“Take the fucking elephant!”
Hey, man! I’m going to wear the skin of your face, and then I’ll be YOU! What’s that? No, I have not gone all Hannibal Lecter. That’s just the premise of this movie. It stars Liam Neeson as a superhero! Well, of sorts, anyway. Being able to wear other people’s faces and getting really angry can hardly be called superpowers, now, can they?
Now, let me take you back to a time, long ago, when everything was still right in the world: 1990! The Cold War ended officially, the two Germanys got back together, and Mandela was set free! Bush Sr. was president, can you believe it? Home Alone was the biggest hit in theaters! Ah, those good old days… Now, it was in those golden days of yesteryear that one Sam Raimi thought, “I want to make a movie about my very own cheap, campy superhero! And I’ll ask a still young and non-crusty Liam Neeson to play the lead role!” And so he did. Ergo: Darkman!
Right. Story! Liam Neeson plays Peyton Westlake, a mild-mannered, soft-spoken scientist who works on creating synthetic skin to help burn victims or something noble like that. He dates Frances McDormand, who plays an attorney. She stumbles across some document she wasn’t supposed to see, and now Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake), the strong arm for some corporate douchebag who’s been bribing members of the zoning commission to get some megalomaniac build project going, is after it. Still with me so far? Good. So, one night Durant breaks into Westlake’s lab with some of his thugs, kills his assistant, and then tortures Westlake and blows up his lab with him still in it. So, good, friendly folk.
Of course, Westlake survives. He’s taken to a hospital where he undergoes some experimental treatment that severs his nerve endings, so he doesn’t feel the pain of his horrible face anymore. Unfortunately, this has an unwanted side effect: adrenaline now runs unchecked through the good doctor’s body, making him super strong! It also triggers some mild anger issues now and then. In a fit of rage, he escapes the facility, dons a long, black overcoat, and sets up a lab in some abandoned warehouse. (By the way, if movies were anything to go by, there must be countless abandoned warehouses full of labs by now: The Punisher has one, so does Otto Octavius… Even Bryan Mills from Taken! Maybe they time-share.) He then uses his skin technology to pose as the various criminals that ambushed him and takes them out, one by one.
So, does the doctor then recreate his own face so that he can be with his girlfriend again? Yes, he does. Sadly, though, his artificial skin only lasts for 99 minutes. After that it starts bubbling away in this gross and disgusting manner, and he has to flee. It has something to do with light sensitivity, but the real reason is that otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a movie.
So, Darkman. He never really caught on, did he? Of course, Sam Raimi went on to have lots of success with directing that other web-flinging super dude. I never understood that… Why we’d prefer to watch some underage teenager wearing a skintight unitard frolicking through New York as opposed to Liam Neeson, who looks like Freddy Krueger had a date with a meat grinder, I’ll never know…
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