Amazon Prime Video's Invincible Premiere Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out This is a spoiler-free review for Invincible episodes 1, 2 and 3, which hit Amazon Prime Video on March 26th. The remaining five episodes will be released weekly after that. Based on the early 2000s Image comic by Cory Walker and Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead), Amazon Prime’s Invincible demonstrates the potential to hook audiences with its mystery plot, especially if its fourth episode strikes a chord in week 2. But in a market saturated by cape stories and dominated by shared universes, the animated adaptation seems to take a backward approach to its material. Where the comic is incisive genre satire, the show plays its stories and ideas completely straight, and with an unironic penchant for grim ultra-violence, which doesn’t always work given its otherwise kid-friendly presentation. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/invincible-official-trailer-2021-steven-yeun-jk-simmons"] The story follows Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), a highschooler living in the shadow of his father, also known as the world’s greatest superhero, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). Superheroes are a dime a dozen in this universe, so when Mark’s own flight and super strength powers finally begin to manifest he enters a world of responsibilities, expectations, and complicated friendships. It’s a distinctly Spider-Man-esque story, among many other nods to famous heroes. Mark even shares a last name with comics’ most famous sidekick, Dick Grayson (Batman’s first Robin), and Invincible’s superpowered landscape is littered with characters practically traced from the designs of the Justice League. These intentional Marvel and DC evocations make it easy to introduce new characters in a world that feels familiar, even though it isn’t. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took this approach for the Watchmen comic in 1986 (Moore’s original plan was to use DC’s recently acquired Charlton Comics catalog) and Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of The Boys plays on familiar iconography as well. However, where both aforementioned stories differ from Invincible is that their use of graphic violence, in a largely kid-friendly genre, is clear and pointed. Watchmen aims at grounded deconstruction; The Boys is often bleakly comedic; Invincible, on the other hand, doesn’t yet know what to do with its copious blood and guts. The bright colors, which take their cue from Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley’s vibrant artwork, certainly make for a jarring contrast, but the story traps itself within the bounds of the familiar at every turn, leaning on existing superhero tropes and archetypes in ways that rarely subvert or comment on them. Its characters don’t exist outside those boxes – until a small handful of moments in episode 3. For a show filled with fantastical powers and vivid costumes, it’s surprisingly drab. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=6cb54c5c-1976-4986-8074-aea5c6318d39"] On the plus side, the premiere episode borrows an interesting hook from the comic’s second volume, which re-frames Invincible as a mystery show. The action scenes are lively, coherent, and occasionally inventive, but they also pose their own problems for how the plot unfolds. In one scene Invincible grounds its superhero-powered carnage in the perspective of a normal security guard who, just moments earlier, had been lamenting his broken relationship with his son. It seems, at first, like the show might take an approach similar to the (equally bloody) animated Harley Quinn series and deflate this self-seriousness. However, once the over-the-top mayhem ensues, the melodrama is pushed as far as possible without winking, all while being couched in animated gore. It’s a fine line to walk, and the show seems to hope the drama will set the tone for the action even though the result is often the opposite. Invincible knows exactly how seriously it’s taking itself, but lamp-shading its tone doesn’t make this disconnect any less pronounced. At the end of the day, it’s still rife with flashy cartoon violence — as opposed to, say, animated horror rooted in agony and nightmarish imagery — so it’s hard to make it feel any less silly than Itchy & Scratchy, no matter how dramatic the framing. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=For%20a%20show%20filled%20with%20fantastical%20powers%20and%20vivid%20costumes%2C%20Invincible%20is%20surprisingly%20drab."] Omni-Man, a mustached Superman send-up, forms a major centerpiece of the plot. Simmons is a proven comedic and dramatic talent (he’s legendarily silly as J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man, but downright terrifying in Whiplash), but his Omni-Man a.k.a. Nolan Grayson is oddly monotone, so his talents feel misused. This seems like the show’s attempt at gravitas — it often stops to focus on Nolan’s stern, imposing stare — but it leaves little room to peel back any layers to this alien character. At least in the comics, he felt like a livelier, more complete person, which only made things more complicated the more you learned about him. This stagnant approach affects the title character, too (Mark adopts the name “Invincible” when he begins fighting crime). He stands up to bullies at school and crushes on pretty girls, but he feels like he’s going through the motions of a standard coming-of-age story rather than carving a unique path within a familiar genre. In terms of personality, you could easily switch him out for any of the other teen characters on the show. Yeun, like Simmons, is a tremendous performer (his work in Minari recently earned him an Oscar nomination), but he’s offered little by way of humor, or frustration, or anything that might make him feel like a real teenager burdened by expectations. The show has an all-star voice cast, from Mark Hamill to Seth Rogen to Walton Goggins, but you wouldn’t know it given how seldom they’re allowed to express themselves and imbue their characters with life or perspective. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-25-best-adult-cartoon-tv-series&captions=true"] One character who gets something of an upgrade from the comics is Mark’s mother Debbie (Sandra Oh), who’s more assertive and doesn’t feel nearly as passive as her comic counterpart (even though that passivity ends up working on the page, given how the comic eventually explores her emotional layers). But of course, the show is not the comic — for better and for worse — and taken at face value, its approach to framing Debbie as a strong-headed woman has unintended side-effects. She holds her own in arguments, but these often take the form of domestic conflicts where Mark and Nolan are downright nasty to her. That’s a dynamic the show brushes off as soon as it’s introduced. In spite of these tonal oddities, the overarching plot is, at the very least, intriguing. In-depth descriptions are best left for once the show has been released, but suffice it to say, it’s anchored by a character-centric mystery — not so much a “who” dunnit, by “why” — which, in the comics, makes for a fascinating subversion of superhero tropes. Whether the show does this story justice remains to be seen, but episodes one, two and three are promising, even if the characters feel half-baked. A major hurdle to developing Mark, his family, and his high-school friends — primarily, Mark’s schoolmate Amber (Zazie Beetz) and fellow superhero Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) — is unfortunately the animation itself. The designs evoke a range of influences, from anime to DC cartoons — one alien character even feels plucked from Futurama — but the leads are rarely expressive beyond mild annoyance or exasperation, leaving the actors with most of the heavy lifting in more nuanced or intimate scenes. The show’s editing doesn’t do much to fix this problem. Shots simply linger on blank expressions, augmented by little more than a bare-bones dramatic score, and conversations soon fall into a pattern of “Line. Pause… Line. Pause… Line. Pause...” and so on; the scenes rarely have rhythm or whimsy. There are mild exceptions along the way, like Jason Mantzoukas as the wisecracking teenage hero Rex Splode — Mark’s teammate on the aptly named Teen Team, created in the vein of Marvel’s Young Avengers or DC’s Teen Titans — but his antics are the only times the show feels truly energetic outside of its action scenes. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/jason-mantzoukas-roasts-igns-max-scoville-without-mercy-ign-fan-fest"] This interpretation is much more diverse than the comic, but change doesn't offer much in terms of substance to the show. Rex is now a person of color, Mark and his mother (who are voiced by Asian actors) are Asian, and several supporting characters have been bent along the lines of race and sexual orientation, so the story isn’t wholly straight and white like the comic was. But none of the initial three episodes, which run nearly an hour each, seem to do much with the characters’ new identities; the fumbling of this change is indicative of Invincible's lack of depth across the board. Invincible wants to be deadly serious about colorful superheroes that are usually handled with a more self-aware comedy tone, but it has so little to say about its own approach — or the material it draws upon — that it ends up somewhere in the middle. It’s not a dud by any stretch — the action scenes occasionally skew towards exciting, and the mystery feels like it’s approaching a challenging reveal for the Graysons — but thus far, the show is mostly texture, and the furthest thing from poignant or unique.

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