Hawkeye (2021) Review
6/10
A retired archer takes his children to New York for Christmas and finds that somebody has been wearing the costume he used during the worst years of his life. That puts the people who want that person dead in front of him instead. The 6 is for a series that knows its size. Six episodes, one city, a stolen watch, a track suit mafia, and a man counting the days until he can be at a kitchen table with his family.
I loved the first five episodes of this show, and then the last twenty minutes disappointed me. A crime boss from another franchise arrives to make the story important, and it’s the wrong move for a series whose best quality is how small it is. Everything before that is the most likeable thing the streaming era produced, and that finale is what pulls my number down to a 6. That’s a letdown, because the show was so close.
The Reluctance Drives the Story
Clint Barton doesn’t want a protege, doesn’t want a case, and spends the series trying to conclude the problem quickly enough to get home by the twenty-fifth. That resistance generates every scene. Kate Bishop is enthusiastic, capable and won’t leave, and Barton’s entire performance is a man calculating how much time each of her ideas is going to cost him.
Jeremy Renner is doing the best work he’s been given in the role, and most of it is exhaustion. The character is deaf in one ear, wears an aid, is in physical pain and has a private list of people he killed, and none of that is presented as tragic. It’s presented as a Tuesday.
The show is also honest about what he is. Barton spent five years murdering people across three continents and the series doesn’t soften it or explain it away. Maya Lopez wants him dead for a concrete reason and the show agrees she has one.
A mentor who doesn’t want the job is the reliable version of that relationship, because every scene contains a question: will he teach her this time, or will he leave. The resource is the resistance, and most writers spend it in the middle because the resolution is more pleasant to write. Keep him trying to get rid of her until the very end and the story stays alive.
Give the reluctant one a concrete deadline. Barton isn’t vaguely busy, he’s a fixed date and a real kitchen. That single detail converts a mood into pressure.
Kate Bishop Works Immediately
Hailee Steinfeld plays somebody who’s good at this and has no idea how much she doesn’t know. That’s a harder combination than it looks.
The dynamic writes itself because she’s a fan of the person she’s annoying. She has opinions about his career, remembers his equipment, and is thrilled and mortified in alternating scenes, and none of it requires the show to explain why she’s there. Steinfeld made me want a whole series of her pestering people.
Her competence is established properly. She wins a fencing tournament, climbs a building, and survives on nerve, and when she’s out of her depth it’s because of experience instead of ability. That keeps her from being the liability that role usually becomes.
The apartment is the best running joke in the series. A young woman with money, a terrible dog and a flat she can’t manage, hosting a man who has been doing this for twenty years and is visibly assessing the exits.
Vera Farmiga and Tony Dalton give the family plot more weight than it needed. A mother running a security company and a stepfather who’s charming and entirely untrustworthy, both played straight, so the eventual reveal is a disappointment to a daughter instead of a twist for an audience.
The LARP Episode
Barton recovers his stolen equipment from a group of live action role players in a park, and then has to participate in their rules to get it back.
It’s the most likeable thing the franchise made for television and the reason is restraint. The joke could easily have been contempt, and the show finds actual warmth instead. These people are committed, organized, and correct that he should follow the rules.
Grills, a firefighter who has made a costume and takes the game seriously, is treated with more respect in twenty minutes than most Phase 4 supporting characters receive across a season.
The sequence also does plot work. Barton fighting people in foam armor, badly, in a park, establishes exactly how tired he is and how far from his best, which the show needs before the real fights arrive. Grills returns later and the show remembers him. That’s the detail that separates affection from a gag. A comic character who exists in only one scene is a joke. One who reappears, is useful, and is treated as a person by the protagonist is somebody the writer liked.
The LARP episode is my favorite hour of the show. I laughed at Barton flailing in foam armor, and I liked Grills more with every minute he got.
A comic set piece justifies itself when it also delivers information. This one is funny and it establishes the protagonist’s physical state, his impatience and his willingness to be ridiculous for a practical reason. Decide how you feel about the people you’re laughing at. Contempt is the easy tone and it makes a reader like you less. Affection is harder and it means the scene can be funny twice. The general rule: if your comic characters are correct about something and the protagonist is wrong, the comedy stops being about them and becomes about him. That’s a better arrangement.
Maya Lopez Is the Best Antagonist
Alaqua Cox plays a deaf amputee who runs a criminal organization and wants to kill the man she believes murdered her father. The show is unfussy about all of it. Her fighting style accounts for her prosthetic and her deafness, the scenes in her organization use sign language without subtitled ceremony, and none of it is presented as an obstacle she’s overcome.
She’s also right. Barton did kill her father, in the period the show refuses to sanitize, and her pursuit of him isn’t a misunderstanding to be cleared up. The series gives her a real grievance and then declines to resolve it neatly.
Maya is the character I’d have built the finale around. She has a real grievance, the show admits it, and I wanted the last episode to be about her and Barton settling it.
Cox had no previous acting experience and the performance is the most physically specific in Phase 4. The character was given her own series afterward, which is the franchise’s usual response to somebody working, and the version here’s the one worth watching. Florence Pugh arrives in the fourth episode and the series survives it. That’s notable given how badly the same move goes elsewhere in the phase. Yelena is grieving, funny and entirely uninterested in the plot she’s walked into, and the rooftop conversation about her sister is the best scene in the finale.
Then the Franchise Arrives
In the final episode a crime boss from a previous television property appears, and the series briefly becomes about something much larger than a stolen watch.
The performance is good and the arrival is well staged, and it’s still the wrong ending for this story. A show about a man trying to get home for Christmas resolves into a confrontation with a figure the audience is expected to recognize from elsewhere. The ending loses me because I didn’t need a bigger villain. I needed Barton to get home, and every minute spent on a crime boss from somewhere else is a minute taken from the story I cared about. Everything the finale does well is the small material. The fight in the tower using trick arrows is inventive, the track suit mafia get a proper send-off, and the last scene is a kitchen table. That’s where the story was always going.
The trick arrows are also the best use of the character anybody has managed. Six episodes of a man with a finite quiver, choosing which arrow to spend on which problem, turns a limitation into a decision, and the finale gets real comedy out of Kate reaching into the quiver and picking entirely the wrong one twice in a row at exactly the worst possible moment. That works because the show established the rule six episodes earlier.
The 6 reflects both halves. Five episodes of an unpretentious New York crime story with two well-drawn leads, and a finale that exists to service an obligation. The obligation is smaller than usual here. That’s why the score isn’t lower.
An ending must resolve the story you told instead of the one your series wants next. Barton’s problem is his family, his past and his exhaustion, and the finale resolves all three. That’s why it survives the intrusion.
When you must include a franchise obligation, put it beside the real ending instead of in place of it. The kitchen table comes last here, and that ordering keeps the series feeling complete. Ask what your protagonist wanted in chapter one. If the last chapter doesn’t answer it, you’ve delivered somebody else’s chapter one instead of your own conclusion.
Should you watch Hawkeye?
Yes, and it’s the easiest recommendation in Phase 4. A Christmas crime story with a tired man, a capable girl, a terrible dog and a mafia in track suits knows exactly how big it is and stays that size for five and a half episodes. I’m giving it a 6 because that last half episode matters to me. The show spent all that time making me care about a kitchen table and then borrowed a villain from somewhere else to close it out.
