Darkman: The Best Revenge Movie You’ve Never Seen

Few things are worse than a revenge movie done half-assed. A good vendetta ride and a pile of mangled corpses will leave us satisfied only to a point before interest wanes and we wander out of the theater 20 bucks poorer. For every Oldboy there’s 20 or so remakes of I Spit on Your Grave or Last House on the Left. How exactly Liam Neeson has come to embody the revenge genre — relatively late in life — is largely because he’s great playing vengeful middle-aged men. But it’s also because he’s been perfect at playing tragic characters since early in his career. And before he was the angry dad in Taken or that old guy fighting wolves, he got his start as Peyton F*cking Westlake. AKA DARKMAN.

Enjoy it, ladies…

Yeah.

In 1989, Filmmaker Sam Raimi, still 15 years from Spider-Man, had enjoyed a minor hit in Evil Dead II and was shopping himself around Hollywood. He’d asked to do Batman but Tim Burton took the job. He asked to do The Shadow, but no one gave a sh*t about The Shadow. And so, Raimi wrote his own film. And with the help of a brilliant little script, he found his personal vision, a willing studio, and two burgeoning young stars in Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand, both of whom had yet to star in Schindler’s List or Fargo. Pitched at the divide between action/comic book movie and Phantom of the Opera – like tragedy, Neeson gave one of the most overlooked and utterly bad-assed performances of his career.

Cause as bad as Neeson is electro-shocking a guy’s taint in Taken, or severing limbs in Rob Roy, Darkman would likely squash their collective ba**s into oblivion. It’s also schlockier than the Evil Dead movies, completely over-the-top, and arguably one of the best comic book movies ever, dammit. Part Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Part The Crow, and all comic book action, Darkman was financed by Universal, but its magic lies within its purposefully-schlocky milieu. Terribly-photographed chroma key shots and Sergio Leone-esque cinematography combine to convey a comic book feel, but it’s also held up by some truly spectacular stunts and one-liners that make it an oft-overlooked tragicomedy.

Part of how Raimi makes it work is through Westlake’s descent from logical genius to madman. Westlake is a noble man on the verge of developing a synthetic skin, which could help the disfigured and badly burned live normal lives again. The problem he faces — and one of the film’s major plot devices — is the skin’s inability to last more than 99 minutes in daylight. Its cellular structure will only remain fully intact in complete darkness. Still, like a good scientist, he’s also dedicated to solving the problem objectively and methodically.

Why is he still wearing bandages?

Despite his frustration, Westlake seems happy and content in life. Part of that happiness is due to his dedication and determination to making the skin last, and also because he’s madly in love with his girlfriend Julie (Frances McDormand). She’s an attorney whose inadvertent possession of a mysterious legal memorandum — particularly incriminating of a corrupt businessman — will end up destroying both their lives. When the businessman’s gangsters (led by actor Larry Drake in a campily evil role) track the memo down to Westlake’s apartment (thanks for leaving that on my desk honey!), they trash the place, beat up Neeson, burn him, shove his head through glass, stick his face in acid, and — just to make sure he doesn’t get any ideas — blow him up with a big f*cking bomb.

Cause critics matter and stuff

Westlake’s body is hurled into the East Bay, somehow recovered, and made into someone else’s experiment. With 3rd, 4th, and 5th degree burns covering most of his body — along with some severed nerve endings — doctors make a few minor surgical adjustments to his spinal cord, thus rendering him super-strong. And so follows his Crow-like vendetta.

Using his synthetic skin to track down and kill his enemies, Darkman can only look human for about an hour and a half. This is one of the best things about Darkman and, again, a crucial plot device. Since he can only impersonate an enemy for 99 minutes, his plans must be precise and carefully planned.

After that, the skin begins to melt. Which would probably just freak the henchmen out more than arouse suspicion, but Raimi is smart enough to make it work both ways. It’s this combination of style, low-budget silliness, and tragedy that makes Darkman one of Neeson’s very best films. And as most great action films are only as good as their main character, one of the best things about Darkman is the character of Westlake. Much like Seth Brundle in Cronenberg’s The Fly, the notion that a once-great, brilliant, even noble scientist can be driven to madness by his own quests for perfection is what makes Westlake a perfect tragicomic character, and Neeson the perfect man to play him.

Style-wise, if you can keep in mind that it’s about 22 years old, and y’know, they didn’t have much CGI back then, it’s also gleefully shlocky fun. Though character comes first — wisely — it’s also the stylistic elements, so emblematic of Raimi’s technique, that makes Darkman so much fun, one of Neeson’s best roles, and a damn great revenge film to boot.