A little while ago, I decided to take on the insane project of wanting to see every comic-book movie that I possibly could. With all of the fun MCU movies out there today, this sounds like a really fun idea, but I caution anyone that thinks they might ever want to do it. The biggest hurdle is going to be the earliest adaptations, because the majority of them were in the form of serials. Serials are very archaic for modern viewers, since they’re this weird blend between film and TV, consisting of 12-15 “chapters,” each spanning about 15-25 minutes, usually making for a film that’s around 4 hours. There are 11 total serials based on comic book characters from Marvel and DC, and after seeing Blackhawk I’ve now officially seen all of them. When you’ve suffered through as many serials as I have by this point, you start to get really tired of them, but Blackhawk in particular was easily my least favorite of all of them, because it completely embodied everything I’ve hated about serials.

No doubt, the vast majority of people out there will have never heard of Blackhawk (I’m a huge superhero nerd and hadn’t heard of this property before discovering this movie), but this serial is based on an early DC comic based on a hero of the same name. It’s actually kind of confusing too, because the main character’s hero name is Blackhawk, but he’s also the leader of a group called the Blackhawks. So, that’s a weird distinction to have to make sometimes. Anyway, the Blackhawks are a group of pilots that used to take down Nazis in World War II, but now continue missions to stop other bad guys. In this serial, Blackhawk leads his group in fighting a group of spies and saboteurs that are trying to destroy democracy. This kind of sounds like a generic plot, and that’s because it is. There really isn’t any other depth to it outside of the basics here.

Like I’ve said, I really haven’t been a fan of most of the serials that I’ve forced myself to watch, but at the end of the day I didn’t give many of them bad scores, because I’ve tried to judge them on what they are. People might not care about serials now, but they were popular at one time, and while I might hate the format as a whole, I at least want to try to make the distinction between a good serial and a bad one, so I’ve given positive scores to the ones that I thought were good at what they are. Blackhawk, however, is the worst serial I’ve ever seen. I can’t even give it a pass for being a “good” serial, because it commits all of the worst sins that have made serials go out of style in the first place.

I’m going to do something unusual that I don’t normally do in a review. Usually I try to just express my thoughts in some sort of essay format, but I have a lot of unconnected, singular thoughts about what I hate about serials that Blackhawk embodies so perfectly, so I’m actually just going to list all of my complaints here in a list format:

  1. Generic plot. We’ve already covered this, but Blackhawk has the most cookie-cutter plot you can have for one of these things. Bad guy is trying to do something bad. Good guy must stop bad guy.
  2. One-dimensional characters. One thing that ends up happening in a lot of serials is that it’s hard for me to remember who characters are, because they have no real defining traits. In Blackhawk, I knew who Blackhawk was and the villain (mainly because she’s a girl among a sea of dudes). There was also an Asian character named Chop, who I recognized because he’s a literal caricature of Asian people. Other than these people, I couldn’t tell you who anyone in this serial is.
  3. So many white guys in suits. WHY WAS THIS SUCH A TROPE IN SERIALS?! This drove me nuts in so many of these, and it makes the previous problem I just talked about worse. All of the bad guys in these things are just nameless henchmen wearing suits. It’s impossible to know who’s who, because they all look completely identical.
  4. Formulaic structure. Granted, the structure of the serial is what sets it apart from other similar mediums, but the problem is that it never lends itself to any surprises. After the first chapter, each subsequent one starts with resolving the previous chapter’s cliffhanger, having the villain come up with a new scheme, having the heroes find out about the scheme, having the heroes go to stop the scheme, a fight breaking out, and a hero being placed in a perilous situation that makes it seem like they’re going to die. Cliffhanger ends the chapter, and then we repeat all over for the next one. Man if this doesn’t get repetitive.
  5. Bad cliffhangers. The problem with most of the cliffhangers in these serials, especially in one like Blackhawk, is that it’s rarely something that you’re going to be wondering how the character gets out of the situation. Sometimes the set-ups are interesting, but the resolutions are always the same. Usually it comes in two varieties. Either you have a character that’s about to be run over by a car or sliced in half or something like that, and the resolution in the following chapter is just that they stepped out of the way at the last second; or, you have the kind of cliffhanger where a car drives off a cliff or a house explodes, and the resolution is just an extra shot showing the character escaping before the thing happens. Cliffhangers are meant to make you want to know what happens next, so the problem here is that you always know how it’s going to resolve, and so there’s never any suspense to begin with.
  6. Repetitive action. I’ve got good news for you: if you want to see a bunch of guys constantly diving at people or throwing huge, exaggerated punches, then you will love the action scenes here. If you tend to want something a bit more creative from your action movies, though, you will quickly tire of seeing the same fight scene play out over and over.
  7. Terrible acting. Where did they get the people for these things? I will at least give credit to the main actor, Kirk Alyn, who also was the first actor to ever play Superman in a live-action setting (in the two Superman serials). Alyn is competent enough to carry a scene, but the rest of these people had to have been picked up off of the streets. You’ll never see these people in any other movies, and that’s because their delivery is some of the worst you’ll ever see in a movie.
  8. Uninspired writing. This is where you end up having to give the actors some slack, though, because sometimes an actor can only be as good as the material they have to work with, and in this case it’s hot garbage. This goes hand in hand with the generic story and formulaic structure complaints, but seriously, the THREE writers for this serial seriously couldn’t come up with ANYTHING creative for the characters to say or do? This is some of the most generic content you will ever see.
  9. Low production value. Okay, so this one is largely a complaint of serials as a whole. The idea behind serials was to bang out a lot of content for little budget, in order to get a good return. I’m really thankful that movies have been treated more like art over time, because there’s literally no effort put into something like Blackhawk. If you’re not familiar with many movies from the 40s and 50s, you might watch some of these serials and just think that this was the quality they were working with back then, but that’s just not true at all. There was some real care put into other contemporary projects back then, but it’s clear with Blackhawk that it just needed to be thrown together and shit out as soon as possible, because nothing looks professional here.
  10. SO. DAMN. LONG. Again, this is another general complaint of serials for me than it is for just Blackhawk. I understand that back when these serials were released, they were meant to be viewed more like TV (in chunks), but even so, no one wants to sit through this much content of something as shitty as Blackhawk. With 15 chapters each consisting of a length of 15-25 minutes, you have a total runtime of over 4 hours, and it’s just egregious. I’m able to sit through long movies too, but their content has to justify their length, and when you have all of the previous complaints compounding together, the length of Blackhawk just makes it so hard to get through.

Thank you for letting me air out my grievances there. Like I said, I had a lot of those problems with most of the serials that I’ve seen, but Blackhawk just manages to combine them all together in the worst way possible. It doesn’t even end up being a matter of me hating serials either, since this was toward the end of the era of serials, and most people agree that these ones that were released in the waning days of them weren’t nearly as good as the ones from the 40s. I was able to judge previous serials on the merits of what they were, but with Blackhawk I just can’t justify any of it. It does a poor job at everything it sets out to do.

I’m just thankful that this is the last serial I’ll ever have to watch. I was hoping to end this journey of the first era of superhero movies in a positive way, but unfortunately Blackhawk is the worst of the worst. In a way, though, it’s kind of a good thing, because it will serve as a lasting reminder of why I disliked these early adaptations of a medium I love so much. In summary, don’t be crazy like me and decide that it’s a good idea to try to watch every superhero movie. Instead, just stick to the good ones, because I wouldn’t recommend anyone torture themselves with these serials like I did.

1/5