Originally written February 26, 2018

The Vigilante is one of the many serials that provided the earliest adaptations for comic book characters on the screen. Many people haven’t heard of The Vigilante, and that’s okay, because a lot of these older serials featured some of the more obscure characters. The honest truth is that I don’t have a lot to say about these serials after the first few, because they’re all pretty similar to each other. They’re very formulaic, and so outside of talking about the premise of this, I don’t have a whole lot else to say about The Vigilante.

In this serial, a masked government agent (which would make him not be a vigilante, ironically) named The Vigilante is sent to investigate a case where pearls that may have been smuggled into the country are sought after by a gang of criminals. An actor named Greg Sanders (that is, the character name, not the actor playing Sanders) is The Vigilante, and so he must mask his identity and go after the criminals to stop their plan. To be honest, it’s one of the most generic possible plots for this sort of thing, so there isn’t a whole lot to see here that isn’t in any of the other many serials of the time.

Like I said, these things are pretty formulaic. The story of The Vigilante is spread out over 15 chapters, each being between 15-20 minutes, making for a final runtime that’s just shy of 5 hours. It’s not the kind of thing I recommend consuming in one day, as each chapter (minus the first and last ones, which provide an exposition and conclusion respectively) follows the same basic set up. Greg Sanders discovers more about the case and what the criminals are planning on doing next, he goes to stop them as The Vigilante, a fight breaks out, and a cliffhanger ends the chapter, making it appear as if a character is about to die, which you get to see the conclusion of at the beginning of the next chapter. And repeat. When you’ve seen as many of these as I have by this point, these serials really start to test your patience. All I can really judge The Vigilante on are its plot, action scenes, and cliffhangers. And honestly, I’ve seen both better and worse. It’s one of the most generic serials I’ve seen, and so really it just doesn’t stand out much for me. There’s not really a huge audience of people that enjoy serials these days, so it’s hard to recommend as it is. But even for those who are interested in serials, it’s not that The Vigilante isn’t worth watching at all, but there are definitely better ones out there. It’s probably better to forget this early DC hero.

3/5