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Small Screen Reviews: Luke Cage
Luke Cage: Punching crime with the might of the Seventies!
So let me say this up front: Marvel and Netflix are a match made in Heaven. They should stick together and have many superhero drama-children as long as they both shall live until death do they part. Okay, now my review is getting confusing, and it’s not even the end of the first paragraph. But I think that’s a decent summary already. It’s just one service I provide. Okay, it’s the only one. This time.
Luke Cage is the latest Marvel-Netflix offering along with Daredevil and my so far personal favorite, Jessica Jones. The title character was introduced in the latter of these two series, a super-strong, nigh-invulnerable man with a lost love and a past he’s reluctant to discuss. After being compelled to battle to the death with Jones, Cage leaves to get his own tv-streaming series. Good deal.
Unlike the Marvel films, which take place across the globe and even the galaxy (only when accompanied by your Guardians), the Netflix shows have taken place in neighborhoods of New York City. DD and JJ in Hell’s Kitchen, Luke Cage in Harlem. This is one of the many strengths of the Netflix shows: the local story focuses on the character of the neighborhood as well as the character of its protector, exploiters, and destroyers.
Knowing Luke Cage was to be set in Harlem, I was a bit cautious at first. It could easily go bad in so many different directions. It could have devolved to black-on-black violence caricatures. Or power-broking white antagonist caricatures. Instead the direction keeps a story which, despite featuring super-powers, maintains a level of verisimilitude that does not talk down to any view regardless of race. Moreover, it’s done in such a way that I just couldn’t see the roles played by whites. Doing that yet making the story engaging and compelling takes a lot of care and talent that can be appreciated by anyone.
The story begins simply. Luke Cage, still in hiding from his dark past, works as a dishwasher at a nightclub and an assistant at a barbershop with a man who proves a great mentor and teacher. Poor guy. We all know what happens to them. Anyways, when two of the young men who frequent or work at the barbershop try to rob Harlem’s homegrown crime boss, they set in motion events that lead to disaster and force Cage to decide whether he will stay hidden or stand up and use his abilities to bring down those who exploit and abuse his home town.
Well this being a tv series he decides the latter, of course, and this is where the super powers come to play – Luke Cage muscles his way through various criminal spots, invulnerable to bullets and with super strength. If it weren’t for those, this show could fairly strongly stand on its own as another story where a man has to decide whether to stand up and act for his community or not. The body count is high, and there’s a couple of twists and turns here and there.
Ricochet member Henry Castaigne elsewhere mentioned this might be one of the most conservative shows Netflix has to offer. I’m not certain about that, but it is indeed refreshing to see a show like this not to default to making straw men arguments and scolding the audience. I find it refreshing in a similar way to how I find Adult Swim cartoon “The Boondocks” refreshing: The truth is presented with little decoration. The writer might project a few of their own biases, but never so much as to dilute the truth too much.
If I have a complaint, it’s perhaps that for some time I don’t find its villains as fascinating as in other series, at least not until the very end of the series. The primary antagonist believes himself in a Cain-and-Abel type relationship with Cage (though I find that an Ishmael-Isaac relationship would be a far better analogy), but I just don’t find it compelling. But this is really a small complaint for me. Nobody really matches the sheer intensity of D’Onofrio‘s Fisk, or sociopathic hedonism of Tennant‘s Killgrave. There is an ruthless intensity in Mahershala Ali‘s Cottonmouth, but … well I am avoiding spoilers here.
Though I don’t find this as good as my favorite, Jessica Jones, or Season 1 of Daredevil Luke Cage remains a strong addition to the Netflix-Marvel series. I anticipate more, and I really can’t wait for even more. Great show, go watch it. Just look out for violence. Seriously, all of these are like being in an ice cream parlor. Sure, I have some flavors I favor over others, but it’s still all ice cream and delicious.
Published in Entertainment
In a few weeks I’ll do a Spoiler filled post making the case that Luke Cage is ridiculously (if unintentionally) conservative.
I’m going to put a pin in this and come back to it to read it all and comment after I finish watching the series this weekend. So hold on.
I have to agree with this. I can’t wait to read your opinions to see if we’re thinking about the same scenes. Like the one where the drunken baseball has-been explains why “brothers don’t play baseball anymore.”
About halfway through. First episode had some awful dialogue, which tried really really hard to let us know this series was about black people. I couldn’t tell if it was written by blacks who overexplained to whites, or whites writing about what they thought black life is like. Thankfully this is gone by episode 3.
Offhand, I suspect a lot of that has to do with how conservatives and liberals see the world at present. Modern liberals tend to see the world as they want it to be, where conservatives tend to see the world as it is and respond accordingly. This show tends to do the latter a lot more than the former. Again, odd for a show whose main character is nigh-invulnerable.
I suspect this is intentional. The original comic book character was created during the popularity of the blaxploitation films that were popular in the day and had a lot of that character. My lovely wife Amanda noted that early in the show, they use color temperatures that give the show an “older look” — like something from the seventies or eighties — and that changes until it’s gone and replaced with more modern coloring that we know today. Given that they haven’t shied too much from the roots of the character, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she’s right and that the dialogue perhaps reflects this as well.
I totally agree, bad dialogogue and poor acting in first episode. Made me quit after one episode. Might give it another go, since you say it gets better.
It really does. I recommend a few more episodes at the very least.
I may give it a shot, but I’m skeptical. After watching Jessica Jones, I thought that the Cage character (and the actor) weren’t interesting enough to be a series lead.
There’s not too much about him in JJ. Mostly he’s there to be a challenging fight later on in the show. Much of his role is moving Jessica’s story forward. His laconic personality doesn’t do well in that series. It works better for his own title, and the character gets more depth to it.
Me, too.
I await with bated breath.
It also seemed slow the first episode. It took awhile to build up. They had to introduce all the characters so there was a feeling of doing homework. I have to say, I thought it payed off. The second episode has better dialogue and more movement and in episode three it gets into the meat of the series.
As far a Luke expressing emotions. The series starts with him like ice and then he starts to thaw. That could have been implemented better but it does have a purpose.
Yeah. There was actually a somewhat larger cast than the others. DD and JJ both had relatively small casts, and both took a couple of episodes to introduce the antagonist in earnest. There seems a lot more players in the story at first.
After that, the only real hiccough I experienced was something I won’t discuss in the first page as it’d be a spoiler.
I remember reading the series in the 70’s, when the character was new. The dialogue in the Netflix version may be bad, but nothing like it was then. Even as an 8-year-old white kid, I knew that black people didn’t speak like that.
“Sweet Christmas?”
Sweet Christmas indeed.
I hope I don’t rain on your parade by telling you that apparently he wears his hoodie as a tribute to Trayvon Martin. ( I read that on The Root). So maybe not so conservative?
The Wire had some conservative messages despite being intended to be hardcore leftist; Simon’s clever messaging was so clever that very few viewers understood the 9/11 references, but the problems with unions were pretty obvious. The most conservative show on TV at the moment, Transparent (filled with pro-life, pro-marriage, specifically traditional family structures, pro-Christian, specifically conservative Baptists from Kansas City, pro- liturgical religion in general, and anti-feminist messages, climaxing in an episode that literally casts radical feminists as Nazis, overlaying the present day images with images from Germany in the 1930s), has a ton of symbolic leftist content. If the West Wing had used pens used by Reagan and shoes designed to evoke Goldwater (it did pay tribute to the Founding Fathers), it would still have been objectively leftist. My understanding, not having yet watched it, is that Cage makes reference to the racist history of gun control and features books that help readers learn more about that. They’re leftist, anti-racist, books, but our side wins more than theirs does from that argument, and it’s not close.
“Sweet Christmas” is part of the character. I think it goes back to when they were more careful not to curse. Later they had him say something about not wanting to use bad language in front of his daughter.
I really enjoyed the series. There was a lot of uncensored rap I could have done without.
Thanks! Good to hear.
I hope to try out Luke Cage soon. I was delighted with Daredevil Season 1 and pleased with Season 2.
I couldn’t get through the first episode of Jessica Jones. Too much sex, and maybe more cussing than I was comfortable with. And I have a hard time thinking any show featuring a scene of a pantsless woman pooping, lying, and cussing–literally all at the same time–can be any good.
(I can’t say I would have approved of a similar scene featuring a man either.)
Luke Cage is exactly what Conservative out reach to Black Communities should look like. Incredibly, shockingly conservative show. The only false note in that I have seen so far is that they show media holding an impeccably liberal Black Council Woman accountable. Does that ever happen? A female corrupt, liberal politician held accountable for corruption, really? Hard to believe I know.
I know, I found that the hardest to deal with in Jessica Jones too. However you should stick with it. It pays off if you do.
There’s some embarrassing stuff in the old comics, written by Archie Goodwin. A lot of that is purely modern-racial-sensitivity hindsight of course, and Goodwin, John Romita Sr and George Tuska deserve credit for what they did. But it is clearly white people swimming in someone else’s pool.
That said, I miss the tiara, cuffs and chains.
They managed to get that in the TV show.
Jessica Jones had an awesome villain. I can’t really get into the main character though.
What do you have against integrated swimming pools? ;)
Though the seventies racial presentations are laughable and embarrassing today, the creators should get some props for not giving Cage a superhero code name that includes the word “Black,” such as “Black Vulcan” or “Black Panther.”
“Power Man” came pretty close, but I agree.
Here’s Black Mariah in the comic (she’s a little different in the TV show so far):
Yeah … yikes. I mean, I typically try to avoid comparison to today’s standards but … yikes.