Hawkeye
Marvel's latest superhero breakout series features the sharpshooter in a slow-starting but satisfying passing of the torch to a next-gen replacement.
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“The Eternals” already featured a deaf character and another with mental health challenges, so the “superheroes with disabilities” thing is not exactly brand new. But “Hawkeye,” the fifth spinoff series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that debuts this week on Disney+, is the first to take an existing hero and demonstrate the toll, physical and mental, taken by years of death-defying, close proximity to explosions and Infinity Stones and all the rest.
It opens with Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), sitting in a Broadway production about the Avengers’ various adventures called “Rogers: The Musical,” and yes it’s just as exactly as bad as you’d expect. (Though not quite as bad as “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”) Partly because it’s so awful, but also because watching the events reprised is triggering for him, Barton turns off his hearing aid so it turns into a muffled, soupy sound.
I’m very familiar with that sound, being partially deaf myself. Now, so is Hawkeye.
Barton’s hearing loss has been featured in the comics for some time, with various iterations of the cause depicted (from his own explosive arrows to being stabbed in the ears). Now it’s finally been incorporated into the MCU character, though they ascribe his condition to the multitude wear of his adventures rather than a single incident.
Based on the first two of the season’s six episodes, mostly what “Hawkeye” appears to be is a meditation on aging and loss, and what happens when a superhero decides they no longer want to be super. We’ve already seen this woven into the MCU movies, with Barton retiring before being pulled back into the mayhem.
But here, Barton seems tired and noticeably disengaged from the business. He just wants to wrap up his adventures in New York City, where he’d been enjoying the holidays with kids, and get back home to the farm — permanently.
The other big theme of the show is passing the torch, or rather the bow, to the next generation of hero. At least, that’s what it appears to be with the presence of Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), a 22-year-old archery and martial arts expert who becomes his protege.
Well, more accurately we should say that Bishop inadvertently becomes a thorn in his side, then the ward he feels compelled to protect, and as the series goes on she will increasingly take on the mantle of Hawkeye until, my guess, she is it.
The precipitating event is, of all things, the suit and sword of Ronin, the alias adopted by Hawkeye during the period of “the blip,” when Thanos made half of all sentient creatures disappear, including all of Barton’s family. During these years the despairing Hawkeye hunted down a lot of criminals and made a lot of enemies, though no one definitely knew it was him.
Bishop is a bit of a spoiled rich girl whose father was killed during the 2012 alien attack, and now her mother (Vera Farmiga) is about to marry a smirking playboy, Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton), who she takes an instant dislike to. Jack tries to buy the Ronin gear in a black market auction Bishop stumbles upon, but some Russian mobsters attack, and in the confusion she winds up with the outfit.
When she later scuffles with the Russians while wearing the Ronin costume, they assume she is him. It quickly becomes a chase-chase affair, with Barton getting involved to reclaim the Ronin suit and thereby, he thinks, put an end to the matter.
You might be asking yourself the obvious question: couldn’t anybody make a copy of the Ronin suit? Wouldn’t there by little kids wearing ersatz versions for Halloween? I guess the idea is that Ronin was a more mysterious figure than other heroes, existing more as a barely-seen myth than a figure standing tall in a cape.
Indeed, there’s a funny side-story where Barton tracks down the suit to a LARP festival in Central Park — that’s where people dress up in medieval outfits and beat on each other with foam weapons — and he has to jump through all kinds of hoops to get in, including buying a ticket and having to rent an outfit.
It’s exactly how you would think life would be like for a non-super-powered Avenger: people ask him for selfies and he gets a free appetizer at restaurants, but it’s understood without saying that he’s still just a regular dude. The price of admission is, quite literally, the same for him as anybody else.
Barton resolves to protect Bishop, seeing it as his one last mission. But she has other ideas about getting into the game herself, pestering him for tips and encouragement that he’d rather not be bothered with.
Another LOL moment: Barton tells Bishop during a quiet moment that he needs to pick up some supplies, which freezes her in place with mouth practically agape: “You mean… Avenger supplies?!?”
No doubt she has visions of super-suits and computerized weapons dancing through her head. But it’s the simpler, more mundane stuff that you don’t see depicted in an MCU movie.
Renner looks older and even a bit doughy in the show, which is really appropriate if you think about it. Even Hulk has gotten grayer, so it only stands that the un-mutated Barton would slow down a bit. The actor brings a world-weary sort of charm to the performance, an understated guy who just wants to do his job and go home.
Steinfeld plays up the eager-beaver angle quite a bit, almost to the verge of annoyance, though I suspect in later episodes she’ll gain experience and gravitas.
“Hawkeye” admittedly starts a bit slow, though it revs up the RPMs to an entertaining rate by the second episode. Certainly it doesn’t dawdle as much as “WandaVision,” which ended at in a good pace but needed half its season to get there.
This show is, essentially, about the retirement of Hawkeye and training up the new kid to take his place. Based on the early look, it’ll be another satisfying streaming spinoff for the MCU as it looks to relaunch with a new generation of heroes and stories.