ham-fistedly replace him with Diamondback? It felt sloppy--like the way Iron Man 2 tried to cram so many pieces into the story without much regard for polish. Incidentally, about a year ago someone in the one of the Star Wars threads made a comment about his/her “accidental Domhall Gleeson marathon,” and I legitimately burst out laughing at that comment, as I was on about movie number six staring Gleeson at the time. I must currently be on an accidental Mahershala Ali marathon: the dude’s in everything I watch lately.

Diamondback: Tone it down, bro! They have a word just for characters like this: hammy. Honestly, I still don't understand parts of Diamondback's/Styker’s backstory. He’s billed as this terrifying, badass criminal mastermind, then . . . oh hey, it’s Carl Lucas’ goody two-shoes half brother who hates him even though they were best friends when they were kids until some incident landed Styker in a juvenile detention facility . . . something-something . . . Stryker frames now-police officer Lucas, Lucas goes to a maximum security prison to essentially die . . . something-something . . . Stryker tries to take over the New York criminal underworld, but is fixated on Luke Cage and is plotting his demise except he just learned he’s alive . . . It just doesn't make much sense.

Shades: Oh, hi Juice. Seriously, he’s like the exact same guy he portrayed on Sons of Anarchy.

Mariah: At first I was bored ####less with Mariah, but by the end I had changed my mind. As far as conniving slimeballs go, she was pretty good. But she was over-used and over done. She’s not a criminal mastermind, I don’t—and won’t—believe that for one second. She’s an opportunistic, slimeball politician, full-stop. I hope they dial down her role if she returns.

In the end, Luke Cage was slow; began to feel like a chore to watch. Reducing the episode count would have benefitted Luke Cage significantly by tightened up the story and cutting out a lot of the fat. And for an action show, y’know, there wasn’t a whole lot of action.

Is it fair to compare the show past Marvel-Netflix shows? No, probably not, but in a shared-universe like this, it’s pretty hard not to: Jessica Jones was pretty light on action, but it more than made up for it with gripping characters and solid writing. Daredevil was action-packed, written wonderfully, but had some weaker characters.

Luke Cage had attitude, and that’s about it. C-