So many spoilers I just blacked the whole thing out, capeshitters beware!
Marvel's The Defenders
The latest instalment in Marvel's Netflix franchise, The Defenders sees heroes and supporting characters from previous series team up to take on... Sigourney Weaver! A sad lady who pops pills and listens to Brahms while being sad, and that, aside from telling other people that she is not to be messed with, is literally all she does. Sadgourney is also responsible for creating the Black Sky—yes, that's right, the main villain is yet another big player in the mystical crime ninja underworld—which it turns out, to no one's surprise despite a great many attempts to shroud it in mystery, is actually Elektrik “Which Hemisphere Is My Accent From Today?” Nachos, back from the dead and not quite herself.
The basic plot is thus: the Hand has been digging a hole (previously seen in season two of Daredevil) under a skyscraper, and at the bottom there is a mystical door with mystical writing on it which they believe will lead them to K'un Lun. To that end, they are looking for one Ron Fist, who has been tracking down Hand members around the world with his Chinese ninja girlfriend who still walks around densely populated urban centres with a lethal weapon on her back in plain sight without attracting the attention of police officers or literally anyone, for he alone has the power to unlock the door. Returning to New York after a brief encounter with Our Lady of Cheese-Drenched Tortilla Chips, they find themselves gradually becoming involved with Luke Cage, Matt Murdock, and Jessica Jones, all of whom are either unwittingly investigating Hand-related activity, or very much wittingly investigating someone who is unwittingly investigating Hand-related activity.
Defenders is really where the Hand stuff from previous shows pays off, kind of, in a roundabout sort of way that makes you wonder why they didn't come up with something else. Buh “KAHLEEEEN” Kudo is back from the dead, and now he's allied with Kung Fu Grandma, African Scanner Pimp, Japanese Taxidermy Man, and of course Sadgourney. No, it's not a prospective list of villains from Hideo Kojima's planned but unrealised Metal Gear Solid 6, but in a way it might as well be. These are the Five Fingers of the Hand, ancient evil persons of a racially and sexually diverse nature, natch, who were exiled from K'un Lun (that or they just left of their own accord, it seems like even they aren't really sure anymore) a billion years ago because they wanted to use the power of Fisting for evil.
Contrary to the speculation that Daredevil would be the main character, it turns out that most of the show is about Danny Rand being put in his place by just about everyone on the planet. The interpretation of his character from my I, Ron Fist review seems to have been in line with what the writers intended, or at least with what the writers of this particular version took from his original series, and his confrontations with his fellow Defenders are shown to be childish and silly, even often detrimental to their success in the fight against the Hand. Anyone still on the fence about the Iron Fist character will probably be convinced by the end that his obnoxiousness is entirely intentional in the writing, and that the other Netflix heroes find him just as insufferable a good amount of the time as the audience does. Even Colleen gets in on the action, making fun of his tendency to ramble on about how he is Ronnie Fisticles to anyone and everyone regardless of whether or not they want to hear it.
On the villain side of things, there isn't really anyone worth caring about. BuKAHLEEEENdo is as bland and insipid as ever, and the other Handy Finger Bois don't really have enough screen time or personality to feel like anything more than minor players. Perhaps the greatest offence is found in the lacklustre portrayal of the once fearsome and mysterious Madame Gao, who here seems more like a disgruntled old maid with about as much power and intrigue as a bargain bin AAAA battery. But there is hope on the deadly old persons front in the form of Stick. Cranky and ruthless as ever, our first scene with him involves him fighting off multiple mystical ninjas while chained to a pipe before cutting off his own hand in order to escape the Hand (see what they did there), and generally his scenes involve him killing people or berating them in the extreme, the former of which is about as bad-ass as the show gets, the latter often the only source of genuine comedy in a relatively dry show. Jessica Jones tries to pick up the slack but her one-liners come off forced and unfunny.
In case you can't already tell, I think Sadgourney's characterisation is extremely weak. It's unfortunate because we all know Weaver can deliver a great performance, but her screen time here shows signs of poor writing and poorer direction. It's like they thought “oh wow, Sigourney Weaver!” and expected they could give someone of her stature a supermarket receipt for a script and she'd come up with something good. What character moments we do get are pretty weak. The string quartet scene in the second episode very much comes across as “we looked up Brahms on Wikipedia”, and it just feels incredibly dumb to me. I also feel like they shouldn't have had Weaver speak foreign languages so much. I've heard it said that D'Onofrio's Chinese in Daredevil was kind of stilted, I didn't notice because whenever I hear spoken Chinese it just sounds like random noises, but I can definitely tell Weaver was coached for all of five minutes in Japanese and Turkish for her scenes. They really want to make her seem like someone who has lived for a very long time and experienced a lot of things, but I feel like they wrote her as a series of bullet points rather than as a person. Weaver is a good casting choice, but the script serves her poorly.
Elsewhere things are somewhat better. The main foursome and their friends all feel believable, relationships developed to some degree from the other shows, although I will say Daredevil's Foggy Nelson feels like an afterthought in a lot of ways, and his lines come across choppy and uncharacteristic in several scenes. There is a general sense, much as I feared there would be, that they tried to pack in too much, just like the Avengers movies. It's not quite Age of Ultron bad on that front, but there are definitely plenty of times when the desire to luxuriate in a particular scene or character is at odds with the need to push ahead with the plot. After all, the show only has eight episodes, and for all that's in there it feels like there's too much of one thing and not enough of another.
Fight scenes are kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, Iron Fist definitely looks more competent early on than he did in his own show, there's less cutting and more clear shots and Finn Jones has clearly been practising, but later on fight scenes quickly become incomprehensible messes. I'm thinking of one scene in particular in episode seven where the Defenders and three of the Hand's leaders face off, and while it's not Liam-Neeson-climbs-a-fence it's definitely edging towards that territory, located on the other side of the world from the thrilling and now classic hallway sequence in Daredevil's first season. Cinder blocks fly, punches, kicks, throws and flips dance around fire and the Force, cars are crushed, walls are smashed, blood is spilled, but spectacle gives way to not being able to tell what the fuck is happening or who is making it happen. Cinematography in general can be a little annoying, with tons of clumsy shots that exist only to show the Defenders as a group regardless of whether it looks good or appropriate or whatever.
The soundtrack tries too hard in some ways and not hard enough in others. Early on it tries to mirror the feel of the original shows as it follows each character, but it can't match the authenticity of Luke Cage's blend of jazz, blues, funk, and hip-hop, nor can it create any tension the way Daredevil's and Jessica Jones's soundtracks did. Later on, once they're all together, even this sense of at least trying to be character appropriate is gone, and the whole thing disintegrates and reforms as a bland amorphous mush of generic gestures and moods, becoming one of the least memorable parts of a show which makes of the forgettable its bread and butter.
It's not as gritty as Daredevil, as pulpy as Luke Cage, as paranoid as Jessica Jones, or as richly characterised as Iron Fist. Its villains are bland, and the plot is essentially tying up loose ends from other shows which I'd be surprised to learn anyone really cares about anymore. The Hand was best when it was a mysterious shadow organisation you couldn't quite reach out and touch, now that we know it's mystical crime ninjas it ceases to be as interesting as it once was, especially as it is now appearing for a third major outing. In this way it mirrors The X-Files's alien invasion “mytharc”, which became less interesting as it went on, partly due to diminishing returns, but mainly because Chris Carter clearly had no grand plan for how it would play out, and evidently still doesn't, but without the great characters and chemistries that show had/has to keep the drama rolling along through its most bafflingly stupid moments, The Defenders feels like a lot of sound and fury. The direction is inconsistent, and the often messy fight scenes are a microcosm of the show itself, too much going on at once forcing cut cut cut and often losing any sense of rhythm it manages to establish in its quieter moments. I'm ragging on it a lot, but for all its many many faults I actually enjoyed it. It's silly and messy and unimpressive, but I was entertained by it and managed to get through it in just a few days, so take that for what you will.