Hawkeye review: “Never Meet Your Heroes” and “Hide and Seek”

“I need a bow and arrow.” Spoilers for the first two episodes of Hawkeye follow.

Review: “Never Meet Your Heroes”

Clint makes his way to New York to enjoy Christmas with his family as future Hawkeye Kate Bishop tries to find purpose in their life. Their lives cross in a way that will change both forever.

Bishop, Kate Bishop

To begin on a personal note, Kate Bishop is one of my personal favorite Marvel characters, so it’s beyond exciting to see her finally get the spotlight that she deserves. But does the adaptation live up to the character in the comics?

To put it bluntly, in just a few scenes, Hailee Steinfeld embodies the walking disaster that is Kate Bishop absolutely perfectly. This is pretty obviously a different version of Kate than the one from the comics, but the core elements of the character are there: sarcastic, sassy, confident and caring. It becomes very clear very quickly that Steinfeld is perfectly cast — frankly that felt true from the announcement, but it’s nice to be vindicated.

Plus, the episode does a really great job of establishing how competent she is in both archery and fighting, while being at a loss as to how to translate translate those skills to being a superhero. The episode does a great job of visually establishing that the real world is not the same as the competitions that she has dominated.

From the opening credits, Hawkeye makes it clear that that this is very much Kate’s show. She and Clint are the main characters, but she’s the main main character. They’re setting her up to be around for a long time, which is wonderful.

Just a dude with a bow and arrow

One of the running jokes with Hawkeye is how everyone questions how he was ever an Avenger in the first place. He’s just a guy with a bow and arrow, he doesn’t belong with gods. But the opening of this series shows exactly why he deserved to be there with the Avengers as we see him save Kate during the 2012 attack on New York and how that inspired her. Yes, he’s just a guy, but why does that matter if he’s saving people?

Flash forward to the present, and we see Clint in the seats for “Rogers: The Musical,” which is absolutely ridiculous; it feels like a Matt Fraction idea in the best way possible. Amidst the insanity, we see where Clint’s head is going to be at during this series; he’s grappling with PTSD, especially regarding Natasha’s death. This will come into play more when Yelena shows up, but seeing him struggle with it here is very effective.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. We also get to see Clint acting like a dad with his family. This is something only glimpsed at in other films, but seeing how happy he is with them here retroactively gives more weight to them disappearing in the Snap, and more of an understanding of why he became the vengeful Ronin in Avengers: Endgame.

Swords and gangs

We also get out our first glimpses at the villains of this season in the form of Jack Duquesne, aka Swordsman, who is already very different from his comic incarnation; and the Tracksuit gang, which feels incredibly accurate to the comics.

There’s really not much to either of them in this episode, which is rightly focused mainly on Kate and Clint, but their introduction is appreciated. And there’s one character in the Tracksuit gang, Kazi, who if he becomes anything like his comic counterpart will be terrifying.

Review: “Hide and Seek”

Hawkeye saves Kate from the Tracksuit Mafia and tries to get her into hiding. To keep her safe, he tries to retrieve his old Ronin suit, which was stolen from Kate’s apartment after she won it at a black market auction.

Finding the suit

Grab Kate, get the Ronin suit back, get back to the kids. Simple, right? Well, that’s what Clint thought when he confronts Kate about getting the Ronin suit back. But this is a superhero show; nothing can ever be that simple and no good deed can go unpunished, because it turns out that after Kate rescued Lucky and brought him back to her apartment, the Tracksuit Mafia followed her. They begin to throw molotov cocktails through the window, torching the place, which leads to the Ronin suit being stolen. Nothing can ever be simple for Hawk Guy, can it? (Seriously, go read Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye run.)

If the first episode belonged to Kate, this one is Clint’s. The back and forth nature of these two episodes works well as the two get to know each other.

Renner gives one of his best performances as Clint in these episodes. He’s tired and just wants to spend time with his family; while that might come off as Renner phoning it in at first, it’s clear that’s not the case. As we’re reminded again in this episode, this is a man who has been through a lot and is trying to not let his anger seep out. Renner plays that very well.

Not listening

As for Kate, she’s just wonderful. The fact that she won’t listen to Clint is perfect and so true to the character from the comics. Her sarcasm is much more prevalent in this episode and it’s clear that Hailee Steinfeld is having a lot of fun playing her.

It’s also just so fun to see her antagonizing Clint. It’s very clear that she looks up to him and is nervous around him, but she also sees how tired he is. Beyond being a defense mechanism for herself, her light-hearted antagonism almost feels like her attempt to get him to smile, which he has only really done around his children, specifically Lila. This isn’t explicitly stated in the episode, but it feels like what she’s doing, and it’s honestly very sweet.

Tracksuits

We also get more of the Tracksuit Mafia in this episode. It’s like they’re ripped straight from the comics, “Bros” and all. It’s pretty great and brings just the right amount of absurdist humor to the series early on, meaning the inevitable turn into darkness will work much better than if it was dark and depressing right from the beginning.

The first two episodes of Hawkeye are incredibly charming, in large part because they do such a good job of bringing Kate Bishop to life.

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