Hawkeye: How the MCU Stole Christmas
Hawkeye is the latest product in the never-ending Marvel franchise. Focusing on arguably the least interesting Avenger, this series follows Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) on a little holiday romp where he meets his eventual protégée Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and adventures ensue. I’ll be honest, things kicked off with a clunky, awkward start that had me rolling my eyes and hoping this wouldn’t be the whole show, but while the series does struggle with how much it wants to commit to the larger MCU, there are enough fun moments to stave off superhero fatigue for a little while longer.
In post-Blip New York, Clint is trying to enjoy a little Christmas vacation with his kids seeing the sights, and doing some general family bonding. Their first stop is a Broadway musical adaptation of the events of 2012’s The Avengers that features a climactic song about Captain America.
It’s simultaneously hilarious and entertainingly macabre to see this giant, cheesy, Disney-fied version of what would surely be a 9/11-level event in this universe. Despite the lower-than-likely production value (After The Lion King, Disney knows that Broadway plays can be gigantic productions, so why is Hulk just a guy in a green hoodie?) Rogers! the musical was so entertaining that I wished we could have seen more. I know they’ll never do it, but it would have been really fun to lean into it and really explore how the rest of the world sees the events of all these movies since we’re all so familiar with seeing them from the heroes’ perspectives.
But we don’t have time to linger because we have to meet our new characters and introduce an adventure. Kate Bishop is Not Like The Other Girls™ in that she’s very awkward and rebellious, despite being phenomenally wealthy and privileged. I’m sure Twitter dudes will label her a Mary Sue because she’s great at everything, and she has the trophies to prove it.
Steinfeld operates well in the not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman space of figuring yourself out, as we saw in Edge of Seventeen. She works here too because Kate is kind of an oddball in the way you probably would be if you grew up in a world shaped by alien attacks and real-life Norse gods. She makes big expressions that work when a character doesn’t really have anyone to play off of and she gives us reactions that can be read from the back row, which fits the Marvel tone pretty well. Teaming her up with a character like Hawkeye who doesn’t have a big personality seems like a good recipe.
Where Hawkeye struggles, much like the other shows and the latest movie entries in the saga, is in how much to connect the story to the greater MCU—especially because the Universe is in a transition period. They’ve written themselves into a corner a bit with these Disney+ shows in that they’re introducing some pretty big concepts but not really committing to how much they want to own them.
For example, in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, we saw that Sam, who was blipped, was struggling to get a bank loan because he had five years of no credit. We learned there is a global refugee crisis to try to handle all the people who popped back into existence to find they had no homes and no jobs. In WandaVision, we learned that despite saving the world together, the Avengers apparently aren’t super close and nobody came to comfort Wanda over the loss of her loved one. We learned in Spider-Man Far From Home that apparently kids who were blipped as teens are now legally adults that are still in high school. And, thanks to Loki, we have variants and a multiverse, and that’s only further complicating things.
It reminds me of when The Last Jedi introduced the concept that starships could run out of fuel and it made me think about the logistics of the Millennium Falcon for a good few minutes before I could get back into the story. Marvel has never operated on the “just don’t think about it” model when it comes to stories that make sense, but I can see them starting to flirt with that idea and it just doesn’t appeal to me in the same way the MCU did pre-Endgame.
When the MCU first landed Disney+, it seemed like the shows would be the place to get a lot of character depth that we couldn’t spend time on in a feature film. This is why WandaVision was my favorite of the bunch: it was about exploring Wanda as a character…until it turned into a big CGI battle. My hope for Hawkeye is that they will just let this be a small, contained little story. The Christmas setting could make this a fun, limited idea and it would be great to see Clint and Kate forming a bond and Kate preparing to join the team, but the corporate wheels are turning and everything must be an ad for the next thing, so I don’t think anything is allowed to just stand on its own anymore.
So yes, the first couple episodes of Hawkeye are pretty good, and it seems like there’s a lot of potential here for something small and fun, but I can feel the looming shadow of the greater MCU hanging over us, so I’m preparing myself for the inventible big CGI battle that will probably conclude the series.
