I must thank Roger Ebert for recommending Darkman when it was first released in 1990, when most critics generally panned it. His praise for Sam Raimi's low budget film intrigued me enough to check it out before it vanished from the theaters, and a number of scenes have remained in the long time pleasurable memory zone. Recently re-watching Darkman on DVD, I find the film continues to hold up as entertaining melodrama and offers hope for the Spider-Man series.

After two misfires with mainstream releases For Love of the Game and The Gift, it's refreshing to see Raimi taking on the essentially cartoon characters of Darkman and creating a believable universe in a visually rich environment with touches of pathos. Although most Raimi cultists loyally stand by his Evil Dead trilogy in hopes that he'll transform Spiderman into a worthy film, the best indicator of Raimi's ability to work with cartoon material lies with his vastly underrated Darkman.

Liam Neeson (destined to star in Schindler's List three years later) carries the film as Darkman, an identity scientist Peyton Westlake takes on after being horribly burned and left for dead. Westlake has been working on synthetic skin, developed from digitally transforming photographs, but unfortunately the skin breaks up at the 99th minute.

Similar to Hitchcock's protagonists, Westlake is a victim of random circumstance. His girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand, six years before she strikes gold in Fargo), discovers compromising papers from her boss that prove extensive corruption and leaves them in Westlake's lab. Mobster Robert Durant (Larry Drake) and his henchmen show up for the papers, blow away Westlake's lab assistant, thrash and trash Westlake and lab, and leave him for dead as the lab explodes in a beautifully filmed fiery inferno.

Alive, but deformed with burns covering 40% of his body, Westlake anonymously is treated in the hospital by removing nerve endings to make his life tolerable. Ironically, rendering him in this manner subjects his mind to high stages of rage and episodes of extreme strength, similar to the Incredible Hulk without changing green, but now he becomes a creature of the shadows—Darkman.

He sets off to win back his girlfriend, but cannot do so in his deformed condition. Using scientific intelligence, Darkman reconstructs his lab, collects photographs of his adversaries, and creates duplicate masks to extract revenge on Durant and his crew of mobsters in plots reminiscent of Mission Impossible that set the bad guys against each other.

This provides some great humor and also establishes another Hitchcockian theme—the idea that evil dwells within us all. Raimi beats us over the head with that theme often, but as a cartoon this is perfectly acceptable—this isn't exactly in the same territory as Notorious, but I can imagine the Master of Suspense enjoying Raimi's work here. The depiction of good and evil within the protagonist demonstrates that Raimi understands how to bring a measure of depth to characters that would be left paper-thin in more traditional treatments. One memorable sequence with the evil Durant's cigar cutter evokes physical reactions in the audience without even showing the blood, and a subsequent parallel scene with an enraged Westlake crunching a carnival worker's fingers further establishes his theme associating our protagonist with his dark side.

Credit the main actors for translating Raimi's screenplay into the flesh. McDormand delivers the goods believably as the loyal girlfriend, conflicted when Westlake apparently dies. Her part could be expanded more, but the film allows Neeson to demonstrate his acting skills to a much fuller degree. His over the top scenes of rage show excellent comic timing, but he shows a great deal of range. The quieter moments with his pained looks add far more sympathy for his character than we'd expect in such a screenplay.

Darkman contains many pleasures that film aficionados will appreciate. Incorporating Chicago locations in the mix and combining warm sunlit open spaces with darker closed in sets, cinematographer Bill Pope (The Matrix) captures great explosive scenes, surreal dream sequences with lots of reds and yellows, and really gloomy scenes in darkened alleyways with the despondent Darkman character.

Overall, this film shows off Sam Raimi's vision and gives the clearest preview of what we can expect of his Spider-Man. Should the large budget movie fail, we can still bring out this far less seen DVD as definitive proof that Raimi remains one of the better directors working in the business. Of course his Evil Dead fans have believed this for years.