Thanks, I Hate It: Jessica Jones

Maybe the most scathing thing I can think of to say about Jessica Jones is that it proceeds from the notion that David Tennant is scary. I understand that he's supposed to be this whiny, entitled creep, but his face and demeanor are so cartoonishly ineffectual at projecting menace. You couldn't have purpose-built a person less suited to play the show's villain, Kilgrave. And that's only the start of it. Inconsistent handling of super powers weighs down Jessica Jones' genre thrills, and the show's arch tone and genuinely stupid writing make a hash out of material about rape and abuse that should be white-hot.

One second Jessica (Krysten Ritter) is cut to the quick by witnessing a man's death, the next we get a joke about burying his iPhone charger with him. It's not just her hard-boiled emotional distance, either. The part is one-dimensionally flip and unemotional, Ritter's performance grating. Boring and lazy characterization abounds, especially in Kilgrave's backstory where after we hear about his experiences being abused as a child we learn that actually he was the abuser, born evil like fucking Voldemort. To delve into what child abuse does to those who survive it and then to pull an "aha!" switcheroo like that is the cheapest of cheap tricks, undoing everything accomplished by the show's sole good episode, "What Would Jessica Do?" in which Kilgrave abducts our heroine and takes her to a replica of her childhood home.

The staging and choreography are limp--though there's a good action sequence set in a minimalist rich family's apartment--and the show's positioning of Jessica as a hard-drinking private detective, unaided by any visual relationship to the genre, never goes anywhere. Nor do snidely hateful asides about her fat neighbor's exercise habits or the general useless, stupid selfishness of humanity do anything but tell us over and over again that nobody gets close to Jessica because she's damaged. There's nothing else there.

The show's inability to make up its mind about how Jessica resists Kilgrave's powers, or the nature of those powers, is deeply irritating. It is a matter of love and grief, or of virology? When Kilgrave injects his own unborn son's stem cells into his spine to increase his powers it feels more like someone opening an RPG menu and buying a new talent than any kind of frightening or personal development. And my God, to cap it all off there's a moment where a profoundly misused Carrie Anne Moss lets a mind-controlling maniac out of his sealed prison cell to get her wife to sign divorce papers. Jessica Jones is ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag labeled "feminism."