Kite Man: Hell Yeah! streams on Max on July 18, 2024.
Nobody takes Kite Man seriously. Not in the pages of DC Comics, where he’s a second-class member of Batman’s rogues gallery, and not in the superb animated comedy Harley Quinn, where Matt Oberg first played the green-suited buffoon as an unlikely love interest for Poison Ivy (Lake Bell). She’s obviously out of his league, and this stable and kind dude (who is, let’s not forget, also a supervillain) is eventually pushed aside so that Ivy could end up with Harley. He may have found a better fit in the equally minor DC baddie Golden Glider, but that sweet note within the madcap symphony of Harley Quinn isn’t enough to sustain the new spinoff Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, which lacks both the sharp writing and deep respect for the source material of the series that spawned it.
Following a similar trajectory to the one that led from Big Mouth to Human Resources, Kite Man: Hell Yeah! spins a workplace sitcom out of the more character-driven raunchiness of Harley Quinn, with a sprawling cast of mostly new characters and lots of cameos from familiar faces. Due to a poorly thought out conflict with Lex Luthor (Lance Reddick, in one of his final roles, succeeding Harley’s Giancarlo Esposito), Kite Man and Golden Glider (Stephanie Hsu, taking over for Cathy Ang – lots of recasting going on here) wind up owning Noonan’s, a Gotham City dive bar frequented by goons and villains who have fallen on hard times. It’s a premise with promise, like the inverse of The Tick’s heroes-only Comet Club or any of the many great gatherings of put-upon henchmen from The Venture Bros. Unfortunately, showrunner Dean Lorey, who worked on the first two seasons of Harley Quinn, doesn’t seem sure of what he wants from Kite Man: Hell Yeah! or any of its characters.
Kite Man’s only power – as we’re repeatedly reminded – is kindness, while Golden Glider has a fearsome, uncontrollable ability to slice and dice through whole crowds of unfortunate bystanders with astral-projected tendrils. The show explores Kite Man’s feelings of inadequacy and Golden Glider’s desire for control, as well as the significant issues they both have with their parents, but it never achieves the kind of earnest emotional payoffs found on Harley Quinn. By the end of Season 1, Kite Man and Golden Glider don’t feel any more fleshed out than they did when they were guest stars on somebody else’s show. (Some backstories aside.)
A lot of that comes down to a large number of equally thinly drawn characters. Malice (Natasia Demetriou of What We Do in the Shadows) is the spoiled goth goddaughter of Darkseid (Keith David), and is somehow able to make him proud by taking on the role of social media manager for Noonan’s. Malice’s blasé attitude and demeanor are reminiscent of Parks and Recreation’s April Ludgate, but while it took several seasons of that show for April to become more than a moody coworker who hates everyone and her job, Malice quickly develops a loyalty to the Kite Man crew without any real work from other characters pushing that growth. When she’s brought along for side plots, it’s only because people are obviously trying to avoid being alone with someone else.
Even worse are the bar’s regulars. The running gag of Gus the Goon (Rory Scovel) being a henchman on the side and holding down several other jobs rarely provides laughs, and is mostly just a way for key information to be delivered later in the season. A perpetually drunk villain known as Sixpack (Eddie Pepitone) is just a perverted version for The Simpsons’ Barney Gumble, with the whole punchline being “alcoholism is funny.” At least the bickering between two-headed gangster Joe/Moe Dubelz (Michael Imperioli) and disembodied Harley Quinn Season 1 villain Queen of Fables (Abbott Elementary star Janelle James, taking over from Wanda Sykes) provides a few chuckles – even if it tends recycle the same gags over and over.
On Harley Quinn, Bane (James Adomian) is a consistently entertaining presence because he’s so disconnected from the rich main plots – a walking non sequitur harping on something irrelevant while more powerful supervillains hatch their schemes. Elevating this version of the character to Kite Man’s new best friend and occasional muscle – and thus expanding his screen time – does him no favors. He is (perhaps appropriate for someone of his size, stature, and chaotic drive) an endlessly disruptive force. A callback to the Harley Quinn Valentine’s Day Special actually conjures some of the sweetness and emotional bite Kite Man seems to want from its central romance, but that development is immediately dropped when Bane, for pure plot-function purposes, gets saddled with babysitting an extremely annoying child.
A short memory and inconsistent characterization are most keenly felt in the conflict between Luthor and Helen Villigan (Judith Light), the leader of an Amazon-like company that also operates a chain of supervillain-themed bars. Villigan starts as one of the more encouraging aspects of Kite Man, with a heavy assist from her underling Baby Doll (Maria Bamford, in a clever use of one of Batman: The Animated Series’ most disturbing one-shot villains). But a late twist undermines her character and all of her previous actions.
Kite Man’s humor is as flimsy as its characters. It tends to overuse gags that weren’t especially funny the first time – there are two instances of a character ruining their dramatic entrance by getting something caught in their throat. Other jokes are either quickly over-explained or undermined. Golden Glider says her brother is on a no-fly list “because of Jan. 6. Jan. 6, 2014. He punched a TSA agent.” “Your clothes, give them to me now,” the villain Insect Queen (Rhea Seehorn) says when hitting on Bane in 1986, adding to this bit of Schwarzenegger quotation with “Terminator. No? I’m more of a Predator gal anyways. A sexual predator.” The show also makes some flaccid attempts at meta humor in a Rick and Morty vein, pointing out exactly how it’s aping pop-culture touchstones like Back to the Future and The Exorcist. But like the whole series, these nods just make Kite Man look like a pale imitation of something better.
