And it’s an emotionally intriguing note to end on, that’s for sure—a new Marvel Cinematic Universe hero, doing something pointedly anti-heroic, or even just straight-up bad. If we do wind up getting more Moon Knight adventures, Oscar Isaac’s lightly comic performance as all of the Moon Knight collective’s individual components will be the main selling point, no question; they’re what made this show so easy and fun to watch. But after that ending, I’ll be curious to see just how grim’n’gritty the character is allowed to get. I’d imagine that white costume dirties up pretty good.

I reviewed the season finale of Moon Knight for Decider.

An episode like this serves as a good reminder that the show has a secret weapon on its side: the casting of Oscar Isaac as its hero. Isaac has to be equally at home screaming and sobbing from the sudden intrusion of deeply traumatic childhood memories and talking to a CGI hippopotamus woman; he has to play both his Marc and Steven personalities, holding conversations between the two of them thanks to a little movie magic; that split has to be played for laughs, for pathos, and for mind-warping reality-shifting superhero antics. Isaac makes it all look easy.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

We’re now two thirds of the way into Moon Knight, and the show’s strengths are self-evident. No, there’s no cool superheroic death-defying Moon Knight action in this ep, and Khonshu is out of the picture as well. But you’ve still got Oscar Isaac’s charming performance as both nebbishy Steven and deadly serious Marc. There’s still inventively staged action—Layla really makes the most of her collection of flares throughout, at one point stabbing a lit flare into a zombie’s eye. And the show is aware enough of its pulpy B-movie/syndicated-TV roots to make a joke about it in the form of that Tomb Buster video. There’s even a little mystery about the identity of Marc’s old traitorous partner, though the odds are certainly stacked in favor of Harrow himself.

Is Moon Knight going to reinvent the genre? No. Is it going to rise to the emotional heights of the better ex-Netflix Marvel shows? I doubt it. Does it need to do either of these things to be an enjoyable action-adventure series? Not as far as I’m concerned!

I reviewed today’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

We’re now fully halfway through Moon Knight’s short six-episode run, and by now it’s pretty clear what the show’s real selling points are: Oscar Isaac as our troubled hero, and F. Murray Abraham as the voice of the surly, petty god who powers him. Isaac plays Mark Spector as a straight-down-the-middle action hero in the Jason Bourne vein…then switches gears to play Steven Grant as a refugee from some unmade British slapstick remake of Night at the Museum. All the while he has Abraham’s booming voice in his ear, making demands and doing freaky shit with the sky. It’s a hoot.

That said, the fight choreography is a mixed bag, especially for a series that sold itself on being sort of a return to the grim and gritty combat of the old Marvel/Netflix shows. It’s not that the rooftop knife fight that opened the episode or the spear battle near its conclusion were bad, per se; I just don’t see them sticking in my memory. This, of course, is a pitfall for nearly all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s products—full of sound and fury, but weightless in the end.

Ah well. Even if I weren’t getting paid to watch it, I’d stick with Moon Knight on the strength of Oscar Isaac’s unusual star turn and the extremely cool-looking superheroic power of his costume. And at a scant six episodes, it’s a very small time investment relatively speaking; fighting aside, one advantage this show has over its lengthier Daredevil-style antecedents is that there will be no room for the dreaded Netflix Bloat. For now, at least, the Fist of Khonshu still has me in its grip.

I reviewed today’s episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

After watching Moon Knight Episode 1, I wrote on Twitter that “I kind of hope every episode has this same basic tone of Oscar Isaac bumbling around, blacking up, waking up, and realizing he just killed six guys or whatever.” I’m pleased to report that, after watching Moon Knight Episode 2 (“Summon the Suit”), this appears to be the direction in which Moon Knight is headed!

I reviewed the second episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

Written by series creator Jeremy Slater and directed by Mohamed Diab, “The Goldfish Problem” is a fun little diversion. Again, its success largely hinges on Oscar Isaac, who plays the Steven Grant persona as a more chipper and scatterbrained British version of his loser character in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Whether he’s missing a date, taking part in a high-speed chase, getting yelled at by his boss, receiving strange phonecalls from an unknown woman on a burner he found hidden in his wall, or waking up surrounded by people he’s beaten the crap out of, he treats everything with the same sense of mild-mannered “oh, bugger” confusion. He’s a fun secret identity to watch, and that goes along way.

So does that final reveal of Steven/Marc/whoever in full Moon Knight regalia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the character has had the staying power he’s had in the comics world because that costume design—Batman at P. Diddy’s white party, basically—is so bitchin’. Based on the glimpse we get of him in this episode, the show has made no concessions to superhero-movie kevlar-uniform “realism” in translating it to the screen. He really does look like he teleported in directly from the funnypages, and that’s good to see.

I’ll be covering Moon Knight for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It ain’t bad!