Liam Neeson is Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on the experimental "liquid skin" in a laboratory built out of a waterfront warehouse. He lives with Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand), an attorney representing a shady developer (Colin Friels) whose trail of bribes starts to surface. When he sends his thug Durant (Larry Drake), a beady-eyed heavy with a jowly face, a posh sense of fashion, and a pocket cigar cutter that doubles as a portable guillotine for the fingers of his victims, to grab the incriminating documents, Peyton and his lab assistant become collateral damage.
Darkman was Raimi's first studio film and, while hardly a big-budget project, he had more resources at his disposal than he had ever had before and he celebrates with a big, busy opening scene of gang warfare. Raimi lets us know exactly what kind of film we're in for in the first scene, where a gang stand-off becomes a massacre after Durant's men pull out a machine gun hidden in prosthetic limb. Guns appear out of nowhere, dozens of characters scatter and fall in the melee, and a car bursts out of a shipping crate, just because. It looks like a grindhouse gang thriller with a budget boost, not particularly slick or polished but revved up with over-the-top action and creative character touches and a big, dramatic Batman-esque orchestral score from Danny Elfman. The mayhem is pushed to extremes with the attack on Peyton, who is no more than a bystander in the power struggle. The quirky members of this eccentric crew aren't urban criminals, they're the sadistic spawn of a comic book supervillain, gleefully torturing their victims before sending them off with a dramatic flourish. A fiery explosion turns the genial scientist into a disfigured creature of the shadows, kept alive by experimental surgery that leaves him superhumanly strong, impervious to pain, and an emotional powder keg.
For the medical exposition, Jenny Agutter (An American Werewolf in London) makes an uncredited appearance as a burn ward nurse giving a tour to medical interns. She's a fabulous piece of work, with a cheery attitude toward the students but utterly unconcerned with the welfare of the actual patient, who is wrapped like a mummy and strapped to a rotating brace that seems to serve no purpose beyond disorienting the patient. That's part of the fun of Raimi's approach: it revels in monster movie lab clichés, like a fan slipping a tribute to Universal horror movies into his brightly-colored comic book of a movie.
Under ratty bandages, a heavy cloak out of the Victorian-era stage drama and theatrically oversized black hat, our Darkman looks like the Phantom of the Opera in urban America. His mad-scientist lab is built out of the embers of his old warehouse laboratory, a contemporary version of Dr. Frankenstein's castle of rebuilt equipment and a stuttering computer cobbled together with duct tape and bailing wire. He needs to perfect the liquid skin to rebuild the face that has been charred to exposed muscle and bone, but while the concoction can be molded into hands and articulated faces (love those 1990 computer graphics!) and pulled on like rubber gloves and masks, they last a mere 99 minutes before dissolving into a smoking, bubbling mess. It barely gives him enough time to take his revenge on the thugs who tortured and disfigured him for the bad luck of having inconvenient evidence in his lab. Masks and costume changes, of course, are involved.
It's a little shaggy when compared to his Spider-Man movies, more in line with the anything-goes approach of Army of Darkness, endearingly sloppy with details and filled with invention flourishes and a film-lover's fun when it comes to playing with genre conventions. But for all the humor strewn through the film, Raimi keeps the film on the serious side, especially when it comes to his tortured hero. Along with Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein you can pick out the inspiration of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty and Beast, and even The Incredible Hulk. Not merely disfigured, he's emotionally unstable thanks to the burns and the surgery, driven to obsession and flying into fits of rage. Neeson, who spends most of the film behind bandages and elaborate make-up, conveys that torture with his eyes and his body language. Raimi sometimes lets the performances get out of control, verging on hysteria or burlesque, but Neeson's tormented intensity keeps the film centered. Darkman is as much tragic monster as shadowy superhero and vengeance is all he has left when he realizes that he can never be with the woman he loves. It only compounds his anger and instability. It's comic-book melodrama but Raimi makes the tragedy the dark heart at the center of Darkman.
This isn't the Blu-ray debut of Darkman--Universal put out a bare-bones Blu-ray a few years ago--but Shout Factory's release is mastered from a new and improved HD transfer and is filled with supplements. There's nothing new from Sam Raimi (although there are vintage interviews with the director) but key members of the cast and crew are well represented in newly-recorded supplements, including new interviews with stars Liam Neeson (who doesn't offer much detail but does reveal that Gary Oldman and Bill Paxton were both up for the role) and Frances McDormand (who tells better stories, like how she got to know Raimi and the Coen Bros. when they were all starving artists sharing a house in Los Angeles).
There are also new interviews with bad guy Larry Drake, henchmen Danny Hicks and Dan Bell, make-up artist Tony Gardner, and production designer Randy Ser and art director Philip Dagort, and new commentary by cinematographer Bill Pope. Darkman was his first feature as a DP--he went on to shoot Army of Darkness and Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3 for Raimi as well as the Matrix trilogy for the Wachowskis--and he spends his time on the production details. The new interviews are all in HD. Archival extras include a vintage featurette and profiles of and interviews with Raimi, Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, and Larry Drake, all produced and presented in standard definition.
By Sean Axmaker
