Television Reviews: “Luke Cage” and “Westworld”.
One of my favorite records by Ghostface Killah, arguably the Wu-Tang Clan’s most formidable lyricist, is one that came out in the last couple of years. Titled “Twelve Reasons to Die,” it’s a kind of loose concept album about a black Mafioso done in by his own people who is then reincarnated after the fact (through the voodoo of a magical vinyl record which, let’s face it, is a can of worms best saved for another time) and proceeds to return to his old crime-plagued block as a kind of superhero reborn. As far as concept in rap music, you don’t get much more brazen than that.
The album takes full advantage of Ghost’s ordinarily cinematic rhyme scheme and penchant for mise-en-scene but what’s really striking about “Twelve Reasons to Die” as a whole is how earnestly old-fashioned and, in some senses, un-cool it feels. It’s an audio Blaxploitation homage done sans wink, and when righteous bloodshed is doled out over the course of the album’s wonky, live-wire trajectory, it’s like about as real as a cartoon concept album about a masked assassin is likely to get. “Twelve Reasons to Die” feels, moreso than the comparative output of many of Ghost’s fellow Wu-Tang members, like a product of the classic era it emulates. Not the least of this has to do with the sumptuous, impossibly funky musical input of Ghost’s newfound musical partner Adrian Younge, who, in his collaborations with the Wally Champ, cranks up the porno guitar licks, scintillating high hats and wobbly bass to create something akin to “The Mack” soundtrack for our modern era.
I’m opening my review of the new Netflix/Marvel crossover “Luke Cage” with this long-winded tangent because “Cage” reminded me of “Twelve Reasons to Die,” and not simply because Mr. Younge is the primary musical mind behind both projects. Like “Twelve Reasons,” “Luke Cage” is steeped in Blaxploitation homage. It regards the African-American body with majesty and awe. There is nothing cynical about its reverence. Luke Cage himself is a quiet, taciturn, decent man who ends up having to protect his neighborhood from violent criminals, which is to say nothing of the show’s multiple nods to the fashion and style of 70’s exploitation cinema. It will come as no surprise to informed viewers that Quentin Tarantino was slated to direct a “Luke Cage” film at one point after “Reservoir Dogs” — though ,given Tarantino’s, shall we say, liberal use of certain racial epithets, I personally am glad that that project was never realized.
And yet, like Ghostface Killah’s silky gangster rap lullaby, the new-ish Netflix incarnation of “Luke Cage” is smarter than it looks. Well, most of the time. While the show ultimately shares many of the problems that have plagued the other small-screen Marvel efforts — the episode-to-episode inconsistency of “Jessica Jones,” or the sluggish writing and dull view of the criminal underworld that occasionally mars “Daredevil” — it’s by far the most assured and entertaining television work that the comic book conglomerate has produced to date, and creator Cheo Hodari Coker (who cut his teeth on shows like “Ray Donovan” and “Southland” and also penned the screenplay for the uneven Notorious B.I.G. biopic “Notorious”) even manages to sneak in some genuinely subversive subtext about recidivism, race relations and modern-day gentrification that in no way distracts from the slam-bang entertainment factor of what we came to see. “Luke Cage” is still a superhero show, with all the good and bad that comes with that label. It is also, however, a superior example of its kind, and one imbued with refreshingly forward-thinking racial and sexual politics. There’s something undeniably heroic about the notion of a proudly black superhero in 2016, and the singularly African-American outlook of “Luke Cage” itself is a welcome corrective in the otherwise lily-white landscape of comic book adaptations.
Actor Mike Colter plays Luke, who seasoned Marvel nerds will recognize as the barkeep and love interest from “Jessica Jones”. Luke is a former convict who harbors fearsome, otherworldly powers: to put it simply, he’s basically unkillable. His jaw can turn a flying fist into limp mush, bullets simply bounce off his barrel chest like puny BB’s, and as for rockets… well, I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. Cage is one of a small handful of proverbial others who live in New York after what is obliquely referred to many times as “the incident,” (i.e. the climactic melee seen at the end of Joss Whedon’s “Avengers”). The aforementioned incident has understandably left many of the city’s denizens with a nasty taste in their mouth at the prospect of welcoming what “Simpsons” anchor Kent Brockman would call “our new galactic overlords” — and can you blame them?
With this in mind, Cage the man keeps to himself. He sweeps the floors at Pop’s barbershop, a community staple in the Harlem neighborhood where he resides. Pop himself is a garrulous former criminal, played by Frankie Faison a.k.a. Chief Burrell of “The Wire,” and his genial father-son bond with Luke is one of the only means of communication the younger man possesses. There’s also the matter of a female cop unfortunately named Mercedes “Misty” Night (Simone Missick) whom Luke keeps running into, mostly because the screenplay demands it. There’s also the matter of Cornell Stokes (played with sinister elegance by actor Mahershala Ali, who will be seen next in Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight”), also known as Cottonmouth. Frequently dressed in immaculate suits and holding himself with the regal reserve of a statesman, Cottonmouth is a onetime neighborhood boy, like Luke, who has since graduated to the bloody heights of criminal power. He’s also a villain in the Marvel T.V. universe, which means the character exists as a compendium of other, more interesting bad guys. The sometimes-stale characterization is ultimately rejuvenated, however, by Ali’s canny, terrifying and unexpectedly hilarious performance.
It is absolutely not a spoiler if I reveal to you that the conflict between Cottonmouth and Mr. Cage will eventually come to a head, and that the two men will have to duke it out — using guns, fists, bombs and several choice hip-hop cuts — to see who holds the fate of Harlem in their hands. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary or new about the plotting in “Luke Cage” and the modest, but very real pleasures that the show does offer comes from its assured spin on a time-tested formula.
Take Cottonmouth, for instance. On the page, he’s little more than another vicious, well-dressed scumbag who likes to brutally murder his own goons as a means of making an example to his competitors. Been there, seen that. And yet, the way Mr. Ali plays him; there’s a perverse sophistication to the character, not to mention a heavy dose of demonic humor (typically, before offing someone, Stokes will emit a throaty, jovial laugh — and man, does Mr. Ali have a great laugh). And Cage, for that matter, isn’t the most exciting of heroes. He’s overwhelmingly good, with nothing in the way of flaws (that shit’s for humans, man) to hold him back. Instead of fighting against the current, Mr. Colter embraces the character’s anachronistic, “aw-shucks” decency and runs with it. He plays Luke as a kind of avenging angel — capable of doling out extreme acts of brutality, as he does in one mesmerizing Luke-vs.-everybody-else combat scene set to the eerie, clamorous notes of the Wu-Tang Clan’s immortal “Bring Da Ruckus” — but one who is fundamentally altruistic and kind. Marvel nerds will also be pleased to see the return of the terrific Rosario Dawson as Hell’s Kitchen nurse-to-the-superhero-stars Claire Temple, while character actor nerds will rejoice in the presence of “Sons of Anarchy” actor Theo Rossi, who only semi-effectively plays Cottonmouth’s brooding right-hand man, Shades. If you guessed that a character named Shades wears sunglasses in this show… all the time, even indoors, then you guessed correctly.
You might read this column with some frequency and deduce that I don’t like superhero movies, superhero T.V. or superhero anything in general. Based on my reactions to the three unfortunate superhero movies I’ve sat through this year — “Deadpool,” “Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Suicide Squad” — this would not be an unreasonable assumption to make. The truth is that I have nothing against superhero stories, on principle. When they’re done right, as in films like Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” or James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy”, they can offer audiences a kind of thrilling escape. I think, like a lot of viewers, I’m just tired of being force-fed the same old story with literally no variation in the formula. It’s not that films like “Deadpool” and “Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” are crimes against the medium of cinema: they’re just not offering us anything we haven’t seen a million times already. Their chief sin is mostly laziness. “Luke Cage,” while it gets no points for novelty, is at least committed to honoring a racial perspective that has been woefully underrepresented in these kinds of entertainments, and its sexy, seductive, 70’s-lite vibe makes it both an easy binge and also a welcome rebuke to the grating “seriousness” of something like “Daredevil’s” second season. It may not be anything new exactly, but it’s a ton of fun anyway, and executed with wit and polish to burn. Can you say that about “Suicide Squad”?
“Westworld” is a more ostensibly serious-minded show, and one I had great concerns about as I settled into the rhythms of its pilot episode. The show’s ads did nothing for me, and while I was intrigued about the prospect of Jonathan Nolan (brother to Christoper, and a co-writer on many of his best films, including “Dark Knight,” “The Prestige” and “Interstellar”) flexing his muscles in the realm of television, the rumors of creepy casting contracts and last-minute reshoots had me… well, worried. HBO has a lot riding on the show: aside from the recent, excellent “The Night Of,” their dramatic slate has been sorely lacking as of late, and they’ve taken two pretty big hits recently in the form of “True Detective’s” now-infamous second season and also the sudden cancellation of Terence Winter’s “Vinyl”. HBO clearly wants “Westworld” to be their next “Game of Thrones”: a large-scale science-fiction/fantasy drama that creates an immersive fake world to get lost in, and presumably one that will fuel the fire for many seasons to come.
After sitting down to watch “The Original,” the first episode of Season One, I can safely report that “Westworld” is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It’s also a far cry from great, at least for now. While “Luke Cage” is ultimately smarter than it needs to be, “Westworld” has the opposite problem: it’s not nearly as smart as it looks or thinks it is. Like his brother Christopher, Mr. Jonathan Nolan seems to enjoy calling attention to the artifice of his constructions; he typically will clue in viewers in to the fact that what they’re watching is actually an elaborate con. This works in something like “The Prestige,” a beautiful film about that is very literally the art of deception, but it’s by no means the catchall strategy that Nolan and “Westworld” co-creator Lisa Joy seem to think it is.
The pilot of “Westworld” is structured like “Groundhog’s Day” as envisioned by Robert Heinlein: a series of recurring events, tweaked with minor modifications, that end up having a sort of seismic ripple effect outside the world in which the action is seemingly taking place. While there’s a lot going on in terms of quote-unquote plot in the “Westworld” pilot, I can’t say that much of it struck me as being particularly interesting, and some of it was even downright lame. Admittedly, the show noodles around with fascinating philosophical notions of sentience, playing God and what exactly it means to be human. And yet, it does this in an often bone-headed fashion that seems designed to appease the philosophy bros that thought “True Detective’s” first season needed even more Nietzsche name-dropping. The first hour of “Westworld” is nothing if not intriguing, but it lacks a human core. I understand that this is a somewhat incongruous thing to say about a science-fiction show that is specifically about the perils of artificial intelligence, but fancy plotting and cold displays of savage violence can only take you so far.
The “Westworld” of the title is a kind of high-filigree theme park of the future: an eerily real simulacra of the Old West in which wealthy patrons come to satisfy their every venal, violent and deviant sexual desire. The source material is a novel by Michael Crichton (Crichton also wrote and directed the 1973 film adaptation) and you can see him whetting his appetite for something like “Jurassic Park” in terms of the world-building at play here. Westworld, though, in spite of its alluring appearance, isn’t the greatest place to be. All its inhabitants are either “hosts” — robotic human surrogates who have been artificially engineered to replicate human behavior in the most realistic way possible — or rich folks looking to get their rocks off.
There’s a whole lot of killin’ and rapin’ going on in Westworld: perhaps because the creators have decided that, deep down, this is who people really are and, if left to their own devices, this is the kind of awful shit that they would do. It’s a fairly realistic notion, even if it’s not exactly the most original idea in the world. The show ping-pongs between the dusty vistas and saloon town of Westworld itself and a kind of sterile, antiseptic think tank — we’ll call it Westworld HQ for the purposes of this review — where a gaggle of engineers and eggheads work at the behest of the magisterial Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins, who seems like he’s in need of a long nap), the park’s creator and, in effect, its God.
I found one of the more interesting characters on the fringes of the show to be Dr. Bernard Lowe, played by the consistently brilliant character actor Jeffrey Wright. Lowe the head of the Westworld Programming Division whose job it is to oversee the construction of hosts for the park. He’s a man who is so obsessed with the presentation of being human that he stops a colleague mid-rant, just to make an observation about the exact nature her facial structure.
Back in Westworld, Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) acts as our kind of nominal protagonist: a wide-eyed prairie girl for whom every day in the park is a sun-kissed blessing. A far more interesting character comes in the form of The Man In Black, played by — no, not Johnny Cash, but close — Ed Harris. It’s hard to discern the purpose of The Man in the pilot, other than that he’s a mean, violent son of a bitch, and the question of whether or not he is, in fact, a host — or rather a human guest of Westworld who has overstayed his welcome so as to kill and torture more people — is left unclear by the episode’s end.
“Westworld” contains several set pieces that are dazzling when taken on their own terms. And yet most of these sequences are undercut — and worse yet, deflated — by the often-uneasy confluence of the show’s dueling worlds. A climactic, high-stakes robbery played out with some cyborg bandits is elicits a visceral, almost involuntary thrill, but then we keep cutting back to Westworld HQ, where Lowe, Ford and their colleagues stand over a dust-bowl sized map: one in which they watch their robotic and human specimens tear at each other like rats in a sewer. The metaphor is obvious — Gods watching petty humans destroy each other for their own sick gain and amusement — but the creative decision sucks all the air out of the action. Which wouldn’t be a problem if “Westworld” didn’t also want to be a gory, sex-filled, super-badass HBO drama in the vein of “Game of Thrones” or “Boardwalk Empire”. But the T&A and on-screen bloodshed has been amplified to appease the show’s dude-bro contingency, and while the pilot admittedly raises a whole host (see what I did there?) of fascinating questions, it doesn’t even seem like we’ll be close to getting an answer by episode two.
The icy, confounding first hour of “Westworld” bears enough noteworthy qualities that I can’t ultimately call it bad, and I’m sure plenty of viewers will enjoy the show on its own aesthetically rapturous terms and not even ponder many of the possibly pithy objections that I’m raising in this review. Like any good sci-fi series, “Westworld” creates a fully-functional and believable alternate world, and only violates the rules of said world a small handful of times for dramatic effect (the final shot had me rolling my eyes, but I suspect others may love it). It looks great and has intelligent, unusual rhythms in its pacing, and though Wright is the only actor here giving a credibly human performance, the rest of the cast acquit themselves nicely to the show’s steely, deathly-serious vibe. And while I, for one, will most certainly keep watching “Westworld” with hopes that it gets better, I will also say that I found the first hour more pretentious and sterile than genuinely engrossing. It presents us with a surplus of troubling and engaging ideas about our future as a species, only to walk away from those points just as the show is getting interesting and return to the boobs, bloodletting and bad-words that have become HBO’s network crutch. At the very least, I hope we find out what the fuck is up with all the milk.
Grades: “Luke Cage,” B. “Westworld,” B-.
