director
Sam Raimi
screenwriters
Chuck Pfarrer
Sam Raimi
Ivan Raimi
Daniel Goldin
Joshua Goldin
story by
Sam Raimi
producer
Robert Tapert
cinematographer
Bill Pope
music
Danny Elfman
editor
David Stiven
cast
Liam Neeson (Peyton Westlake)
Frances McDormand (Julie Hastings)
Colin Friels (Louis Strack Jr.)
Larry Drake (Robert G. Durant)
Nelson Mashita (Yakitito)
Jessie Lawrence Ferguson (Eddie Black)
Rafael H. Robledo (Rudy Guzman)
Danny Hicks (Skip)
Ted Raimi (Rick)
Dan Bell (Smiley)
Nicholas Worth (Pauly)
John Landis (Physician)
Bruce Campbell (Final Shemp)
Jenny Agutter (Burn Doctor)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 96m
u.s.
release: 8/24/90
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other sam
raimi films
reviewed on this website:
- army
of darkness
- for love of the game
- the gift
- a simple
plan
- spider-man
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Darkman, the fourth feature by Sam Raimi (he
did The Evil Dead in '82, Crimewave in '85, and
Evil Dead II in '87), is a prime example of how movies
at their most cheerfully trashy can move you in ways that classier
films can't. Raimi, who secured a place in my heart with one
scene from Evil Dead II (wherein the hero, attacked by
his own giggling, demon-possessed hand, slices it off with a
chainsaw, shouting "Who's laughing now?"), is
a supreme prankster with a deep respect for all the cheesy romanticism
of misunderstood-monster movies like The Hunchback of Notre
Dame or The Phantom of the Opera or Frankenstein.
Sure it's tacky, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still work,
especially when a director as endearingly loopy as Sam Raimi
serves it to us.
Darkman began as a short story by Raimi, who
expanded it into a script with his brother Ivan, Chuck Pfarrer,
and Daniel and Joshua Goldin. What they cobbled up is a lovably
(and lovingly) pulpy premise: A scientist, Peyton Westlake (Liam
Neeson), is experimenting with a new synthetic skin he's developed;
he's sabotaged by a pack of gangsters, mutilated, and left for
dead in his lab, which is rigged to explode. Westlake survives
the blast and escapes from the hospital, endowed now with superhuman
strength and fierce, unpredictable mood swings. He becomes Darkman
(he needs the cover of darkness, especially when wearing the
fake skin, which only lasts 99 minutes in daylight), a tragic
figure with a ruined face and an intense longing for his past
life and love Julie (Frances McDormand). He rebuilds his lab
and makes "copies" of each gangster's face; he slinks
around the city after sundown, wearing the villains' "faces"
and picking them off one by one.
The plot is a hodgepodge, the
dialogue often atrocious, I suspect by design: "What if
I was scarred," the masked Westlake urgently inquires of
Julie, "disfigured, so that you couldn't bear to look at
me, to touch me -- what then, eh?" We're firmly and affectionately
in comic-book land here; the dialogue is delivered in italics,
with jagged speech balloons signifying screaming (Darkman
is the loudest movie in some time, in no small part due to Danny
Elfman's mega-caffeinated score). But Raimi's gift is that he
transcends the cheese by his very loyalty to it -- he embraces
it, runs with it, does pirouettes with it. And few, if any, filmmakers
have yet approached Raimi's fearless camerawork. His camera has
wings, it does loop-the-loops, it shows you things you've never
seen before. If you ever wondered what it might feel like to
be smashed face-first repeatedly into glass cabinets, Darkman
has that answer and many more.
As action spectacle, Darkman
is exhilaratingly violent; the scenes of brutality are much more
bracing here than in a comparably witless head-slammer like Total
Recall, because they arrive right when the narrative needs
them -- they're like the climaxes in a classical piece. Many
of the more violent bits are wondrous little sick jokes. One
villain (Larry Drake, a far cry from his well-meaning character
Benny on L.A. Law) snips his victims' fingers off with
his cigar trimmer and saves them; another bad guy is captured
by Darkman and thrust up through a manhole as cars speed past
his head; the scientist's undoing turns out to be one of those
bobbing plastic drinking-glass birds, which bobs forth and triggers
the explosion.
There are also sequences so
incongruously touching that you feel a real pang -- that's what
makes Darkman better than the snotty, ironic pop trifle
it might have been. Darkman stands outside a window, peering
in, and crumples in misery when he sees Julie dancing with the
head villain (Colin Friels); elsewhere, he flies into a horrifying
rage when, at a circus with Julie, he is denied a stuffed pink
elephant he's won for her. (This, however, leads to some memorably
hilarious dialogue and sight gags, which makes Raimi the rare
director who can go for pathos and comedy in the same scene,
and pull off both.)
The movie has been getting
a bit of a bum rap from critics who can't stomach its violent
humor or its shameless comic-bookness. Movies like Darkman
aren't really for them, or for anyone else who can't surrender
to the ride. It comes on exceptionally strong, sure of itself
and its basic, primitive hold on the audience, and this has not
been a period for boldness at the movies -- not in a climate
wherein the amiable, comforting pillow Driving Miss Daisy
took the Best Picture Oscar earlier this year. Sam Raimi isn't
remotely interested in comforting us; he just wants to slam us
around in a fast, brutal dance, and we stagger away dazed but
satisfied. Darkman will never, and should never, be mistaken
for art, but it's about the only thing out there right now that
reminds us what real moviemaking tastes like.
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