Over the last decade and a half, Liam Neeson has gone from being one of our most consistent dramatic actors to one of the leading faces in revenge movies, but his very best revenge movie came out 33 years ago — Darkman.
This 1990 superhero movie came along at a time when superhero movies were hardly the norm, and in today’s day and age, barely feels like a superhero movie at all.
Instead, this movie combines a bleak tragic tale with the visual language of the classic monster movies of the ’30s and ’40s. To top it all off, director Sam Raimi helmed the picture, not quite bringing his Evil Dead sensibilities, but delivering one of the darkest superhero movies ever. I mean it’s basically in the title itself — Darkman, Liam Neeson’s best revenge movie.
Liam Neeson has been working in film for much longer than most people even realize. His career takes him all the way back to 1978 when he played Jesus Christ in an adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress.
He would spend the better part of the ’80s taking part in loads of action and fantasy movies like Excalibur, Krull, and The Dead Pool, while also flexing his dramatic chops in The Mission, Suspect, and The Innocent. It wouldn’t be until 1993 that we’d really get to know him though.
That was the year when Liam Neeson exploded into the movie star stratosphere with his performance as Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, a role that even got him nominated for Best Actor at the 66th Academy Awards! From there, he has taken over our movie-watching lives as one of our most consistent on-screen presences, popping up in Star Wars and Batman movies, a Les Misérables adaptation, and even voicing a lion! That’s right, you know we all love Aslan.
When Did the Liam Neeson Action-Revenge Boom Begin?
The late 2000s saw an interesting shift in this actor’s career. As stated before, Liam Neeson’s early career was largely populated by genre fare, with your occasional drama popping in for a moment as well. These genre-heavy pictures remained a constant for him, but instead of being the guy doing all of the action, Liam Neeson became more of a wise figure in these movies. Again, look at Aslan; how do you get more wise than that?
Well, thankfully, everything comes full circle, and in 2008, Liam Neeson got to kick ass again in Taken. This movie follows Bryan Mills (Neeson), a man whose daughter is kidnapped and taken into human trafficking, and as stated famously in the movie, Mills tells his daughter’s captors “I will find you, and I will kill you.”
Taken became a phenomenon, went on to have two (less successful) sequels, and also ushered a wave of action and revenge movies into its lead actor’s career. The Grey, Non-Stop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and The Commuter are but a few of these movies that have brought him back to handing people’s asses to them.
‘Darkman’ Is Gothic Revenge at Its Finest
Liam Neeson has his fair, weighty share of iconic roles, that much is true. Many of his pre-Schindler’s works have fallen by the wayside, and all of his post-Taken action roles have brought on a new tough-guy image of the actor in general.
That’s what makes it all the more tragic when we realize that his best revenge movie, Darkman, is often left out of the conversation when discussing this wing of his filmography. This movie is unique to Neeson’s revenge movies in that it isn’t a revenge movie that’s grounded in the real world. Nothing about Darkman is brooding and rough around the edges in the way that something like Taken is.
What Makes Darkman the Perfect Revenge Movie Character?
Instead, imagine if you took the tone of the Universal Monster movies, mixed it with a little bit of Batman ’89, burned the lead character’s body, wrapped him up in some nasty gauze, threw a trench coat on him, and topped it all off with a mangled up fedora, and you have the campiest, coolest-looking superhero of the pre-2000s.
Not only that, but a lead who you can totally get behind. We gotta see this guy get back at the thugs who did him wrong. Neeson is given a little bit of room to play the part with his actual face and bust out his dramatic chops as far as the movie will let him.
These moments mostly come before Peyton Westlake (Neeson) becomes burned and transforms into Darkman. That said, Westlake also manages to create a synthetic skin, helping him appear normal after his tragic incident. This also helps him to look like other people aside from himself, and trick criminals into being caught. This guy has all the tricks up his sleeves.
Darkman follows Peyton Westlake, a scientist who is horribly burned and psychologically damaged by a group of mobsters after they search his lab for incriminating documents. Westlake survives though, and while doing what he can to continue his work, the main thing that keeps him going is a drive to get revenge on those who destroyed his body and mind.
Darkman isn’t a superhero based on a comic book or any sort of intellectual property, it’s an original creation from director Sam Raimi. Despite being a superhero movie, the film reeks of old-school horror tropes, and takes on a gothic atmosphere that continues to add to Darkman’s fractured mental state.
Besides having a fun character to stand behind and root for, this movie has infinitely more style than any of Neeson’s other revenge movies. Everything is soaked in shadows, buildings and skyscrapers feel like castles in Transylvania, and enormous laboratories filled with all kinds of scientific equipment are put on display. Darkman is a visual banger.
In order to have a great revenge movie, you have to have a great villain, and that comes with Darkman’s nemesis – Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake). This mob boss doesn’t exactly change the game of how mob bosses are typically represented in movies, but Drake plays the part so well that you can’t help but hate him.
He’s never exactly over the top in the way that Darkman or the world of this movie feels. Instead, Drake plays Durant a bit understated, more cold and calculated than anything else in the film. You want the character to be over-the-top to seem like he actually feels anything for disfiguring Westlake, but instead, he doesn’t seem to care a bit.
Sam Raimi Brings His Signature Sauce to ‘Darkman’
Liam Neeson’s later action and revenge movies are loads of fun but don’t often do much that’s visually or tonally interesting. They’re pretty standard movies for this genre.
Darkman, on the other hand, mixes its gothic tone with a campy comic book feel perfect, all thanks to director Sam Raimi. This movie doesn’t quite whip the camera all over the place like his Evil Dead or Spider-Man movies do, but it still has way more visual variety than something like the recently released Liam Neeson-led Retribution.
Raimi doesn’t make movies just to capture images. He knows that if there’s a paying audience, he’s going to give them something wild to see. If you handed this creepy and fun script over to any other filmmaker, they’d probably deliver something serviceable, but Raimi is the force who truly sets this movie apart.
Movies like Taken and Non-Stop are fun, but Liam Neeson doesn’t have a better revenge movie than Darkman. In the same way that you don’t necessarily have to watch every one of Neeson’s recent action fare (if you’ve seen one or two, you’ve seen them all), you also don’t need to watch either of the direct-to-video Darkman sequels, Darkman II: The Return of Durant or Darkman III: Die Darkman Die.
No, instead, all you need to rely on is this original classic to do the trick. This isn’t Liam Neeson’s best performance, nor is it the best movie that he’s ever been in, but Darkman sure is a killer revenge movie.
