When attorney Julie Hastings discovers an incriminating document that proves her employer has been bribing members of the zoning commission, he explains to her that it was necessary to ensure the renewal of the city, and warns that her possession of the memorandum is dangerous, because mobster Robert Durant also wants the document.
Unfortunately, this warning comes to late for Julie's boyfriend, Dr. Peyton Westlake (an oh my god so young Liam Neeson). Peyton is working on a new type of synthetic skin to help burn victims when Durant and his cronies burst into his lab, beat him up, steal the memorandum, and then blow the place sky high. The good doctor's ear is the only part of him found at the site and he is announced dead. Of course, we the audience know that the other 99% of him went flying into the river.
Some time later, a doctor delivers a long lecture that is basically a massive exposition dump to justify why the John Doe at her facility is superhumanly strong and almost impervious to pain. Obviously, this is Peyton, who has been hideously scarred from the explosion, but who - with the aid of the still unstable synthetic skin he has developed - will now begin a one man war of revenge on Durant and all his friends.
Darkman is a bad film. The story is weak; the dialogue histrionic and overwrought. And while the make-up effects aren't bad, but almost all of the others have dated poorly (but then, it was made for less than half the cost of the previous year's Batman). Despite all those issues, its clumsy but earnest enthusiasm for its comic book genre makes me want to like it, but unfortunately Sam Raimi would need another decade or so years before he would finally make a superhero film really work on screen, with 2002's Spider-man.
Want a second opinion? Comics writer Peter David has much more eloquently dissected the film than I ever could, right here.
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