Lukewarm Cage

Hmm...

I find myself overall underwhelmed by Luke Cage: great characters in a dull story, with boring action and an at-times jarringly lazy script.

At one point a character is called through a police line to be told 'You should stay back'... :/

The supporting cast are great: diverse, unique, relatable and/or understandable. The bad-guys (and there are a few) are mostly nuanced, and with arcs, while the female good-guys are assertive, interesting and never in the damsel-in-distress role (one does need saving at one point, but it doesn't really count).

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Luke himself. Unlike the supporting cast - and more notably, unlike Matt Murdock and Jessica Jones before him - there's no agency about him. Everything he does he has to be pushed and prodded into doing (with the exception of a quick heist he does for the lols). He crumbles under the mildest pressure, shows little wit or imagination, and too often suffers from momentary idiocy syndrome when the plot requires him to.

At one point, he's about to pack up and leave town because of a mild threat, is told off for being a bitch by one of the series' intelligent characters, and decides, 'Oh, okay, guess I'll stay then'.

The action, when it happens, consists almost exclusively of him walking into a hail of bullets and throwing people around like a Kevlar Mr. T, and the one time we do get a fist-fight, it consists of the two characters trading blows like they're taking turns on a heavy-bag, while the crowd chants as if they're watching a crap Rocky knock-off.

It does have its moments (though they mostly come when Luke's off screen), and there is a polemic through-line reflecting the state of American politics and race-relations, but everything seems short-changed.

The first few episode hint at a character's racism, but that's forgotten before we're halfway through, it briefly tries its hand at being a police procedural, but the mystery is limp and quickly given up on, and the good ideas it does stick with tend to crop up in visual metaphor throughout the series, but are never explored in any depth.

There are good ideas beneath the surface, and the cast for the most part (particularly the bad-guys) are engaging, but this is easily the weakest of the MTVU so far.