Why JESSICA JONES isn’t “All that!”

Well I’m going to partly prepare for some hate coming my way for this but I think JESSICA JONES was not as great as people are making it out to be – it’s good, don’t get me wrong, but is it great? Would I watch it again? Am I dying for season 2? No, not really.

For me, with Marvels original series through Netflix efforts, DareDevil (DD from hereon!) remains the standard to beat, flaws and all.

So, I’ve elected to put down my thoughts on the show in a kind of extempore fashion, listing good and bad as they come to mind – feels like that will be a little quicker and more honest than trying make a pro/con list or something:

• I think it was a step down from DD in terms of being entertaining because they made it sooo dark and broody and that it made DD seem almost lighter by comparison. It didn’t help that it did in fact drag out the episodes/scenes in bits and that made that part of it worse for me.
• What I liked was how great it was with regards to the super-powers, nice to see that brought in so non-chalantly like in the comics from where all this comes. Shit is happening in the larger world, powers exist, shit happens.
• Jessica herself – she’s powerful and a badass and revels in it but is not over-the-top heroic or villainy way.
• But the whole thing with her and Cage and Cage’s wife… little over-wrought for drama and more than a little creepy. I get a lot of the “it wasn’t her fault/you can’t help your attractions/etc, etc” arguments – but it’s just a wierd friggin choice so let’s just admit it and move on.
• Kilgrave was excellent, David Tennant utterly destroyed that role and reinforced why I wanted him to be potentially cast as a Joker/Riddler type character after Batman Begins came out!
• But it took so DAMNED long to bring him in that you could have easily missed out on one of the shows highlights – which I know for a fact several people I have talked to did in fact do because they stopped watching the show after the first couple of episodes at which point Kilgrave is just some mysterious dude you see far too little off.
• Krysten Ritter. I’m in two minds. On the one hand she was really good in a lot of ways in her delivery and presence and attitude – but on the other, she had such little expression a lot of the time that part of me wanted something terrible/dramatic to happen just to see if it would shake something out from under the surface on that face! It was almost (only a little, just the face bit) like watching Hayden Christiansen/son in the Star Wars prequels. *shudder!* ALSO this is annoying because having seen her in other shows like the under-appreciated Dont Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 I know that she has so much more of an expressive range than she gets to show here. I can’t say whether this is on her as an actor or on the direction frankly.
• However as a powerful female character in popular fiction? Jessica had more positives by and large than negatives, especially considering the dark place the show started her off with and then proceeded to sink her into more and more as it went along.
• Patsy Walker was portrayed very nicely and her characters arc and journey were actually one of the better parts of the show for me, especially her relationship with Jessica.
• Luke Cage… I basically liked the actor and the superpowers. Also the sex scene where they break the bed, did crack me up and add some amusement to a show that was starting to weigh on my brain + when he saws his gut till it fries to show his powers, cool moment.
• The evil, conniving, cheating lawyer as played by Carrie Ann Moss – definitely another interesting and high point in the show. I liked how you dislike her in a good way at the start because she’s a quintessential hard-edged lawyer and then proceeds to just become more and more hateful as the series progresses and the portrayal was excellently done. Another dark but high-point in the show, much like Tennants Kilgrave – I almost hated how much I liked both portrayals.

So there it is… Akshay’s views on Jessica Jones…

Was it good? Yes.

Was it great (or at least as great as some are making it out to be)? No.

Would I recommend it to people? Honestly I think I would gauge the people – unlike DD or Agent Carter or some other Marvel stuff, I would not recommend it to everyone. Because it’s definitely not FOR everyone.

Does it need/deserve a second season? I think there were enough positives overall that I think they should get one and hopefully learn from the weaker points of the first season because there’s potential for greatness in all of this, no doubt about that.

Thanks for letting me get all that out and hearing my views. I’m going to be back VERY shortly because I’ve been making out a similar piece on the recent Star Wars outing and I actually expect to get a LOT more hate for that than this one (which is why I started with this one!).

Cheers all!

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