The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy is a reminder caped crusader adaptations can be delightful and insightful along with punch-drunk and deafening. It’s as bonkers as anything – but a brolly good show to boot.

The story here unfurls slowly, so the steady pace of “The Umbrella Academy” may challenge viewers who are looking for immediate villain-avenging action. But for those who don’t already know the story, there are gratifying payoffs down the line.

It has flaws and excesses, but the series, whose first season is available on Friday, nonetheless lands in the sweet spot between comedy and drama, and between a plot-and-action-driven narrative and character exploration. ... By the time Mary J. Blige and Cameron Britton (he was serial killer Edmund Kemper on “Mindhunter”) show up as time-traveling assassins named Cha-Cha and Hazel, respectively, I was fully onboard, at least for this one season.

The show is every bit as good, as delightfully odd, and as touching as the comic.

Umbrella looks, feels and sounds different [from other comic book TV adaptations]--music does much of the heavy lifting, and effectively so. It's a gorgeous-looking production that evokes another world, with both feet still firmly planted in this one.

The Umbrella Academy isn’t so much a puzzle that needs to be solved as a long wait for a series of explanations. At least it’s an entertaining wait. Blackman’s approach is less surreal than Way’s writing, but the density of the world-building isn’t lost. The isolated moments are often brilliant.

The story is a little too Dark Phoenix, and the series’ pacing can be maddening. But you have to love an action-packed finale that rips from a kid’s birthday party at a bowling alley (little Kenny is never getting over that one) to a concert hall on the cusp of the apocalypse. The climax is an ending and a beginning. Umbrella Academy is just getting started.

While the title might evoke images of dark clouds, the forecast for Umbrella Academy actually looks pretty bright. Assuming, you know, that the world doesn't end.

As a production, it is incredibly stylish. Clearly a fair bit of money has been spent here. And there are enough good ideas in its multifaceted story to please some fans of the comic book – and comics in general. But if it does return for a second run, it would be nice to see some more genuinely fresh ideas – without the over-reliance on tried, tested and tired tropes from years past.

Its attempts to capture the visual and narrative virtuosity of the comics are halfhearted, though, and we’re left with a polished but increasingly dull version of the same old story: saving the world as a byproduct of overcoming adolescent resentments and family dysfunction; teenage alienation as an apocalyptic force that has to be brought under control.

It’s not that the writing is awful; it just veers a little too wildly between being needlessly vague and frustratingly ham-fisted. ... The Hargreeves family, though, is where the show shines its brightest. ... It’s not lacking plot, but in the end it’s just far too anxious about doling out answers to focus on the elements that could’ve made it great.

Too much of the series, though, suffers from the same grey emotional palate and cement pacing that have afflicted every other Netflix superhero show. ... Ellen Page is utterly wasted until the season’s last two episodes, by which point Umbrella Academy has squandered most of the goodwill its occasional bursts of stylistic inspiration have generated.

Overall, the series reeks of undeveloped potential. It looks beautiful and has an incredible cast, yet often drags. After a solid first episode, the plot is excruciatingly slow, pausing in all the wrong places.

The Umbrella Academy never delivers on its intrinsic potential. It’s just one more half-hearted attempt to capitalize on the genre’s popularity.

You’re eternally aware you’re watching a very slow countdown to a superpowered world rescue. Particularities among the characters dissipate.

It is purest hokum: a superhero show with some potentially interesting stuff lurking underneath about family dysfunction (mostly carried by Ellen Page as the black sheep) that promises never to be developed.

[The] busy nature initially makes for a slow start, as its pilot embeds us in their grief as means of gloomy exposition, but then it creates the opposite effect by the second and third episodes and onward--the series is both slow moving and overstuffed.

There’s not much else going on here, beyond some admirable if too strenuous attempts by the actors to breathe life into the show. It is packed with talent, but except for Gallagher’s time-traveling Max Fischer vibe, somehow none of it quite shines as it has every right to--save for the mid-20th-century-inflected production design and art direction (credited to a team of four), and Jeff Russo’s old-fashioned score.

It’s soundtracked by “ironic” peppy pop music, the clearest sign a show is more interested in maintaining a pose than in showing us something we haven’t seen before. ... After a while, endless stylization for its own sake comes to feel cluttered and, worst of all, dull.

For whatever weirdness the TV series promises at its outset, it ends up as another distended superhero show that smooths out its source material’s idiosyncrasies until little remains of whatever made it appealing in the first place.