Marvels newest TV show Hawkeye starts off with a lot of Christmas cheer but not a lot of interesting plot lines. This next marvel installment debuted its first two episodes on Nov. 24. The show starts out following Clint Barton, a.k.a Hawkeye, (Jeremy Renner) while he is in New York with his children for Christmas after the Blip. The first two episodes are good and fun to watch, but don’t give all the intrigue that past shows have had.

However, his fun holiday plans are thwarted by a young girl named Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld). Kate Bishop was in New York in 2012 during the alien invasion, when Hawkeye saves her life with a well-timed arrow and Kate chooses to become a martial arts and archery master. When she discovers a secret auction and is seen wearing the suit of a very well-known vigilante Ronin, Clint must protect her and stop the new threats coming after her.

Hailee Steinfeld did a great job playing Kate Bishop in these first two episodes. She was funny and excitable, just as you would expect when she gets to meet her hero. Kate also displays some amazing martial art skills and is able to flip over cars and hold her own against a group of gang members. But she also isn’t too good, she can have a few mistakes at just the right moments to make the show funny. Kate Bishop seems like a great main character for the show.

Hawkeye also has some great comedy. The characters do funny things like fake sword fights and joke around enough to keep the show light-hearted.

The fight scenes were pretty good, with fast-paced movement and a lot of punching. With Kate Bishop’s skills, she is able to move around well and use the items in her environment to her advantage. However, some of the fight scenes seem to rely a lot on sound effects which takes away some of the authenticity of the fight. There is also very little work with arrows so far, and most of the fighting is done with fists. 

Hawkeye also comes across like Marvel is trying to get into the business of cheesy Christmas movies. Most of the first episode was Clint and his family talking about being together for Christmas. And with the show taking place six days before Christmas, it feels like a race to be together and finish up the plot of the show before the holidays.

Now that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that depends on how the show continues. It could become like “Die Hard”, which is an amazing mixture of action and holiday. Or it could become a weird mixture of the two and become a real version of the Saturday Night Live skit where they made Black Widow into a rom-com. 

The characters who are being portrayed as villains so far seem incompetent, they can all be taken down by Kate and Clint fairly easily and don’t seem to be that threatening. Whether they were meant to be that way is unclear. One specific character was revealed to be suspicious fairly early, but that was no surprise. He was clearly up to something from the start and was made too obvious. It would have been better if the character had been given a little more screen time to develop into a villain without broadcasting it immediately.

Some of the villains in the show are Ronin’s old enemies so the subject will probably be explained later, and hopefully, marvel fans can get a full look into those five years that Clint went dark. 

The first two episodes also barely touch on the fact that the vigilante Ronin was Clint during the years of the Blip. It can be pieced together for Clint’s reactions to seeing the suit on TV or the one flashback of him taking off the mask that they played. The intense Marvel fans with a great memory might also remember Clint in that suit during Avengers: Endgame. But for more casual marvel fans who didn’t get the connections, this TV show might get very confusing very fast.

I would recommend this show to Marvel fans. But unless you have a good amount of background knowledge on Marvel then you might want to watch some of the movies. If you want to watch the show but don’t have any past experience, I would recommend watching the first Avengers movie, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. Also, as Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is listed as a character/cast member, I would suggest watching Black Widow. In conclusion, I would say the show is good and has potential, but there are some drawbacks that could make it worse in later episodes.

7.5/10