Darkman

(1990)

★ 6.4 IMDb · 1,571 votes

Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Year: 1990

Runtime: 95 мин

Country: United States of America

Director: Сэм Рэйми

Cast: Лиам Нисон, Фрэнсис Макдорманд, Колин Фрилз, Larry Drake, Нельсон Машита, Jessie Lawrence Ferguson, Rafael H. Robledo, Дэн Хикс, Тед Рэйми, Dan Bell

Plot

Dr. Peyton Westlake is on the verge of realizing a major breakthrough in synthetic skin when his laboratory is destroyed by gangsters. Having been burned beyond recognition and forever altered by an experimental medical procedure, Westlake becomes known as Darkman, assuming alternate identities in his quest for revenge and a new life with a former love.

Mild-mannered scientist Peyton Westlake, who works out of a lab set up in his loft apartment, is beaten within an inch of his life but assumed dead by criminal Robert Durant and his thugs, Durant solely wanting to retrieve a document discovered by Peyton's lawyer girlfriend Julie Hastings implicating Durant's developer associate Louis Strack, Jr. of offering bribes to get his latest waterfront development passed by the zoning commission, and about which Peyton ostensibly knew nothing. In the aftermath of the lab being destroyed in an explosion set by Durant, Julie knows nothing about Strack being behind what happened let alone that Peyton was targeted or that Peyton survived in only fragments of his body being discovered in her assumption that he perished in the explosion. She further believes that the document was also destroyed in the explosion, while in reality Durant was able to locate it in the loft. Peyton's still alive body is discovered, he only a John Doe, and is operated on by an experimental burn unit whose operation is able to keep him alive albeit permanently physically scarred, but change him fundamentally in three ways: that he no longer is able to feel physical pain; that he has increased physical strength; and that he is emotionally more aggressive to the point of being violent if pushed. Able to escape, Peyton returns to his work in developing synthetic skin. He plans to use this synthetic skin to don disguises in exacting revenge not only on Durant and his entire team of thugs, but on Strack. The problem for Peyton is that he is only able to maintain the skin for ninety-nine minutes in open light in the discovery that the material is light sensitive.