I also finally just finished Luke Cage, so I figured I'd post my usual review with my thoughts to those interested. Please note, this review is relatively spoilery, so please avoid if you haven't finished the series yourself.
Overall, I liked Luke Cage, but really wasn't crazy about it at all. In my mind, it was by far the worst of the MCU Netflix series so far, even though it had some really great things I loved in it at times. This is really too bad beings how it is documented in this thread itself how much I LOVED this series by about the end of episode 4. However, like many of the other Netflix series, it lost its way quite a bit in the middle through poor story arcs combined with poor pacing, and even more so in this Netflix MCU series than others and in more episodes. However, there was still a few middle episodes I liked. (Spoiler Alert) For instance, part of me really liked the big twist in the middle with Cottonmouth, even though I really liked that character, because I thought that twist added a bunch of new potential to the rest of the series. However, the bad part was that in the end, they didn't do a great job of finding a new good direction to go that was better than the last, and a lot of that was because they were essentially replacing one great villain (Cottonmouth) with one okay one (Mariah Dillard) and one pretty bad one (Diamondback). I also didn't like some of the weird arcs they took with Misty Knight's character at the same time. One other big letdown of the series was its action sequences and how boring and poorly done they were. I get it that Luke Cage is a brawler, so the choreography and style isn't going to be as cool as that of a very martial arts skilled Daredevil, but I still thought they could have done A LOT better than they did, and it got worse as the series went on. In fact, I'd call the action sequences nearly AOS season 1 bad, but maybe not quire Agent May AOS bad ;-). Don't even get me started on how bad that Diamondback vs Luke Cage final battle was, not to mention how ridiculous Diamondback's costume and powers were. So so stupid. Almost like amateur hour stupid. Maybe part of their problem too was that they are obviously giving these Netflix series very small budgets by way of special effects and it is becoming more and more noticeable. Shoot, you can tell that AOS has to get a bigger budget than these shows do. Overall, these are big popular shows for Marvel and Netflix, so don't skimp!!! These shows budgets should nearly be on par with Game of Thrones. Nevertheless, I've been pretty hard on this series so far, so I'm going to list some of the many things I DID like about it. To start, I loved the whole musical emphasis they took throughout where most of it hit really well and in a really cool way. I may be alone, but I even loved that Method Man stuff, which helped to end the series in a slight uptick. One other thing I liked mostly was how much the series tried to hit home with what is socially impacting our country right now. Sometimes it was slightly too heavy handed, but overall, there was some great things to take away. Lastly, I still liked quite a few of the characters, which bodes really well for going forward. I still like Mike Colter as Luke Cage. I actually really loved Cottonmouth, even though he didn't end up quite on par with Kingpin or Killgrave. Misty Knight was also great as well even despite the writers taking her on some pretty stupid character arcs, so if you just remember the beginning and end for her, she was awesome. Claire Temple was also very good like always, even though I felt her inclusion in everything was a bit shoehorned. Lastly, many of the supporting characters like Pops, Shades, Bobby Fish, and Detective Scarfe were all very good as well.
Again, in the end, I still really enjoyed this series, but can't help but walk away a little disappointed and also think that we are taking more of a step back with this series than a step forward. Nevertheless, despite all the downfalls, there was enough good things to pull out of this, particularly the characters themselves where there shouldn't be any collateral damage going forward. Marvel, just learn from this and take that moving forward. Can't wait for Iron Fist, but you better step it up both with fight choreographers as well as special effects budgets. Also, maybe consider dropping these series down from 13 episodes to around 8, or maybe even less with someone like the Punisher solo series. Shoot, make that one only like 3 or 4 episodes.
