#darkman 3

[wave-man]

[jcw3-protectorate-enthusiast]

I watched Darkman III: Die Darkman Die (1996). 7.5/10, C. The most underwhelming of these movies. Not too much to say - I thought it was just a fairly 'meh' product. This is a negative review, but not one where I was overly offended or put off by the product.

-The actors playing the villains are trying their best, they're hamming it up, but they don't have the charisma Larry Drake had playing Robert G Durant, so it all falls kind of flat.

-It's interesting it kind of soft retcons the first movie - Westlake is retconned to have looked like Vosloo before the accident rather than Neeson, they reshoot scenes from the first Darkman to have Vosloo in the role of Westlake when he was mutilated.

When I saw Darkman II, I thought the idea was that Vosloo's face was a disguise Westlake was wearing to distance himself from his original identity, but it looks like apparently now that's meant to be what he looked like all along.

A shame - because that would have been a clever way to get around the recasting.

-The guy who played the mobster bad guy of this movie looked so much like John Travolta to me. am i just face blind?

The Travolta comparisons occurred to me because this movie has some of the strongest similarities to Face/Off in any of these films - Westlake, in one of his more unhinged moments, disguises himself as Rooker and begins to fall in love with Rooker's neglected wife. Very similar to the situation in Face/Off, if you'll recall - the shadiness of the 'shapeshifting into the person's lover' thing.

-There are some good gruesome bits in this I won't spoil - the pliers, the industrial shredder at the climax, I thought those were both good.

-Rooker's plot in this is to steal Darkman's super-adrenal DNA and sell it on the street as a steroid - he's also out to get the soon-to-be-elected DA who's on the verge of shutting his operation down.

So when he and his scientist ally figure out Darkman's adrenal fluids and put them in four presumably disposable thugs, their plan is, I shit you not, to have the thugs tear the DA apart on stage as he's giving his acceptance speech after the election. It obviously goes poorly - they never even touch Mitchell! The cops shoot two of them dead on the spot, I think without even a single one dying?

-There are a couple of logical leaps and inconsistencies I won't get into - this movie isn't that long, and there's nothing in here I can really get mad at, but I can't think of anyone I'd really recommend this to - without Durant, this franchise loses a lot of its sauce, and this movie's plot specifically, you can find done better in Face/Off.

Hilariously, scrolling the Wikipedia page, this was apparently a (possibly unintentional) prototype or sounding board for Face/Off before its release. Darkman already reminded me of Face/Off mixed with the Shadow and RoboCop, this just cements the comparison in my head. Darkman 90 and Face/Off might make a perfect double feature.

-I'd say my recommendation is: definitely check out Darkman 90 no matter what, check out Darkman II if you liked that and you're already into pulp hero style stuff, but probably skip this one.

Maaaaaaybe worth watching if you love Darkman, there's a bit of the prior movies' charm in this, but something's definitely lost without Durant and what this movie offers doesn't make up for it

[dailyrockman]

0275: Darkman 3

[callmedarkman]

We got one burned in the car, one gunshot dead up here, two others critical, and that guy's telling me the Phantom of the Opera used a manhole cover.... Like a, like a Frisbee.

- Police officer, Darkman III

[jeff-fahey]

[jeff-fahey]

[jeff-fahey]

[jeff-fahey]