First off: This is an impressive achievement. Luke Cage has stunning, yet unpretentious cinematography. Its scenes are beautifully composed, its environment draws you in with just the right visual keynotes and color composition, and it features some truly impressive shots that one may not realize are that good on the first viewing, as they blend smoothly into the overall filming. Cottonmouth preparing to beat up Chico, then later throwing Tone off a roof, are two examples that stand out in my mind; the latter in particular is excellently filmed in a way I hadn't even noticed before someone pointed it out to me.
The actors are pretty much pitch-perfect. Luke Cage, Cottonmouth, Pop, Mariah... They all own the fuck out of their roles. Even Shades, who does basically nothing for half the series, still appears incredibly ominous every time he is on-screen. Aisha as the girl who would have up and shot Harlem's kingpin over a damned ring felt immediately compelling despite never appearing before or after.
The music is great; this is one of these shows that made me look up what I was hearing to listen to it later. Although I didn't always need to - "the Wu-Tang could be dangerous" indeed. Luke and Squabbles bickering about kung fu flicks cracked me up.
So, I've really liked what I've seen.
But I think Luke Cage is flawed on a conceptual level. It's in my mind one of these rare examples of a show that perfectly executes a flawed premise - the opposite being more common.
Luke Cage is invulnerable. No mortal man, no matter well-armed, can oppose him; he shrugs off assault rifle fire and walks away from a rocket blast unscathed. The first thing to wound him is Kryptonite - actual alien-matter bullets that only the rich True Bad Guy can obtain.
This stands in stark contrast to his original depiction in Jessica Jones, but that is fine. That was Jessica's show, this is his. His powers in his story should be tailored to what this story wants to say.
The problem with an invulnerable hero is how to create conflict, tensions, how to convey threat and stakes. Luke Cage explains how it intends to do that from its first trailer: "You may be bulletproof , but Harlem ain't." Luke isn't in danger, but everything around him his. When he is in prison, his only friend is threatened. When he is in Harlem, his landlord is collateral in an attack against him. As he picks up a vendetta with the local crime lord, everyone around him his casualties. He may be invulnerable, but that doesn't help him any.
This is a fine concept. And where I suspect I differ from most is that... It's not working for me.
The first part of why it didn't work for me is the most minot and subjective, but I'll still address it: the show still expects its action scenes to matter. Even though Luke Cage completely dominates them and is never wounded, the action scenes are shot as intense engagements, which doesn't work. Now, midway through the season, this gets better - we get to see gangbanger run away at Luke's sight. But that still leaves a bunch of fight scenes that play as if they had tension even though they don't.
This is very subjective, clearly. I know people who really enjoy an invincible hero stomping through enemy after enemy. Fuck, I loved Equilibrium. But I still would have liked the Fort Knox scene better if it had played out like a Luke Cage-sized version of Daredevil's two Hallway Scenes, with a hero getting hit and tired and powering through.
Anyway.
In order to sell a story where a hero's invulnerability doesn't help when everything around them could be the real damage, you have to make people care about these surroundings. You have to distance yourself from the hero to focus on the smaller people, those who try to get by without his strength.
Luke Cage tries this, and falls short. In part because most of its screentime is focused on painting Luke himself (who is never in danger until someone brings kryptonite) or the Stokes, who get a lavish portrait as complex villains, rich in character and wonderfully acted. Even their henchmen get in on it - Tone has a small character arc of his own, trying to step up and making his last mistake, Shades getting tons of build-up for relatively little payoff, Scarfe managing to get a lot of sympathy for a corrupt, murderous cop, that one fucking guy who has read up and actually suggests leaving the superhero alone... Even Domingo, who ends up not mattering, gets an amazing scene where the camera work deliberately frames him as smaller and less classy than Cottonmouth only to have his coming out as the bigger guy all that more impressive.
The protagonist gets the character development. The antagonists, all many of them, get the character development.
Harlem gets shit. Aisha has a great appearance but exists for four scenes in one episode. Pop is the humane face of Harlem, his death establishes the stakes, but it was not a consequence of Luke's heroic flaws, so it misses the "you're bulletproof but Harlem ain't" mark. The landlord lady gets two scenes before being shot by a rocket and being saved, then disappears.
Luke Cage is invulnerable, but everything around him isn't. Except... Things around him don't exist. Luke and his sworn enemies have a past, a persona, inner and outer conflict. The people of Harlem are there to be saved and forgotten.
The reveal of Diamondback's identity encapsulates these issues, I think. This is a show about Harlem, day side and night side: This is a show about Harlem as the home or artists and civil rights advocates, a place of life and music and beauty, and yet the home of criminals and corrupt politicians, a place of violence and crime, guns and drugs. Two sides ever in contrast, embodied in Cottonmouth, Mariah, Pop...
And then its artsy, suit-clad crime lord dies, and the True Bad Guy is revealed as a dude from Savannah, Georgia, Luke's brother who orchestrated his fall and suffering. Harlem never mattered: Two outsiders from Georgia were using it as their battleground, however unknowingly.
This is just one way in which Luke Cage undermines its own premise by its own actions.
This is a good show. I really like this show. But I can't love it.
