Kingpin Review
Kingpin is a current fan series set in the Daredevil universe. The episode I am reviewing is the first of the series entitled “Prologue,” as Written/Directed by Aaron Rathbone.
Kingpin is a series that judging from the introductory episode that I sat down with is going to be taking various cues from the Netflix Daredevil series in the more grounded/gritty approach. While I am admittedly not a huge comic book film fan myself, I do remember genuinely enjoying the Daredevil series when it was still fresh a few years back.
With this short Rathbone and his creative team take the time to start sowing the seeds of the underground rule by mob boss Wilson Fisk. Rathbone also stars as Fisk and does a good job in his portrayal, lending something akin to what Vincent D’Onofrio brought to his turn as the villain but still making it his own. The acting in the piece across the board is pretty solid, with the standout for me being Dale Mitchell as Detective Ashland.
On the technical side of things, I think the lighting was pretty solid, if not a bit underlit. Trevor Warmuth brings some nice style to the short but I think a tad more front lighting to accent the eyes or perhaps just some stronger side lighting would have helped punch things up a bit. I also noticed just one or two focus issues in the final interaction with Fisk as well, which again would have been helped with the lighting or possibly a focus puller. I don’t want to nit pick too much though as I know we are all working on smaller indie budgets so large crews are never the name of the game, just a few things I noticed while watching.
The score, dialogue, and audio mixing were all done very well though. Only a few small drop outs of the ambient sound were noticeable in my viewings of the piece.
I think Rathbone and team have a solid starting point for the Kingpin series and I am excited to see more episodes as they go forward. I think there is a lot of different and interesting directions that things can go from here which is always exciting! In my opinion I think it is worth checking out especially if you are a fan of anything to do with comics.
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Cheers!
Daniel Hess
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