To Raimi’s credit, his style at that point of his career was perfect to capture that mix of camp and violence that so many movies, even comic book movies, try to reach for but fail to achieve. Darkman is unabashedly demented in places, including a henchman who only purpose is to be there so that others can use the machine gun hidden in his prosthetic leg. There’s also the Chinese mob boss who’s one Fu Manchu mustache away from being a complete racial stereotype, and if Larry Drake’s Robert G. Durant isn’t the most overly articulate gangster in the history of film, I don’t know who is.
By the time Raimi made his own superhero movie over a decade later in Spider-Man, he had fully embraced earnestness and idealism, with the likelihood of revisiting the much more complicated grey world of Darkman seeming almost non-existent. There were two direct-to-video Darkman sequels and an attempt at a Darkman TV show, but given Neeson’s evolution as the statesman of movie tough guys, wouldn’t it be fascinating to see what happened to the avenging angel of a thousand faces 25 years after the fact?
Of course, there’s a greater likelihood of another Taken then there is of another Darkman, which is sad because Darkman, like Dick Tracy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, showed tremendous creativity and dedication to material in a time when comic book movies weren’t typically given the respect they deserved. As we’ve seen with the Turtles, their simple origin wasn’t enough for the modern franchise-minded studio, and would a Dick Tracy movie today be allowed to get away with using nearly two dozen bad guys? Forget it! The 90s may be remembered as a dark time for comic book movies, but 1990 was one of the bright spots, and a hat trick that’s been hard to top all these years later.