Hawkeye

2021, d. Rhys Thomas, Bert & Bertie - 6 episodes - Disney+
Series created by Jonathan Igla

I tend to write big, long posts about superhero movies and TV shows, in case you hadn't noticed.  To paraphrase a certain toy reviewer, they're my bread and butter.  But sometimes I don't have an immediate take.  Sometimes months pass and I still don't have a lot to say.  And sometimes I'm just need to sit down and write but I don't because I'm lazy and I get caught up in playing some dum-dum game on my phone for hours on end, a bad habit which seems to have had undue influence over my life for the past half decade.

Anyway, since I've caught up to No Way Home and just laid the pipe on Peacemaker (whazzat?), I figure I should just get everyone's least favourite Avenger off the docket, and it would only be too fitting to cram him into a 10-for-10 but I'm certain I have more than 10 minutes worth of writing to do.

Yes, it's Hawkeye, but, I have to say, I've been looking forward to a Hawkeye movie or TV series for years. 

Have  I particularly loved Jeremy Renner's performance as Clint Barton? Not particularly. Renner's an amusing performer but his Clint has never really inspired any real reaction, love or hate.  He's just kinda there doing his thing.

Am I a lifelong, die-hard, deep-seeded fan of comics Hawkeye? No. No no no. I've always prefered Green Arrow if we're talking comic book archers, and really don't think I read a comic that featured Hawkeye with any prominence until the 2000s, by which point I'd been reading comics for 20 to 25 years.  I don't think I was missing much.

No, all my desire for a Hawkeye movie or series came out of one of the best runs of superhero comics ever(!), which would be Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye run from 2012-2015 which pairs Young Avenger Kate Bishop with old Avenger Clint Barton as they defend Clint's New York apartment building from the Russian Tracksuit Mafia.  It's a gloriously entertaining story that redefined both Bishop and Barton and made them favourite characters of mine, Bishop even more so since, despite being the junior player, she showed far more competency in being a superhero than Barton.  Smarter, faster, more talented, wittier... Barton is only made more interesting by not being the best at what he does.

From the first collected volume (of four) of Fraction and Aja's Hawkeye I wanted to see it on screen. But by the end of the series in 2015, it looked far more unlikely, as 2015's  Avengers: Age of Ultron introduced a whole family of supporting character for Clint Barton which made him owning a New York low-rise apartment building and living a lonely, sad life a lot less likely.  

Clearly Marvel struggled with the same desire, and when Disney+ came along and content was needed, a Hawkeye mini-series was one of the first to be announced, shortly followed by casting for Kate Bishop.  They were doing it, and somehow, some way, they were going to shoehorn this MCU Hawkeye into that Fraction/Aja framework.

I've written 8 long, rambling paragraphs already and haven't talked about the show.  Would it pull it off, would it bring Fraction and Aja's masterpiece (it literally is) to life? 

Not so much.

Here's the thing, we comic nerds really, REALLY need to stop wanting comics translated direct to the screen.  If a comic book is great, it's great because it's a comic book, if that makes sense.  The medium is the message.  The story told in a comic is different than if told in a novel than told on TV than told in a movie or video game.  And if something is perfect in one form, it's an impossibility to literally translate into another form without losing much of its magic.

So that's what happened here. What I wanted, I could never get, because I already got it.  But, what Hawkeye delivered was a fairly entertaining series that used elements of the Fraction/Aja run to further expand the MCU, which, as I pointed out in my Peacemaker review, is both part of the charm of the Marvel tv and movies, but also leads to less immediate gratification. 

With this series we're introduced to Kate Bishop, who was a tween when the invasion of New York  happened (from Marvel's The Avengers) and she got a first-person eye-view of Clint Barton in action and decided being a hero like him was her destiny. Ten years later, she's an prize winning martial artist and archer, but also headstrong and unapologetic, getting kicked out of school and antagonising her high-society mother (Vera Farmiga). When she gets embroiled in stopping a robbery of an underground metahuman paraphernalia auction, she comes face to face with her idol, Clint Barton (on a trip in New York with his family before Christmas) and insinuates herself into his life.

The dynamic between Barton and Bishop in the show is the reverse of that in the comic.  Bishop is the one whose life is a mess, and Barton is the one who is (for the most part) in control.  Clint is still dealing with the loss of Black Widow and the physical impact of the life he's led, including hearing loss.  One of the best issues of Fraction and Aja's comics run was a completely silent issue told from the perspective of Lucky the pizza dog, a stray pooch adopted by Bishop.  I was hoping that the series, by giving Clint hearing loss, would somehow emulate this issue in an episode, however, Only Murders In The Building beat them to the punch with a brilliant episode told from the perspective of a deaf character.  Instead of singling out a single episode, it used Clint's affliction adeptly as a challenge that he could persevere through, accentuated by introducing and interacting with the Marvel character Echo, a deaf assassin, as an antagonist allied with the Tracksuit Mafia (bro!). 

Along the way the dual Hawkeyes find themselves in a murder investigation and criminal conspiracy which Kate's mother and her new fiance, the sword-obsessed Jack Duquesne, may be involved (it's Vera Farmiga, I haven't trusted her since Up In The Air), and somehow shoehorns in the recently introduced Black Widow Yelena Belova into the affair, which adds poignancy to the grief still afflicting Clint.

There's a lot of moving pieces to this 6-part mini-series, but it negotiates them all quite adeptly, and all the various story elements are welcome, even if they don't all exactly gel together seamlessly.  While the series is called Hawkeye, implying that it's Clint Barton-centric, it's even more about the new Hawkeye, Kate Bishop and its success rests entirely upon casting.  

I've liked Hailee Steinfeld as an actor since her early feature debut in the Coen Brother's 2010 remake of True Grit, through to her role in Pitch Perfect and thought she really stood out as the lead of the surprisingly good Bumblebee Transformers movie. While she wasn't exactly Kate Bishop of the comics in my mind when her casting was announced, she owns this MCU version from moment one, and she leads this series to the point that Jeremy Renner is almost a supporting player, rather than co-star.  Steinfeld proves herself here to be one of Hollywood's finest young actors (I've since started watching Dickinson on AppleTV+ which has only served to validate this perception).  The meeting of Steinfeld and Florence Pugh shows that the talent in the next wave of the MCU is very, very bright.

Renner, for his part, really, really shines.  He delivers the pithy lines perfectly, while still carrying the weight of an man haunted/burdened by his past, the losses he's sustained, and the frustration of being separated from his family.  He knows his responsibilities, but he doesn't have to like them.  He sees Kate Bishop not as someone to mentor, but rather someone to protect.  She's his daughter, she's Natasha, she's his wife, all capable badasses, but all people he's lost and he can't handle it happening again, and none of this is spoken, but it lives in Renner's performance.  

That Hawkeye takes place at Christmas is only kind of a bonus.  While not overly festive, it's a "Die Hard is a Christmas movie"-type Christmas story which only kind of heightens its appeal.

I put on the first episode as background while I was writing this and I'm completely sucked back in again.  It's not that the story itself that I find enthralling, but rather the performances, the characters and their dynamics with one another all just crackle with a lively energy.  While I think that the LARPers, Echo, and Yelena are all slight distractions from the main plot, as I said, they're all quite fun, purposeful and welcome additions.

It's not the Fraction/Aja series, but it's also not trying to be.  It succeeds at its own story on its own terms. Hawkeye may not be anyone's favourite Avenger, but after this series, he, or she, is no longer at the bottom of the list.

(The only bummer about this series is that Aja wasn't fairly compensated for the series' adoption of his design aesthetic for both their credits sequence and advertising).