Or: “When You Mix Batman, The Phantom of the Opera, and a Blender Full of Nicotine”
Who Is Darkman? And Why Is He So… Moist?
Back in 1990, Darkman swooped into theaters wearing a trench coat, a fedora, and enough gauze to wrap a mummy convention. Directed by Sam Raimi before he became Spider-Man Sam Raimi and after he’d given the world Evil Dead, this was his shot at creating an original superhero. You know, the kind that’s brooding, disfigured, chemically unstable, and possibly just one missed therapy session away from setting the whole city on fire.
What we got is a film that straddles the line between inspired pulp and sweaty chaos. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s just… Darkman. A movie that makes you go, “That was kind of awesome,” while also muttering, “What the hell did I just watch?”
The Plot: Science, Revenge, and Face-Swapping Madness
Liam Neeson plays Dr. Peyton Westlake, a brilliant scientist working on synthetic skin—which, like all important experiments in movies, has to be done in a smoky lab surrounded by large blinking machines. He’s got a loving girlfriend (Frances McDormand!), a heart of gold, and the dumb luck to get blown up by mobsters five minutes into the movie.
Left for dead and now hideously burned, Peyton is experimented on by doctors who conveniently remove his ability to feel pain and suppress his emotional inhibitors—basically turning him into a sentient rage volcano who can’t feel his own face.
And so, he becomes Darkman, skulking in the shadows, building temporary face masks to infiltrate the criminal underworld, and throwing thugs off buildings while muttering things like “I’m everyone… and no one.”
In other words: the weirdest revenge plan since Mrs. Doubtfire.
Liam Neeson: Before He Had a Special Set of Skills
Neeson commits to the role with Shakespearean intensity, even while covered in what looks like wet papier-mâché and chewing lines like “They took my hands, Julie!” with the seriousness of a man begging for an Oscar in a movie that smells like gasoline. His performance ranges from quietly tragic to Muppet having a meltdown—sometimes in the same scene.
One moment he’s a tortured soul mourning his lost humanity, and the next he’s screaming in an alley because a carnival worker guessed his weight wrong. This is a man barely holding it together, and it’s weirdly compelling to watch.
The Raimi Factor: Dutch Angles and Screaming Skulls
You can feel Sam Raimi’s fingerprints all over this thing. Twisting camera angles. Zoom-ins that punch you in the cornea. Frenetic editing that suggests the film might’ve been cut with hedge clippers. At times, it feels like Evil Dead II crashed into a superhero origin story, and nobody cleaned up the mess.
That’s the fun of it—but also the problem. The tone shifts so hard and fast you might get whiplash. One scene is melodramatic and tragic, the next plays like a Looney Tunes cartoon where the coyote finally kills the roadrunner—with explosives and a monologue about synthetic flesh.
Villains, Henchmen, and Random Carnage
Larry Drake as Durant, the main baddie, is delightfully evil. He smiles like a dentist with secrets and kills people with a cigar cutter. Subtle? No. Effective? Absolutely.
The rest of his goons are nameless fodder with distinctive haircuts and vague Eastern European accents. They exist solely to get punched, lit on fire, or tossed through windows by a man who looks like the Invisible Man’s angrier cousin.
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a man fight on a helicopter hanging from a rope with his face melting off in real time.
Darkman’s Skin Problem
The science behind Darkman’s synthetic skin is never really explained because… who cares? It lasts 99 minutes in the dark, which is either a metaphor for his internal decay or just a convenient excuse for dramatic lighting. Either way, the “face timer” gimmick is neat, but underused. He disguises himself as other people to trick the bad guys, but this plot device gets dropped faster than a henchman from a rooftop.
Still, it’s nice to see a superhero movie before Marvel turned every origin story into a $200 million PowerPoint presentation. This one is sweaty, weird, and bursting with attitude.
Final Thoughts
2.5 out of 5 synthetic faces
Darkman is a noble mess. A movie with a pulpy heart, a screaming lead, and enough latex to make a Halloween store jealous. It’s not perfect—but it’s definitely not boring. Somewhere between Raimi’s wild camera work, Neeson’s twitchy pathos, and the oddball premise, there’s a strange charm that keeps it watchable.
It’s a tragic love story wrapped in a revenge tale stuffed inside a comic book fever dream. If nothing else, it gave us a hero who fights crime with face masks and emotional instability.
And honestly, that’s a little relatable.
