MoonKnight doesn’t quite manage to straighten out its mess of a character, despite a fun and energetic lead performance from Oscar Isaac.
There’s a comedy expression called “putting a hat on a hat,” where two unrelated jokes are combined in ways that end up hurting one another. Moon Knight, created in the mid-Seventies by Doug Moench and Don Perlin, is a cowl on a cowl on top of three more cowls.
Part of the problem is that he was just meant to be a one-off antagonist for the titular hero of the comic, and Moench and Perlin thought a lunar-themed opponent made sense under the circumstance. All the other increasingly complicated character traits came later, a bit at a time — at first, the other identities were just disguises Marc used to aid his mission, and the mental illness concept was added after that — until it all became too unwieldy.
Now it’s Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel team — with the series created by Jeremy Slater and the first episodes directed by Mohamed Diab — taking their turn at trying to to turn the character’s many mismatched pieces into a cohesive picture.
And making Steven into a sweet but clumsy dweeb, rather than the Bruce Wayne-esque playboy he is in the comics, plays well into both Oscar Isaac’s light comic gifts and the overall leanings of the MCU. Despite being one of the most dashing leading men alive, Isaac makes for a surprisingly convincing nerd — when Steven refers to Marc as “bloody handsome,” you can appreciate the physical difference.
joins a long list of overqualified actors taking supporting roles in MCU projects. Unlike, say, Vera Farmiga in, he’s at least playing the chief villain here: Arthur Harrow, the avatar for Ammit, one of Khonshu’s rival gods in the Egyptian pantheon. But the character’s a snooze, and even Hawke doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about Harrow’s Kilmonger-esque claims that he’s really the good guy here.
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