Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hawkeye’ On Disney+, Where Clint Barton Reluctantly Takes On A Protégé, Just When He Wants To Get Home For Christmas

Because of Jeremy Renner’s various MCU appearances as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, we know that he can be more than the brooding, mumbling presence that we saw recently in the other streaming series he stars in, Paramount+’s Mayor of Kingstown. Now that Clint has become the focus of his own series, we can see all of Renner’s abilities on display. Read on for more.

HAWKEYE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: New York, 2012. We see young Kate Barton’s archery awards in her room as she climbs to a vent to eavesdrop on her parents arguing.

The Gist: Despite the issues between Kate’s parents Eleanor (Vera Farmiga) and Derek (Brian d’Arcy James), the Bishops are still a tight-knit family. But it’s all torn apart when their penthouse is attacked during the Battle of New York. She’s saved from an attack by a flaming arrow from the bow of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) aka Clint Barton. She and Eleanor survive, but Derek does not. It makes Kate determined to become an expert archer, just like Hawkeye.

Present day. We see college senior Kate (Hailee Steinfeld) take a challenge to ring her school’s bell using an arrow, but her marksmanship works too well; the bell falls down and destroys the tower.

Meanwhile, in New York, Clint is watching “Rogers: The Musical” with his kids Lila (Ava Russo), Cooper (Ben Sakamoto) and Nate (Cade Woodward). Despite the ridiculousness of it all, Clint has to leave the theater when he sees someone playing Black Widow, whose death still haunts him. But he’s happy he’s with his kids in New York, and he plans to have a fun Christmas week back home with them and his wife Laura (Linda Cardellini).

When Kate visits her mother at their penthouse, she couldn’t be more disgusted to see that Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton) is now dating her mother. She goes to a charity event with the two of them, and finds that Jack’s uncle, Armand (Simon Callow), is in some sort of dispute with Eleanor, to the point where the old man threatens her.

She follows Armand and Jack to a wine cellar, where a black-market auction on recovered Avengers material is being held, including Ronin’s sword and ninja suit. When a hole is blasted in wall and thugs are looking to rob the auction, Kate dons the suit and manages to fight her way out, finding the dog she saw outside along the way. She brings the dog back to her apartment, feeds him some leftover pizza, then goes to Armand’s house.

There she finds Armand dead, apparently stabbed with a sword. As she escapes, word of her exploits — remember, she’s dressed as Ronin — reach the news media. As Clint sets off to find the person in the suit, other people are finding her as well, like members of the Track Suit Mafia.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Hawkeye certainly has heavy ties into the MCU, given Renner’s appearances in multiple Avengers films and elsewhere in the franchise. The series tries to tell a bit more of a personal story, one where Clint Barton is more concerned about getting the Ronin suit off the streets and being with his family for Christmas than trying to save the universe.

Our Take: What Hawkeye, and the show’s head writer Jonathan Igla, does that some of the Marvel TV series haven’t been able to do is bring the story of one of the Avengers down to something that works for a limited-run TV series, rather than try to adapt a sprawling narrative to series form.

Part of it is the focus on Clint Barton, his tiredness with the whole “superhero who helped save New York” business and his desire to just spend Christmas with his family, whom he’s grateful to have since they were blipped back into existence. With Kate entering the picture, Clint will eventually figure out that if he trains her, she can take his place. She clearly has the skills, and it might take a few episodes for Clint to realize that she may be his ticket back to something resembling a regular life.

Yes, there are plenty of fights, and plenty of action. But Hawkeye is more about family than anything else. It’s not just Clint trying to stay connected with his family, but Kate trying to demonstrate to her mother that she’s hitching herself to the wrong person in Jack. She strongly suspects Jack had something to do with his uncle’s death, but it seems like Eleanor, despite being the head of the family’s massive security company, is blinded by her fiancé’s smarmy charm.

Once Clint encounters Kate, Kate is desperate to learn from her hero. A lot of that motivation has to do with completing the mission she established nine years ago, which is to avenge her father’s death. So she’s moving towards fighting while Clint wants to move away from it. It’s a dynamic that plays out well during the first two episodes, and it helps that both Renner and Steinfeld can easily handle the funny moments as well as the fighting and the occasional heavy emotional scenes.

Steinfeld fits into the MCU well, because she makes Kate just silly and vulnerable enough to make her look human, despite the remarkable skills she displays with both a bow and arrow and her hands and feet. There’s a reason why the franchise attracts Oscar-winning and nominated actors like Renner and Steinfeld all the time, and it’s not just because it’s a steady, fairly large payday. It’s also because they can dig in and find the dimensions that the franchise’s various writers have given to these characters, based on the dimensions they were given in the comic books where they originated.

What makes us want to keep watching Hawkeye is that we’re rooting for the teacher-protégé relationship between Clint and Kate to grow. Also, in the great tradition of holiday films where the protagonist just wants to be home for Christmas, we want to see Clint get his wish. And both of those dynamics are more than enough to make Hawkeye Marvel’s best TV effort since WandaVision.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As Kate, in the Ronin suit, is surrounded by the Track Suit Mafia, Clint finds her, pulls her out of the SUV she locked herself in, unmasks her and says, “Who the hell are you?”

Sleeper Star: We loved how menacingly slimy Tony Dalton was on Better Call Saul last year, and he’s equally menacing and slimy as Jack here.

Most Pilot-y Line: Every single scene was shot so dark that it tricked our TV’s HDR settings into making things almost unwatchable. Suggestion: Fix your TV’s brightness when watching Hawkeye or watch it on your phone instead.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hawkeye works because of the chemistry between Renner and Steinfeld, but also because it prioritizes character slightly more than action.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Hawkeye On Disney+