Defenders review – Not reward enough

As I mentioned before, this show has a LOT of characters. Some of them are used really well, while others are left with little to work with.

Daredevil/Matt Murdock gets the brunt of the “character” moments. Elektra, his love interest in Daredevil season 2, figures heavily into the plot of Defenders, and Matt gets to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out what’s going on, or interacting with Elektra, or talking about Elektra.

While the story depends heavily on the Iron Fist and his power, he’s somewhat of a MacGuffin – meaning that he’s there to move the plot forward. The character’s petulant and super-serious nature is balanced out somewhat by Luke Cage grounding him, and he’s not quite as miserable to be around as he was in his own show. But he feels like the Defenders’ little brother – he spends much of his time doing the equivalent of saying “but you guys!” or playing into the Hand’s hands.

And that’s another thing. While Luke and Jessica get a pass for not understanding all of this stuff right away, Danny has supposedly been training for over half his life to handle these situations, but he’s constantly played off as the least experienced of the group, and he’s constantly getting tricked into doing dumb stuff or running headlong into situations. He can be immature without being constantly written as being dumb, but that’s not the case here.

Luke, then, is relegated mostly to being a babysitter for Danny and looking confused. It’s a sharp turn from the determined hero who was such a badass that Method Man rapped about him on the radio. Jessica is similarly underused. She gets most of the funniest lines, but she’s mostly there to react to Danny and Matt’s collective issues.

Scott Glenn returns as Stick, and as usual steals just about every scene he’s in. Glenn is a seriously badass dude in real life, and somehow that feeds over into his performance, and he’s consistently compelling. Wai Ching Ho as Madame Gao is similarly compelling.

Perhaps the greatest crime of The Defenders, though, is how poorly the show makes use of Sigourney Weaver. She plays a woman so intense that even the fearsome Madame Gao bows to her, but we’re never given any real evidence for this. The character they wrote for her is perhaps the most cookie-cutter of the cookie cutters. She likes fancy classical music and has very fine taste in food, and she dresses very fancy all the time. If you think back to Wilson Fisk in Daredevil, he did all these things, too, but the writers did them all better with him. Instead of just saying “look, he likes high art, that’s a thing villains do,” they showed us how his focus on fine art was part of his growth from a low-class kid and abuse victim into a powerful and dangerous businessman. His appreciation of fine food was integrated into his overtures to his girlfriend Vanessa to show the creepy intensity of his love for her. Here, we’re just told that Weaver’s character likes those things, and it’s just because villains like those things.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/marvel-defenders-review/