THE DEFENDERS
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RATED TBC / DEVELOPED BY DOUGLAS PETRIE, MARCO
RAMIREZ / CAST CHARLIE COX, KRYSTEN RITTER,
MIKE COLTER, FINN JONES, SIGOURNEY WEAVER
EPISODES VIEWED 1-4
Marvel’s B-Team come out swingin’
AFTER A STRONG start with Daredevil’s
Season 1, Netflix’s Marvel series have started to
lose some of their polish. The heroes change, but
the complaints remain the same: the series feel
padded and drawn-out, with stories arriving at
natural end points long before their final episodes.
Good news: The Defenders breaks the mould.
With four main heroes and their entire supporting
casts combined in a tight eight episode run, one
thing this series definitely isn’t is drawn-out.
Strictly speaking, you don’t need to have
watched Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Daredevil and
Jessica Jones to get on board here. But The
Defenders doesn’t have time for lengthy
introductions, and it picks up with its leads right
where their solo series left off. Matt “Daredevil”
Murdock (Cox) has given up costumed crime-
fighting and is now a lawyer working solo; Luke
Cage (Colter) is fresh out of jail and looking to
do good in Harlem; private eye Jones (Ritter) just
wants to get back to her low-key life and Danny
Rand, AKA Iron Fist (Jones). is fighting ninjas in
the sewers of south-east Asia as part of his
mission to destroy ninja crime cartel The Hand.
What follows isn’t some kind of top-down
team up; instead, the four storylines gradually
converge as each hero investigates their own
mystery. Jones takes on a missing persons case
that leads to a lot of explosives and a mystery
that goes back centuries, Cage discovers the youth
of Harlem are taking on night shift work that’s
bad for their health, and Rand’s fight takes him
back to New York, where an extremely unusual
earthquake has just put everyone on edge. Getting
Matt back into costume is the slowest burn here;
Cage and Rand have already had the traditional
superhero meeting – a bare-knuckle brawl as each
mistakes the other for a bad guy – before DD getsback in action. But even that storyline moves fast;
by ep four everyone is on roughly the same page,
even if the threat posed by villain Alexandria
(Weaver) and The Hand remains a mystery.
The fights are good, with less of the snappy
editing that made Iron Fist’s fights a blurry mess
and a good mix of styles (Jones and Cage are
muscle; Rand and Murdoch have the moves) to
keep things lively. But having everyone interact is
much of the fun here, and when they do finally
get together (in a Chinese restaurant, because why
not) this slows down to enjoy the way Matt’s
twitchy act and Rand’s young gun arrogance
work with Cage and Jones’ street-level cool. They
may not have the firepower of The Avengers, but
this team is right up there when it comes to
charm. ANTHONY MORRISTHE DEFENDERS IS OUT 18 AUGUST ON NETFLIXTop: Luke Cage (Mike Colter), Iron Fist (Finn Jones),
Stick (Scott Glenn), Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter)
and Daredevil (Charlie Cox) get ready to beat on
some bad guys. Here: Sigourney Weaver’s
mysterious adversary Alexandra.