It’s Christmas time in the MCU. Clint Barton’s just a boring bow-and-arrow guy who wants to get home to his family. But a chance encounter with the new superhero in town — and a certain pizza-loving canine — sends them both spiraling into adventure against a sea of tracksuit-clad Eastern European stereotypes. Let’s load up on tennis-ball arrows and unpack the first two episodes of Hawkeye, starring Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld and now streaming on Disney+.
Dan Grote: So, cards on the table: I wasn’t super hot on this one. This is the weakest Disney+ MCU debut since Falcon and the Winter Soldier, though that show still ranks at the bottom of the pack for trying to do too many things and very little of it well. We’ll get into the whys and wherefores as we go, but Mark, general impressions?
Mark Turetsky: Bro, seriously. Bro. Pay David Aja.
Dan: Amen.
The Kate of It All
Dan: While I am meh on the show as a whole so far, make no mistake: Kate Bishop is good. Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop is very good. Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop in an all-black suit is very VERY good. What say you, Mark?
Mark: I agree. The Kate stuff is great. I was convinced at first that the black tux was to hide that she had a costume on underneath, but I guess instead it became the underlayer to the Ronin ninja outfit (though I’d point out that ninja and ronin are very different things that shouldn’t be conflated). The adaptation of her character’s origin story from the comics works pretty well here. She’s still the high-society young lady who’s a chronic overachiever (though her bows are limited to archery, and not the cello like in the comics).
The biggest change here is that she loses her dad during the events of the original Avengers movie and she watches Clint being a badass and decides that she’s going to be like him from an early age, rather than becoming Hawkeye almost by default. What did you make of her MCU origin here?
Dan: It’s a weird moment of baby-duck imprinting. Imagine if she had seen Thor on that rooftop. Would she dye her hair blond, buy a sledgehammer and start talking to everyone in thee-thou speak?
I keed. I think that scene did exactly what it needed to do as a cold open: Here’s a new character, here’s her backstory, here’s why you should care about her. The first episode especially centers Kate in a way none of the other D+ shows has done with a new character. They need Kate to work, they need Kate to stick because she is the future. Why else spend so much time — too much time? — not just on her but on her supporting cast and their internal drama?
Mark: I think her supporting cast is fantastic. I was thrilled to see Tony Dalton as Jack Duquesne, the Swordsman. He treads the line between affability and menace so well on Better Call Saul, and I can’t wait to see what they do with him here. It’s a bit of a cliché plot, the stepparent-to-be cast as the untrustworthy villain, and I suspect the trope is going to be turned on its head by the end and we’ll discover that Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga) is behind it all. She’s just trying to connect with her daughter, who won’t let her be happy even for once, but maybe in an evil way? Also, Simon Callow as Armand III did a great turn in his one episode.
Dan: I did love them bickering in the rich-assholes auction scene. There was a missed opportunity there though to pepper in some recognizable MCU faces for that classic villains-auction flavor. Surely, Zemo must have escaped the Raft by now. Or his butler, maybe?
Mark: Who knows, maybe the future Doctor Doom was there?
Dan: And Mephisto and the X-Men. Smash that subscribe button for more of our YouTube content!
Mark: Use offer code MagnetoWasLeft for 10% off our free shipping on your first two orders!
The Clint of It All
Dan: Meanwhile, there’s just no getting around this: Jeremy Renner was a casting mistake who’s stuck around by dint of seniority. I blame Joss Whedon. Even if it’s not his fault. Maybe “having no charisma” works as a character trait when you’re juggling screen time with scenery-gobblers like Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Paul Rudd, but it sure as hell doesn’t work when you’re supposed to be carrying 50% of a TV show.
Mark: I believe the phrase, “bag of wet newspapers” applies here. I guess they’re leaning into his everyman MCU identity, but that doesn’t make for compelling watching. There’s the implication that he’s still dealing with trauma and grief for the whole, well, history of the MCU that he’s lived through. But he’s just not compelling to watch.
In the second episode they have him retrieving the Ronin outfit from a LARPing firefighter named Grills. He dons a bit of armor and gets handed a fake sword, and I think the intent behind the sequence is to see Clint doing something ego-humbling and goofy, but it just kinda comes off as a) patronizing and b) not even fun. Even when Clint agrees to play along, he doesn’t play along.
Dan: It drives the point home. You can be the everyman. You can be the hardass forced to do something goofy to advance the plot. You can be Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon — too old for this shit — and still put in a modicum of effort to get the audience on your side. Hell, what’s more likable than a guy who’s just trying to get home to his family for Christmas but has to endure a series of zany adventures first? There’s an entire f’ing cable channel devoted to movies with that exact premise. Renner should try watching a couple and taking notes. I recommend Holiday in Handcuffs starring Melissa Joan Hart and Mario Lopez. I mean, I don’t actually, but for the purposes of this exercise I do.
Mark: And it seems like maybe they’re afraid to have one of their PREMIERE AVENGERS come across as incompetent in any respect. He intentionally gets himself captured in the second episode in order to infiltrate the Tracksuit Mafia and it’s only Kate’s meddling that puts him in any real danger. The Clint of the comics is competent but makes some terrible decisions. Here, #ClintDidNothingWrong.
Don’t get the wrong impression, though, I’m enjoying the series so far for what it is, even if the bits I’m enjoying are the high-society-family-drama-in-a-superheroic-world bits.
Dan: Funny how we’re all “Eat the rich” till they entertain us (See: this show, Succession, Arrested Development.)
The Fraction-and-Aja of It All
Dan: This show wants so badly to be the 2012-15 Hawkeye series by Matt Fraction, David Aja, Annie Wu, Javier Pulido, Francesco Francavilla, Steve Lieber, Matt Hollingsworth, et al (Holy SHIT there were some good artists on that series). The logo, the opening titles, the Tracksuit Mafia, the Pizza Dog, the fact that Fraction is credited as a consulting producer, so much of it cribs from the look and feel of this damn-near decade-old comic. But it’s trying to cram that comic into a continuity in which Clint is married with children, is processing the trauma of losing his best friend and is basically a downer instead of a hot mess. Mark, does that approach work for you?
Mark: I keep expecting the credits to say “Based on the Marvel comics by Matt Fraction and David Aja.” But then they’d probably have to pay David Aja. The thing is, the comic has such a cinematic feeling to it at times. It’s got this 1960-70s cinema aesthetic in the costumes, the cars, the credits pages, even the look of New York City itself. This show opts to focus more on taking plot elements than the aesthetics that made that run so memorable. We get a bit of it in Kate’s weird apartment, which … is it an unused dining room for the pizzeria?
The big exception, of course, is in the credits, which are a straight lift of Aja’s design, right down to the color palettes, which, you know, they should really pay David Aja.
Dan: Pay ‘em all, Brother Mark. Pay ‘em all.
One thing that gnawed at me in terms of lifting direct plot elements from the comic was the introduction of Grills in Episode 2. Now, if you read the comic, you know that a character by that name was killed in one of the book’s saddest moments. As soon as our firefighting LARP-er introduced himself, my shoulders slumped. Maybe a reference is just a reference, but seeing how much of the comic they’re lifting already — this MIGHT be the closest thing to a direct adaptation the MCU has done in 13 years — feeling like they introduced this minor character to make us care about him only for him to be killed off is much cheaper than being surprised by it later.
Mark: Is it just me, or is it weird that they just kinda ignored that he’s a firefighter who steals stuff while working and then posts about it on socials?
Dan: Again, we’re supposed to care about him so we’re sad later. They’re probably hoping we don’t read too much into that.
Bro.
- If they’re building up to a Young Avengers team-up, Kate’s going to have some serious conflict with Kid Loki, since Loki was behind the Chitauri invasion of New York that killed her father.
- There’s also the fact that by the time this movie gets off the ground, all of the actors they’ve cast to play the Young Avengers will likely be well into their 20s and maybe even early 30s.
- I’ve seen people on Twitter say Jack Duquesne should have been played by Paul F. Tompkins. And while that’s pretty good, I raise you the constipated smarm of Murray Bartlett in White Lotus.
- Do you think the tracksuits will end up being Sokovian in this universe? It saves Disney from having to remotely comment on the Russia/Ukraine situation.
- For those scratching their heads about the mysterious woman shown at the end of episode 2, that was Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez, aka Echo, who’ll be getting her own spinoff soon.
- Between Makkari, Echo and to a certain extent Clint, I truly hope the MCU’s recent influx of hearing-impaired characters is good food to those who need it. I’d be interested in hearing from someone from that community whether they work or not.
- The Tracksuits were after a watch retrieved from the Avengers compound. It’s marked #268. Avengers #268 is a Kang issue, so I’m going to say this watch is some kind of Kang time travel device. Why not?
- (Mark here) I won’t be commenting on this show’s strange sense of New York City geography. Nope. Not gonna take the bait.
- Pay David Aja? As a treat?
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
