Hawkeye Didn't Quite Hit the Mark

 It wasn't until late into the holiday season (almost the new year) until I watched the Hawkeye series on Disney+ though it came out on Thanksgiving.  It was pretty much the same for Discovery, The Expanse, and other shows.  I mean it's nice they released a bunch of new content but in the holiday season I like watching holiday stuff--and tangential holiday stuff like Die Hard or Iron Man 3.  I suppose this does fall into the tangential category as it takes place in the week before Christmas.

As far as Marvels' Disney+ shows I will rank them as follows:

1. Captain America & The Falcon
2. What If...?
3. Loki
4. Hawkeye
5. WandaVision

But to be honest there's not a lot of separation between 2 and 5.  Like the MCU movies most of it is not terrible but I also don't really love most of it either.  So when I put Hawkeye 4th it's not that it's really bad--it just wasn't as good as the other ones.

Like the Black Widow movie, the reason this exists is mostly to introduce the next generation Hawkeye, ie Kate Bishop.  After a prank at her college goes wrong, she comes home for the holidays.  And then she stumbles onto a secret auction where they're selling the suit Hawkeye wore as Ronin that was found...somehow by...someone.  When she puts the outfit on to disrupt the auction, she winds up being targeted by the "track suit mob" whom the real Ronin had a run-in with.

The real Hawkeye is in town with his kids and tracks Kate down to get the suit back, but before he can it winds up in the hands of a LARPer.  By then things start getting out of hand with the track suit gang and Kate starts to realize her mom is in business with some bad people.

The relationship between Clint and Kate works for the most part despite the premise that's pretty thin.  This is supposed to be based off the celebrated Matt Fraction run on the Hawkeye comics (he's even an Executive Consultant or something like that) but like most MCU stories it's really watered-down so it can fit within the movie universe.  But there's still bonding and for whatever reason Clint has hearing loss and "pizza dog" and trick arrows and such.

But the main difference is the drag imposed on this Hawkeye because of his secret family introduced in Avengers Age of Ultron.  Since he already has kids (and they were even in town with him) there's really less need for Clint to bond with Kate because he literally already has a daughter.  And though it's kind of rude, the actors playing his kids aren't exactly the Caulkins.  They were fine for a scene or two six years ago but you can probably find better kid actors in toy commercials.  I'm just saying.  Really all his kids do is exist to provide motivation for Hawkeye to get his shit back--which includes a watch belonging to his wife.

The other thing is something common to the MCU:  the villains are pretty blah.  The tracksuit mafia is a joke except their leader is a bad-ass deaf woman who I guess is called Echo and is something bigger in the comics.  Kate's mother is kind of wishy-washy and her beau Jack is kind of a dick but I guess in the end he's not really a bad guy?

Then there was the return of Vincent D'Onofrio as the Kingpin.  Which would have been cool, but this version of the Kingpin was pretty flat.  What really made the Kingpin work in Daredevil and Into the Spider-Verse (voiced there by Liev Schreiber) is his love of his wife Vanessa.  Without any mention of her, he's just a fairly generic mob boss guy.  It really wasn't much better than Michael Clarke Duncan's version in the 2003 Affleck Daredevil movie because again in that there wasn't the wife angle that humanizes him.

For those who watched Black Widow there was also the return of Natasha Romanoff's "sister" Yelena, who tries to kill Hawkeye before they work things out.  It was kind of surprising they didn't work her into it a little sooner.  They didn't even seem to rehash the cookie scene from Black Widow where Julia Louise-Dreyfus's character tells her Hawkeye killed Natasha.  So Yelena just kind of shows up to attack Clint when they're on another mission.

In the end I think the plot could have been tighter and the villains better.  So this wasn't a bullseye for me, but at least it didn't completely overshoot the target.  Maybe a Season 2 could work things out better.  There's no tease for another season, just a annoyingly complete version of the song from Rogers:  The Musical in the credits.  Like a lot of people I watched that wondering if something would happen, but nothing really did.  It was like a long time ago when South Park trolled its audience by airing an entire episode of a fake Terrence & Philip show instead of telling the audience who Cartman's father is.  Though at least this wasn't 30 minutes, so that's something, because I could not do that all day.

Boom, "dad joke" to end it!