Review: 'Luke Cage' Is The Gold-Standard For Superhero Television
Smart and relevant writing, exceptional performances, compelling characters with engrossing arcs, plenty of surprise revelations, and lots of thrilling action entertainment combine to make Luke Cage yet another Marvel-Netflix series representing the gold standard in TV superhero/comic adaptations. Featuring one of the most diverse casts of any series on television, set in Harlem, addressing myriad modern social issues facing communities of color, Luke Cage is bold and unapologetic in its willingness to portray realistic situations reflecting both past and present cultural and political truths— and the convergence of the past and present. This is storytelling at its finest, luck enough to have a cast and crew bringing it to vivid, inspired life as it deserves.
Mike Colter delivers a powerhouse performance as Luke Cage, one of the few superhero performances on TV to demonstrate significant character arcs in each and every individual episode as well as the overall series from start to finish. It’s a magnificent portrayal, the sort making it hard to imagine the actor in real life is any different from the persona he’s created on screen. Cage is filled with an intense sense of morally certain righteousness at the same time he is consumed by overwhelming guilt and desire to fade away and live his life silent and unseen. Yet he cannot remain silent in the face of injustice, even if it means eventually being seen in the bright light of day. He is still, however, a man of extremely conflicted emotions and motivations, to a degree that makes him among the most human and relatable of any live-action superhero......
Simone Missick’s portrayal of Misty Knight, the police detective swimming upstream against a tide of corruption in the police department and government while surrounded by a growing criminal threat that requires intervention by superhuman citizens, requires a deft touch. Luke Cage and other superheroes go against everything she believes in — namely, the rule of law and the importance of rooting out corruption within the system rather than going outside the system for solutions, because the more we rely on external answers the more we allow the decay within the system to remain and grow stronger. Her position is hard to argue against, yet she increasingly struggles with the simple realization that her view is idealistic in the face of a world where such idealism seems powerless to change anything.
Missick makes Knight sympathetic as one of the few untainted people in positions of power, and as a voice of reason shouting, “Am I the only one who realizes how screwed up all of this is?” in a world spiraling out of control. She recognizes the dangerous appeal of embracing superheroism and extra-judicial solutions, and the need to try to not just resist it but to also accept reality and reach out directly to those involved in superheroism and ask them to work with people like herself to fix what’s broken in the system. And in that regard, she represents a wider concept in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and television world, where superheroes are increasingly confronted with the question of whether they will use their powers in service to legitimate authorities and institutions of power even if those authorities and institutions aren’t always reliable, trustworthy, or morally right.
Each new Marvel-Netflix series finds a radically new approach and impressive ways to top what has come before, and Luke Cage continues that trend. It is the best of Marvel’s series to date, and that’s something I didn’t expect to say after the remarkable quality of Jessica Jones. Showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, a great producer and writer in his own right — as evidenced by the series Southland and Ray Donovan, for example — has assembled a knockout team of writers in Charles Murray, Kayla Cooper, and Nathan Jackson. The dialogue is filled with so many great little moments sprinkled throughout all of the big moments, with deeply layered subtext and subtle callbacks. I hope Netflix-Marvel make the show’s scripts available soon, as I’d love to spend a few days reading through them. This is that sort of show, making you want to not just watch it but to also go back and experience the written words, to see those simple pages of dialogue that breathed so much life into the characters and story even before they literally came to life via actors and directors and sets.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2016/09/30/review-luke-cage-is-the-gold-standard-for-superhero-television/#109612c24106
= new reply since forum marked as read
