Amazon is testing out three new pilots that viewers can vote on for series pickup. All three pilots — The Tick, Jean-Claude Van Johnson and I Love Dick — are available now for Amazon Prime subscribers. Jean-Claude Van Johnson is a satisfactory and intermittently funny pilot from Keanu director Peter Atencio, but it’s hard to imagine how it would work as a series. Jean-Claude Van Damme nails the deadly serious tone required for such a silly premise (i.e., his acting work is cover for international spycraft), but the entire concept feels sucked dry in the pilot. Still, it fares better than the other Amazon pilot I watched. The Tick is really miserable.
Placing the spoofy Tick in a darker, more realistic world befitting the Marvel and DC movies makes sense at first blush, though The Tick has adopted the style just as Marvel movies have found a way out of the grimdark woods. Films like Captain America: Civil War have demonstrated that superhero movies can be both geopolitically complex and lighthearted. There are other paradigms than the Batman Begins template.
Still, the impulse makes sense. It’s too bad that The Tick’s “darkness” is little more than a gloss, with even its surface appeal undermined by downright chintzy production design. The pilot’s one big action sequence looks more appropriate to a Batman fan film.
The costuming is a real low point, a notch below Playstation Network’s recently cancelled Powers series. The Tick’s costume is busy and bunched, with a low-riding diaper crotch. The mask, with its nerdy eye circles, both eliminates any chance of facial expressiveness (contrast with Patrick Warburton’s open design that framed broad, comedic looks) and makes the character look goggled, stealing Arthur’s dorky thunder by accident.
Perhaps this all sounds like hairsplitting, but it’s indicative of an overall carelessness in the direction, aesthetic and tone of The Tick that undermines any real capacity for either comedy or good storytelling. As parody, The Tick was once incisive about comic book tropes. But this feels more like shallow pastiche, like something created by people still hung up on the 90s Batman movies.
The plot of The Tick pilot is primarily motivated by Arthur’s search for The Terror, a supervillain that menaced him as a child but is now believed dead by the rest of the world. As Arthur, Griffin Newman is a tolerable center for the series’ action, but the boilerplate story leaves him with nothing but genericism to work with when The Tick isn’t around.
As The Tick, Peter Serafinowicz radiates an ambiguous menace that could be interesting in more capable hands. There’s the sense that his brashness and self-centered personality could be a real danger to the people around him, but it’s barely a whisper of an undercurrent. The one thing The Tick really nails is his grandiose and rambling superhero monologues, for which Peter has a perfect voice and delivery. Too bad about that costume though, which leaves Serafinowicz acting with everything tied behind his back but words and a big smile.
The Tick attempts to counterbalance its goofiness with the villains’ deadly seriousness, but never manages to build either side high enough to engage the thrill of contrast and contradiction. Apart from Jackie Earle Haley’s The Terror, who might evolve into something more interesting, the characters are uniformly glowering, chin-down, black besuited nothings. That they’re opposed by a bland (but not hyper-bland!) nebbish and an overcooked Tick makes for a disappointing reboot.
Largely, this would seem to fall on director Wally Pfister, who manages to smother comedic timing at every turn, but never compensates with anything of visual interest. But it also feels as if The Tick has fallen into the wrong time, lazily reacting to superheroes as they were, but not as they are. (Speaking of decades-old plot points recycled with zero satirical edge: The Tick heavily implies that its titular hero is just in Arthur’s head. Groan.) The Tick leaves a bloated, over-inflated superhero bubble unpopped. We’ll have to search elsewhere for a needle.
