Was Hawkeye a hit or a miss?

Hawkeye is the latest Marvel show to hit streaming giant, Disney +.

The show focuses on the least talked about Avenger, Hawkeye, and new comer to the MCU, Kate Bishop.

Together they train and fight battles against the big gangs on New York all while the countdown to Christmas day approaches rapidly.

So far, only two of six episodes have been released onto Disney + both near an hour long.

The show has a great start, in my opinion. We don’t focus on Hawkeye, even if his name is in the title, instead we meet Kate Bishop. A young girl back in 2012 New York, with a penthouse in the heavens and a rich family name, but when the unthinkable happens her world begins to fall.

We see through the opening credits how Kate developed into the character we see set in the present times, the copious number of awards she’s won as well as seeing her skills develop. I love the addition of having a very iconic art style that people relate to the original Hawkeye comics used as your opening and ending credits.

Now I won’t go too in detail with the plot of both episodes as I don’t want to give too much away. But, from what we’ve seen so far, the story is slowly building up and it appears we’ve got multiple villains for the show.

Though I am skeptical of who’s a red herring or not.

I can already tell I’m going to like the writing in this show, from Clint’s one-liners to anything the Tracksuit Mafia say. It’s just dry, witty humour and I love that; it works well when portraying Clint as this tired dad who just wants out of the superhero world.

Speaking of which, we get to see more of the wonderful Barton family throughout both episodes. One of my favourite things about the MCU's version of Hawkeye is that he seems to be the only one who has a happy family, there’s no unnecessary drama or powers, it’s just a regular family.

I’ve always liked Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye but felt like Marvel had no clue what to do with him, his lack of appearances in most titles shows that; only appearing in five movies out of 26.

It’s great to see the character shine in his own show, seeing his more fun side, showing that he is a capable superhero in his own right and that he isn’t just the guy with a bow and arrow.

With that I turn my attention to Hailee Steinfeld who plays Kate Bishop. To me she seems like the true lead of this series, which feels very deliberate on Marvel’s part.

We know Marvel are wanting to set up the Young Avengers, we’ve already seen Billy and Tommy in Wandavision, we’re getting an Ironheart series, Ms Marvel series and we’ve seen Patriot in the Falcon and Winter Soldier.

It only makes sense that Bishop would be included in that roster.

I love Hailee Steinfeld in this role, she encapsulates this youthful energy while still being a smart-arse and it works perfectly against Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton. The two have such great comedic chemistry and are already an iconic duo.

The secondary characters so far do seem to either mislead the audience or throw them off completely. I saw a post on social media today theorising that Kate’s mother could be the big bad all along which would serve as an excellent twist.

I think the idea of the Ronin resurfacing is great, I do hope we get to see more of that character whether it’s Kate or Clint. I think the potential of that character wasn’t met in Avengers: Endgame and would find its place within this show.

Now before I forget, I have to mention the best character in this show; even if it’s two episodes in.

Lucky the pizza dog. Need I say more?

Best character without a doubt, I even recently followed the pup on Instagram.

There isn’t much CGI within the show currently, though I imagine once we get to those bigger action scenes it will start to appear a little more frequently. From what I can tell at this point, it isn’t too bad though that could be because there isn’t much of it.

The look of the streets of New York seems a little too clean to me, but this has been a trend since the dawn of the 90s. Instead of this grungy city we saw in the 80s and over, we now see it as this pristine city of dreams and all things nice and wonderful.

This isn’t so much Hawkeye’s fault, but I was hoping to see a little more dirt and grime and not clean, empty streets; feels too Hollywood to me.

Possibly my favourite part of the episodes shown was the LARP section. To briefly summarise it: Clint has to go retrieve the Ronin suit from a man who uses it to LARP, however, Clint has to participate in the activities if he wants to get the suit.

The scene is just overall funny and really shows Clint’s fatherly age just a tad more than usual. The overjoyed excitement everyone around him faces as they get to ‘kill’ a superhero is just adorable.

There isn’t much else for me to say on the show at this point, there certainly is a big plot being weaved in the episodes which isn’t really explored until the end of the second episode, but it seems like it’s going to involve a lot of action.

We also have the addition of Florence Pugh who played Yelena in the Black Widow movie, released earlier this year. The character is set to make an appearance in this show as it was teased in the end credits to Black Widow.

I can’t wait to see what this show turns into, it’s definitely going to be a cult classic among fans and hopefully get a few more people into Hawkeye himself.

Hawkeye gets 3 arrows out of 5.

Hawkeye is streaming on Disney + with new episodes every Wednesday.