The Defenders was worth the four-year wait, mostly

IF NETFLIX and Marvel promised you an epic superhero TV show four years ago, what kind of expectations would you have? Is it worth the wait?

WHAT if it took almost four years for a TV series to go from its announcement to its premiere? And what if the show was made by entertainment behemoths, Marvel and Netflix?

What sort of expectations would you have?

The long-awaited superhero team-up, The Defenders, is finally here and it’s been worth the wait. Mostly.

Fans will revel in seeing their heroes in the same frame, kicking arse and kicking back. It’s undoubtedly exciting stuff and that hallway fight — these guys love a hallway fight — teased in the trailers is riveting and propulsive when you see their different fighting styles working together.

Like its big-screen Marvel cousin, The Avengers, The Defenders features four heroes — Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Iron Fist (Finn Jones) — coming together to take on a bigger threat than what they could’ve handled on their own.

But unlike The Avengers, these characters are street-level good eggs and this is a much more intimate fight than the world-saving shenanigans the big green guy gets up to.

Well, not intimate-intimate like their individual adventures have been — this time a whole city is under threat. But it’s still more relatable than, say, Peter Quill’s planet-dad’s evil plot to consume every world in the universe.

Jessica Jones season two could not come soon enough.

The stakes are raised in this series as The Hand, a powerful mystical organisation that has been around since at least the days of Pompeii, look to wreak havoc in New York.

Some months after the events of Daredevil season two and Iron Fist, Alexandra (Sigourney Weaver), a formidable leader of The Hand, finds out she’s dying. For someone who’s lived forever, it’s a hard prognosis to hear. It’s also the catalyst for her moving up the timetable on her grand plan, one that’ll make New York the next Chernobyl.

Separate inciting incidents lead our heroes into Alexandra’s path but it’s a while before they come together. Once they do, these very different people with different philosophies have to overcome their scepticism to work as one to stop The Hand.

Sigourney Weaver is fierce as the series villain.

The Marvel series have all suffered from pacing problems in some form and while it’s improved in The Defenders (at least in the four episodes made available for review), it’s not altogether gone.

It takes two episodes for any of our heroes to meet, and even then it’s only in pairs, and it’s not before the end of the third episode before all four do, when, really, it should’ve happened at the end of the first.

While it’s certainly worth checking in on each character’s lives, it takes too long for the convergence to happen, especially when there are only eight episodes in total.

The other downside of this is we have to spend just as much one-on-one time with Iron Fist/Danny Rand, whose story is still most generously described as “meh”, as we get to with Jessica Jones, who we haven’t seen on screen in almost two years. Sometimes, The Defenders just reminds you that what you really want is Jessica Jones season two.

There’s like seeing them all together, it just took too long to get there.

In the Marvel Netflix world, Daredevil was the first show off the rank and it set the tone and standard for what followed. Each series had a distinct identity, except for Iron Fist, which failed on so many levels. Throwing them all together was always going to be a challenge but one that’s been largely pulled off.

Their personalities also balance each other out. Luke serves as a good foil for Danny’s naivete — there’s something very satisfying about watching Luke schooling Danny on his billionaire privilege. Meanwhile, Jessica’s snarky, self-deprecating humour is a great counter to Daredevil/Matt Murdock’s earnest seriousness.

There are definite fan service moments with supporting characters from each superhero series getting their moment and starting to cross into other Defenders’ worlds.

The bromance is starting.

Visually, the series exceeds the already high standard of the shows that preceded it. The cinematography is heightened by a four-pronged colour scheme with a shade assigned to each character — red for Daredevil, blue for Jessica Jones, gold for Luke Cage and olive green for Iron Fist. This also comes across in the costuming.

Each colour is dialled up when we’re in their individual worlds but the real fun is seeing the hues in group scenes — a blue light illuminated behind Jessica or a red neon sign in the corner of Daredevil’s frame.

Because it is smaller scale than a blockbuster movie, it is steeped in emotional resonance, though some of it is good will carried over from the individual series. You care about what these characters care about — well, three out of four of them anyway (Marvel really needs to sort out this Iron Fist problem).

The Defenders is not a perfect series but it’ll give you the same kind of thrill as when you first saw the Avengers grouped together in that hero shot. Except it feels a lot more personal and that is something worth waiting four years for.

The Defenders is streaming on Netflix now.

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