SERIES REVIEW – While not the first lawyer series in Marvel history (Daredevil is still the standard), it’s striking that the final episode of Better Call Saul is the very last episode of the Amazon Attorney series: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which follows the adventures of the “female version” (niece) of the well-known, grown-up green superhero Bruce Banner, in comedy form, starring Tatiana Maslany. The only question is, are we really doing the right thing by calling She-Hulk? We watched the four episodes Disney Plus sent us before their release.

She-Hulk is probably the best proof for anyone who wants to argue that there’s too much Marvel these days. Of Marvel’s TV series, Amazon’s Lawyer is a straightforward comedy, a charmingly goofy series that feels a bit like it’s trying to ride the success of Better Call Saul – not just with its lawyer theme but also with its humorous tone. The real problem is that it still lacks the expertise of an actual legal drama, the spectacular action of a sci-fi series (unlike the other Marvel lawyer series I mentioned in my introduction, Daredevil), or even the heart and soul and – let’s face it – professionalism of other Marvel series.

She has the right to be a superheroine

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, airing today (18 August) on Disney Plus, stars Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters, an ambitious lawyer who suddenly gains superpowers she never wanted in the first place. This clever, capable woman is not at all happy about being called ‘She-Hulk’, but the stupid name is the least of her problems as she finds herself in a new world surrounded by super-powered weirdos – not to mention the fact that ordinary people are acting very strangely towards her now that she has powers too. It’s all the fault of her cousin Bruce – yes, the Bruce Banner, played by Mark Ruffalo, a mainstay of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who turns into a big green giant at the slightest provocation.

Fans of Marvel comics know that She-Hulk is built around not one but two powerful ideas. First, it deals with the strange new legal challenges that arise when some people have superpowers. Second, it challenges the dominance of male superheroes from a woman’s perspective.

This second part is the intelligent and wry thread running through She-Hulk. When Bruce tells Walters that her transformation into the Hulk is triggered by fear or anger, she replies that it is a woman’s baseline of everyday emotions. When she is hired to head a legal department specializing in superhuman cases, she worries that everyone will think she got the job because of her looks. And when Bruce tells her, “When people start to see you as a monster, it never goes away,” Hulk’s rant is a painful reminder of how women in the public eye are cruelly looked down upon and double standards applied – as Britney Spears, Monica Lewinsky or Amber Heard can attest.

Better Call Saul, indeed

So the deadness of the character ‘She-Hulk’ is backed up by something surprisingly thought-provoking. But while Maslany’s solid performance makes her a significant lead, the series still fails to be a funny legal comedy-drama. One of the character’s distinctive quirks (harking back to 80s and 90s comics) is that Walters breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience, but other than that, the series is not very special, and the humour or style is a bit forced. Better Call Saul, for example, doesn’t even come close.

It also doesn’t help that things start with perhaps the most obscure origin story of the genre so far. And while I can’t find fault with the specifics of the effects, the CGI She-Hulk is a bit of a misfire, and the overall look of the series has a strangely unpretentious feel to it that reminds me of, say, low-budget, Eastern European design from the eighties.

We get some mildly amusing courtroom antics when Walters is called in to defend Tim Roth’s Hulk-like villain Emil Blonsky and a shape-shifting Asgardian causes trouble. But in the first four episodes Marvel has made available to us, the superhero flavouring of the legal cases is sadly both too simplistic and at the same time not quite as memorable or funny as Vince Gilligan’s iconic Saul series, but you might as well put Daredevil in there because it’s much weaker than that.

Forgettable characters

While the characters in Saul are all, one by one, memorable figures, I can’t say a word about Walters’ friends and colleagues, their lives, hopes or fears, and frankly, I can’t even remember their names, even though I’ve been watching Better Call Saul for years and only saw four episodes of She-Hulk maybe a week and a half ago. The opening episodes clearly lack the typical secondary characters.

Yes, of course, there are the familiar MCU main characters, and the witty performances of Mark Ruffalo and Benedict Wong are still watchable. It’s interesting to see Bruce Banner explore what it means to be the Hulk, especially when counterpointed with Emil Blonsky’s take on who gets called a superhero and who gets thrown in jail. Unfortunately, the superficial tone doesn’t allow much room for these thought-provoking moments to reach great depth.

Prosecution and sentencing

Unfortunately, the She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s “defence speech” didn’t work for me, even though I was really positive about it at first. As a lawyer series, it’s beaten by not only the much talked about Better Call Saul, but virtually every other lawyer series. As a Marvel series, the also recently released Moon Knight, but in fact, all of them are better than She-Hulk: Attorney at Law in almost every way. Thanks to Tatiana Maslany’s really talented performance, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is still watchable, but it doesn’t take a jury to see that it lost the trial for me.

-BadSector-