Marvel's The Defenders 2017

-- DISCLAIMER: THIS BELOW IS ENTIRELY MY PERSONAL OPINION, YOU MIGHT NOT AGREE WITH IT --

• This comes from a Marvel die-hard fan that read comics since he was able to read at all. I follow most current comics Marvel is releasing, I obviously have read and reread all the most famous one and I am watching the entire MCU in the exact timeline events ordered. All these opinions you will read weren't taken lightly and without thought. -

• REVIEW

So "The Defenders" is out, or how I like to call them "Heroes for Hire" (Whatever happened to that anyways?)

The Defenders, is the endpoint of each and every single one of the stories we've seen so far in the Netflix MCU.
It puts closure on all of the characters, not indefinite, but closure of what we've seen of them so far.

Because of this, I was not going in with high expectations, and thankfully in doing so, I didn't leave entirely disappointed.

Here's the catch tho,

I believe we can all agree that - this - is Marvel trying a more "serious", a more "adult" way for their MCU.
We can all agree that we cannot expect a Netflix series on Daredevil, JJ or even the others to be action-packed, mindless punching, d!ck hard-straightfoward-nofucksgiven-whatdoesthepoliceevendoanyways as much as we're accustomed to see on the big screen with The Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy.

But let me tell you this:

There is a point - in time - where a man (or a woman) has this "we're the police let us do our job" - "you gonna end up in jail" - "You shouldn't do this, that" kind of bullshit talk so far up his butt, that it is impossible not to hate it.

The extent of milking out minutes and minutes, adding absolutely nothing valuable to the story is REALLY starting to annoy me very much. It was very light in Daredevil, it started showing in Jessica Jones and from Luke Cage it really went downhill. There's a whole new way of talking around, and around, and around pointlessly in these last shows that is really tiresome.

I'm talking about the side characters pointing out the same things, over and over and over and over, one time after one time after one time after one time.

"We are the police we can help you"
"Let us help you, you can't do it alone"
"You're gonna get in trouble"
"You're gonna go to jail"

Listen, screenwriters: shut the fuck up! They gonna do whatever the fuck they want anyways. We know it, you know it. And it showed.

I believe we can all agree (or at least try to) that Marvel won't ever (hopefully not) come up with something so profound, so intense, so serious (Maybe like we've partially witnessed with Logan) because they are too focussed on cliches, too focussed on this bullshit way of having to show how rebelious their characters are, and never focussed on the actual emotions and portraying them or conveying them to the people. I don't necessarily believe they should, that they are trying to do this, but at least... cut the bullshit a little, huh?

And I'm not adding more to that statement.

Alright, since that's out of my system, let's talk everything else.

The baseline of the show and the story aren't that bad. I like that finally we get to see the Hand entirely, for what they are and who they are without the mist of bullshit that we ingested the past shows. The action "side" of "things" isn't quite as horrible as we witnessed in Iron Fist, so that's a huge pro.

The fighting coreographies weren't really that stale, let's be honest: who doesn't enjoy watching JJ or Luke simply lifting goons, or watching Daredevil jump around and that fucking metal batoon hit sound, ohhh so good...

But then... here comes THE LIVING WEAPON. HURRAAAY!

No. Definitely no hurrays for him.

Let me tell you this, chaps, and I won't put spoiler marks on this part because there's nothing new to this:

Danny Rand - did not - evolve from his standalone show, his character depth and importance is just words in the wind, his appeal is just as strong as watching a golden retriever with his face out the car window and his dribble splattered all over.
He's A FUCKING NOOB, and yes, I did scream that out loud, a few times. (Same goes for his girlfriend).

Someone needs to explain to me why Danny got a scar on his chest tattoo in the first episode and then it disappears for the rest of the season.

Plus, someone needs to explain to me if elektra can punch JJ and Luke so hard that it makes them shake a little bit, why doesn't she destroy Daredevil or Iron Fist with the same punch? How can they sustain a damage that can make Luke Cage feel pain?

And that's really most of what's wrong with this show.
Believe me tho, once you see it, you'll understand why I can get so upset.

What more could be said?
Music was good, I enojyed the few pieces, they were well placed.
The colors are always fucking cold and stale, the light almost always dark.
Sigourney Weaver is a great actress portraying a terrible, empty character, but ehhh, whatever.

It is definitely worth watching if you liked Daredevil and Jessica Jones. I could bare Luke Cage more here, he was kind of different, in a good way.

You know what's missing from this show?

A FUCKING GOOD ASS VILLAIN. BRING ME FUCKING KINGPIN.

Jesus christ I fucking hate Danny Rand and his stupid fisting duracell fetish.

"The Defenders" was an anticipated show for me that I only got around watching now. I'm a big fan of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, like Luke Cage, and didn't have much of an opinion on Iron Fist (besides hearing how horrible the first season was), so I was excited to see them all get a mini-series. I've heard mixed opinions on it, but generally more positive than elsewise. I can see why that is having watched it now.

The Defenders' plot revolves around the clan of ninjas knows as the Hand, who played a big part in Daredevil Season 2 and Iron Fist Season 1 from what I can presume. As such, Matt Murdock and Danny Rand are at the centerfold of the story. As villains, I can't say I was too ecstatic about The Hand, especially with how great some of the antagonists were in the Netflix series (Kingpin, Punisher, Kilgrave), but they weren't bad either. I found them largely uncharismatic, though the return of a certain character, Elektra, added the necessary tension and kept me invested in what was going on. The conspiracy itself was kooky, but certainly interesting. Overall, "The Defenders" gets pretty crazy, yet somehow manages to make this work with its grounded superheroes. It takes itself a little too seriously at times, but works for the most part and has its share of fun and comedy.

My biggest issue might really be the overload of drama that is present throughout the 8 episodes. It makes sense and is necessary, even good when properly timed, but there is so damn much of it. Matt is far too secretive, a personality trait that has been set up and is an important character flaw. As such, he is often in conflict with the rest of the group, but the frequency of this gives the show a tonal inconsistency that takes away from the fun. Jessica is an asshole, that is a big part of her charm, so I don't really have any gripes with her. Luke isn't too argumentative either. Danny, on the other hand, being such a vital part of the plot, brings a lot of annoying arguments with him as well. Thankfully, there are many other interactions between these characters that make up for this. Some of the best relationship include Matt and Jessica's, Luke and Jessica's, and Luke and Danny's. Besides the four, we get a lot of cast members coming from across the shows. Stick had a very strong presence here and an important role; Trish was enjoyable to watch, no matter how small her role might have been; Foggy had some great moments as well.

"The Defenders" suffers from some objectively bad writing. My least favourite scene would be Jessica following Matt, who at first senses her and decides to swerve down a back alley, then parkours his way out, somehow completely oblivious to what he just noticed. I cannot make any sense of the scene, it barely had a reason to even be there. Unfortunately, there are other missteps in logic throughout.

The action scenes were good, even great at times. They could also be lazy, but I think the show did a good job altogether with managing 4 characters, each having their own distinct fighting style. Nothing as ground-breaking as Daredevil, but of quality and entertaining.

Truly, the biggest strength of "The Defenders" is how damn fun it is. The pacing is said to be an issue and I would agree, particularly with how much time it takes to actually gather the team. It left me a tad dissatisfied with how little time we got to spend with them, when this was the biggest draw. Still, I like that each of them had their time to shine. Matt had a great arc here and in spite of some of my issues with how he was written, he was one of my favourite characters to watch. Tied with Jessica, who was probably the most out of place and as such one of the most relatable and down-to-earth heroes on the team. Every scene she was in was good in my opinion. Luke contributed a lot and had great charisma. Danny was honestly not as bad as I anticipated. His edge was definitely tacky at times, but most of the time he had this naïve charm to him and was even funny on occassion.

Overall, "The Defenders" was a very flawed, but very entertaining mini-series. While the plot itself might not have been the most engaging and there were plenty of other flaws, I had a lot of fun simply watching each of the characters interact and their stories develop. I wouldn't call it a must-watch, but I wouldn't mind watching it again. As much as I have issues with it, "The Defenders" is just that damn fun.

The Defenders was Netflix' answer to the Avengers, except on the small screen and with a group of gritty, street-level heroes. While this culmination of nearly 2 1/2 years of world-building delivers on the fun & fan service, it also feels like it was less than it could have been. It would be going too far to call the series "disappointing," but in spite of some great plot-mapping and production design (the scene transitions between characters in the first 3 episodes are a great touch), some of the pieces never quite fit, and Finn Jones sticks out like a sore thumb as the weak link among his clearly superior co-leads, Charlie Cox, Krysten Ritter, and Mike Colter.

The show smartly resists the urge to bring everyone together quickly, instead giving each member of the (eventual) team time to work their respective mysteries until they all meet up at the same place. And when they do, the fun really starts. The action set pieces are all done well. The production team has even figured out how to (mostly) shoot around Jones' ineptitude when it comes to martial arts. On the negative side, while Krysten Ritter plays Jessica Jones well, the writers never give her enough space to shine. Jessica isn't a "team" kind of person (none of them are, really) but her skillset is never required to move the story forward once her case leads her to her first Hallway Fight Scene. Also, beyond Misty Knight & Colleen Wing (who have important roles in the comics that they inch closer towards here), none of the supporting characters from each of the Defenders' own shows has any reason to appear beyond a passing scene or two, yet precious time is wasted on them, extending the series longer than it needed to be.

Unlike with their previous appearances, The Hand's ultimate goal is one that makes sense, and the stakes are high. (Ironically, the MacGuffin at the center of it may feel like it's coming out of nowhere until you've watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which didn't hit theatres until 4 years after this series was released.) What's disappointing is that more breadcrumbs weren't laid out in Luke Cage and Jessica Jones' first seasons. That would have gone a long way towards making their joining of forces feel much more earned. Instead, they each make useless arguments against getting involved that play out less like drama and more like wastes of time. By the time I finished my rewatch, I felt fulfilled as a fan and like I'd had fun, but that The Defenders just didn't quite live up to the high standards set by Jessica Jones season 1 and Daredevil seasons 1 & 2. Here's hoping that Disney gives them another chance to do it better.

Let me preface this by saying that I have watched all of the Netflix Marvel shows and found numerous flaws in all of them. However, I still liked Jessica Jones and Season 1 of Daredevil to a decent extent. I really disliked Luke Cage and Season 2 of Daredevil. I have no words for Iron Fist; it was that bad.

Obviously, I did not have high expectations going in. But, in a similar fashion to Jessica Jones and Daredevil, I at least expected to be entertained, even if the plot doesn't make much sense. Moreover, the showrunners were writers on Daredevil. So I had some hope before watching the show.

And boy, does this show disappoint. Every scene in so cliched and predictable. The dialogues are lifeless. As pointed out in another comment, many conversations are about how they can't let the police help them and they need to stop The Hand alone. The show drags and drags and yet, nothing happens. The plot is so stupid and boring and predictable and riddled with cliches. For all the buildup about the teaming up of the Defenders, they all don't get together until halfway through the series.

Superhero shows need a great villain if we want to root for the hero. Season 1 of Daredevil had an amazing villain in Wilson Fisk. Jessica Jones had it with Kilgrave. I very much disliked The Hand as a villain in Season 2 of Daredevil, so it was not encouraging to see them be the villain again in The Defenders. And here, we are led to believe that Sigourney Weaver's Alexandra is a strong, all-encompassing villain. Even though Sigourney Weaver is a great actress, the character isn't written well enough for her to do anything other than look cryptically at people and speak ominously. Yet, all of this is wasted, because they kill her off (just like they did, stupidly, with Cottonmouth in Luke Cage) in episode 6 and now Elektra becomes the big bad villain. I never liked Elektra as a character, so making her the real villain and creating some cliched romantic/tragic tension between her and Daredevil was quite irksome.

In conclusion, this show convinced me to never watch anything ever again from the Netflix Marvel universe. Eh, who am I kidding? I'll probably watch the Punisher series when it premiers at the end of this year. And I'll probably regret watching it as well, considering their track record till now.

Marvel's 'The Defenders' is without a doubt one of the worst properties they have ever produced. This is coming from someone who has seen the entirety of Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. with all its inconsistencies between seasons. After watching the pilot of Iron fist and skipping it, and after barely finishing Luke Cage, I couldn't help but wonder if this would be as bad as I thought would be. Skepticism prevailed, and though I watched the whole season, at the end it was more of an experiment in morbid curiosity and comedic value.

I'll jump into characters to start, following the Good, Bad, and Ugly formula.

THE GOOD
Daredevil, Matt Murdock was actually pretty good during the first half of the season. His scenes spent interacting with Jessica Jones were very fun, sharply written, and the two seemed to have a genuine chemistry that carried them to the diner scene, which I will talk about later as it's quite a point of contention for me with its lackluster cinematography and editing.

Jessica Jones, as mentioned before, probably had some of the most memorable scenes this season, with her signature "I'm kind of an asshole, but everyone deals with it" schtick remaining from Season 1 of her standalone show. They drop hints at Killgrave's death affecting her, but it never really goes beyond that. Jessica also has decent chemistry with Luke Cage, but everything is stilted by bad writing. Has anyone else noticed she sort of looks like Michael Jackson?

Claire and Colleen were doing the best they could with their scripts, and it showed. The final showdown when they team up is actually crafted pretty well, when set against the Jackson Pollock painting of a story the rest of the show is.

Stick, with his David Carridane-esque delivery and presence was also a treat to watch until Electra killed him. Damn shame that they offed him in such a way.

THE BAD
Luke Cage has a few decent moments here and there, and even bros out with Doom...err... Iron Fist when the going gets tough. Luke seems to have not much to do than be a bouncer (literally, his skin reflects bullets) for the entirety of the show, which is to be expected when half of this proverbial A-Team has ninja training.

Finally we get to the fourth and WORST Defender of them all, The Immortal Iron Fist, Protector of Shun-Lun, Master of the Universe, Mother of Dragons, and Heir to the Iron Throne. Joking aside, every time he had a name drop I couldn't help but groan. Disney-Marvel greenlit this? They greenlit his casting? Couldn't they have picked literally anyone else? Danny Rand had no good moments the entire show, and spent the back half of the season complaining about everything for nothing other than contrived conflict brought on by the Jack Sparrow equivalent of villains. As viewing went on, he got many a nickname. Archer fans will recognize Fisto-Roboto. Because of how robotic his delivery was.

Electric Nachos (Elektra Natchios) was as bad as she was in Daredevil Season 2. The lack of personality was actually ok for this season, her becoming a blank slate and slowly remembering things, that is. I really wish they could have done something more with the duality of thought. Just look to the superior show, Legion. The framework is all there. Just borrow the highlights and come up with something original to put a bow on it.

THE UGLY
ALL. OF. THE. VILLAINS.
What were they thinking? These villains are supposed to be a fearsome world ending organization. And they just fail at EVERY turn. There are never any stakes. There is never any good dialogue. None of them live up to their potential. and by God if the great Sigourney Weaver's talent isn't wasted on the tripe they fed her in terms of dialogue. How could anyone think the lines were passable? None of these characters had their motivations spelled out.

What I've come to expect from these shows is a villain that has motives, meaning, and motivation to be doing what they're doing. The Hand are after magic fluid that makes them immortal . Yep that's it. Instead of spending an episode with each of the villains like we did with Kingpin in season 1 and 2 of Daredevil, all we get is strung out lines fed into a few scenes here and there where they're panicking about the newly assumed Superfriends Scooby Gang that is somehow systematically eliminating the forces that once brought Daredevil himself to the brink of death a few times.

CINEMATOGRAPHY
I'm a bit pickier on this than most people. I like my high budget properties to have a certain level of polish. Who in their right mind let the director of photography do so damn many orbiting spinning shots? The biggest offender has to be the diner scene, where they decide that the best way to go about doing 4 solid minutes of dialogue is an orbiting camera on dolly track, going between each character. And that's all it is. A spinning shot. The same spinning shot that we've seen three times before this, and many more after, with basically any scene that Sigourney ends up being in, for some odd reason. The rest of it is just so uninspired, so plastic with an "edgy" flair.

What surprised me the most, though, is that the show sets up in episode 1 so promisingly, by attempting to use the unique styleguide that each show before provided as a template, to lay the foundation for each character. After the rapid-fire montage of each character, they slowly begin to meet through circumstance, as one would expect, but in an instant, (around episode 2 or so), all personality is lost. What happens is 'The Defenders' begins to not look like anything, and lose all sense of personality and self by the way of one of the two most important prongs of the visual medium, the cinematography. This, coupled with the writing that didn't know what it wanted to be made for a crisis of self within the work, a disconcerting string that radiates through the rest of the season. Which brings me to...

WRITING
I've said a lot about the writing on the show thus far. To not beat a dead horse, I'll add one more unique thing that I found particularly annoying. You know that thing where they say your brain is more likely to like a song when you can recognize the chord structures and patterns before they happen? The same is NOT true for that of writing dialogue. I've seen a lot of TV, I'll be the first to admit. More than a lot of people. Not quite 'Abed' from 'Community', but I'm getting there. --When your show decides to pick the most common, thinkable response to everything to the point where I can say the line before it happens, rewrite the bloody line. Even the CW show, 'RIVERDALE' of all things is better at that than 'The Defenders'.

I'm begging the team that had compelling narrative and lines with Daredevil, The Punisher, and Kingpin back in Daredevil season 2, please hire some new people. I don't know how you managed to make magic happen back then, but the decline in quality between those two shows is astounding, and if papa Disney gave a shit, they'd have checked you a bit more. Maybe we're at that point finally where these things aren't a concern anymore, and basically everyone that has a Netflix account will watch the shows, but please don't waste the fan's time with subpar everything.

CONCLUSION
All in all, this show is a small trash fire. I'd say about office recycling bin size. While it isn't a full on dumpster fire, It's still not just a pile of waste that HASN'T been set on fire. If you're like me and have a morbid curiosity about bad properties, and decide to learn from their mistakes when it comes to your own work, I'd recommend still giving it a watch. It is truly a master class in high budget bullshit, with a few moments peppered in here and there to keep you from losing interest entirely.

4/10.

This miniseries combine the on-going Marvel series "Daredevil", "Jessica Jones", "Luke Cage" and "Iron Fist" into one. It doesn't really stand on it's own as it incorporate elements from all the mentioned series and also have an ending that will be continued in their own series later. What we do get though is a mildly entertaining team-up event where they try to stop the ongoing threat of the Hand led by a classy, but forgettable villain appearance by Sigourney Weaver (who sadly has nothing really interesting to do) in a stupid resurrection/immortal plot story that makes little sense. What is cool though is the character interactions, some excellent stunt work and some surprising spurts of violence that suddenly occur. Still, this show feels rushed and not completely believed in. It is also takes one episode too long to start and should probably also have ended one episode earlier as it has several scenes that drag down the action and the importance of the story. Still, we do get to see four heroes together and this is probably the best way to start watching these series if one want to skip the four series all together and only watch one of them.

I have to start by saying very rarely comment on things on the internet, it is a mark of just how frustrated I was with this show that I feel the need to do so.

I had hoped the Daredevil and Jessica Drew production would drag Iron Fist and Luke Cage ones up from the dregs they've been floundering in. No such luck. For the first half of the season it seemed like possibly they may manage it but it grinds inevitably downhill at an increasing rate until the finale is a crushing lesson in how people can stand in a building lobby and talk in circles for about two damn days simply to arrive at the very point they started at. Now Matt and Drew stink nearly as bad. The only blessing is that maybe Misty might STFU for a few minutes now (though I wouldn't count on it) as apparently she is the only one written more annoyingly than Danny, something I hadn't thought was possible.

Just like in Drew's own series with David Tennant, the arch-villain makes this. It looks like Weaver does the best she can with the steaming pile of dross she's handed but even she isn't safe from the shit-show. Seems like maybe the bigger stars are quite happy to limit their exposure to only a single season each!