DAREDEVIL (2003) Ben Affleck as a superhero! I know, that sounds awful but when so many movie superheroes have no identity beyond their powers, costumes and chins, I'll give Ben Affleck's Daredevil this - he's got a good superhero chin. I never read the Daredevil comic books, my exposure to the character limited to an appearance in an incredibly bad made-for-TV Hulk movie from 1989. Thus, I have no perspective on whether or not this movie is true to its source material and the spirit of the character. That being said, the movie Daredevil eats a dick by most measures. Daredevil in this movie is part Spider-Man (poor kid making good on his superpower potential) and part Batman (weird adult loner with too much money, spending too much time hanging out with gargoyles and casting ominous shadows). The former has some potential that isn't realized; the latter is just mopey and tiresome. Of the widely-released superhero movies since their recent resurgence in the past several years (probably starting with X-Men), this is the worst I've seen. How can a movie that does so many things right still end up crashing and burning with such terrible results? In a word: editing. A longer cut runs twenty minutes longer I hear, and if I didn't just watch this last night (second time - I didn't feel right bashing this movie based on a months-old viewing I hardly remembered) I'd be curious. I will start where the movie starts, which probably isn't where it was meant to start. After a damned cool opening credits sequence, Daredevil, battered and bleeding, takes refuge in a Catholic church run by a priest who knows his identity. Whether this is the aftermath of a crushing defeat to be shown later in the film, or just a realistic, standard result of nocturnal superheroing from a guy who is ultimately only human is not clear, and will not be clear until the movie is three quarters of the way over. Then we get a flashback to Daredevil's childhood, as he narrates (sounding more sad and tired than hard-boiled) his life story of being Matt Murdock, son of a burnt-out Hell's Kitchen prizefighter (David Keith) who gets blinded by toxic waste. As a result of this his other four senses are made super-sensitive and he's given a sort of radar, shown in a form of Monstervision which is pretty good, which I suppose is responsible for his new and otherwise unexplained ability to perform amazing stunts of wire-fu. Though technically handicapped, Matt functions better than most sighted people and is only disabled in the sense that he probably doesn't get a lot out of watching TV. The dad promises to clean up his act and they become (sample flashback monologue) "two fighters on the comeback trail". Dad makes good on it, but is killed by the mob for his trouble (more flashback monologue: "I waited outside of the Olympic for my father. In some ways, I'm still waiting."). Flash-forward to the present and the church, or so we think. See, we're still in flashback mode - but the movie is edited to make us think we're not, I can only guess (charitably) by accident due to all that trimming. Grown-up Matt sleeps in a sensory deprivation tank in his pretty posh for Hell's Kitchen apartment. He starts his day by cranking up some Seether. I understand the marketing forces that drive moviemakers to include pop music in their films. It's product placement, but like regular product placement, it can be done tastefully and skilfully, which is not how it's done here. The movie can hawk the products, but the major characters shouldn't (especially ones with supposedly super hearing), because it just makes me think, great...Daredevil listens to crap. Batman might have had Prince's horrifying "Batdance" on the soundtrack, but I don't recall Bruce Wayne freely choosing to listen to it. Matt is a crusading lawyer by day (I'm not clear as to whether he's a public prosecutor or a private attorney), red-leather vigilante by night. We see him at work doing both, failing to convict an obviously guilty rapist (and delivering an unsubtly veiled threat right there in court), and then getting him later that night, segued by a montage of pretty cool, almost background-less suiting-up and testing-out-the-weapons shots. I can buy Daredevil's radar sense, I can buy his heightened sense of balance that allows him to perform feats of incredible gymnastics, but the superhuman leaps (I'm talking standing jumps from one building onto another building across the street that's like three floors taller) are pushing it, and since he grew up poor and should understand the plight of tight money, does he have to damage or destroy thousands of dollars worth of window-washing equipment just to avoid taking the elevator? His hunt for the rapist is the movie's big superhero-vs-the-thugs setpiece, and while it looks good and does the job I suppose (CGI stunts are getting more convincing), Affleck manages to make even single-word lines drip with cheese ("Justice!"). The scene is resolved with the rapist's death of course; this movie doesn't quite go so far as to make Daredevil kill him in cold blood, but he doesn't offer any help at all to the doomed man, which sets up the "am I the bad guy?" theme introduced later but doesn't do it with much authority since the guy is six inches away from a loaded gun and screaming "I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" to the chunky end. We next see Joe Pantoliano as a New York Post reporter, in a scene which shouldn't logically be flashed back to by the hero (since he is not present) but then, we don't know yet that we're still in a flashback. And there are two more such scenes to come. Pantoliano's scenes add exactly one thing to the movie - by figuring out Daredevil's secret identity, he gets a message to Matt later in the film. Otherwise, total waste of time. So Matt goes home, and opens up the rooftop access to his apartment by spinning the three combination locks at high speed and stopping them with millisecond timing, bam bam bam, that his super senses do not explain. He washes up and winces a little at pulling out a loose tooth, making me think, again, that the intro scene at the church must've been the night before and that he usually comes home from his superhero exploits in such rough shape. Next day while having lunch with his law partner (John Favreau), he meets a pretty girl, Elektra, as played by Jennifer Garner. Kate Beckinsale may set my loins aflame, but Jennifer Garner superheats them into a radioactive plasma that must not be looked upon directly for fear of burning out every last rod and cone. They get to know each other in one of those harmless fights that doubles as foreplay, where they pretend they're not holding back but you know they're not going to hurt each other. They have some fun on the see saw but leave a lot of playground equipment unbattled-upon. Garner is one of the only things about this movie that is consistently even half as good as it should be. She's got the toughness, sexiness and vulnerability carried over from her role on Alias, though she doesn't have to be as smart and resourceful. She's stunningly beautiful, believable as an avenger, and only much stumbles during a very silly scene (featuring the big breakout hit from Evanescence, though at least we don't see her turning on the stereo) where she trains for her fight by slashing bags of sand hanging by ropes. Almost forty minutes into the movie, we meet the first of two villains, the Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan). The casting of a black man as the Kingpin has caused a minor ruckus in some fanboyish circles, but I don't see much of a problem - would they rather have seen a man with hair in the role? A short, skinny man? A man who wears tacky shirts? The makers of Daredevil cast a big, bald, impeccably tailored black man - no nipples on his costume, no nu-metal theme song, no one-liners with innuendo so transparent third-graders are rolling their eyes at them (well, maybe "How's your daughter?"). In a movie which casts Ben Affleck as its lead, why would anybody complain about a black man playing a traditionally white role? Apparently a number of white wrestlers screen-tested for the role - I'm not surprised that none of them worked out. Duncan has the massive, intimidating presence augmented by a smidgen of acting chops, which most pro wrestlers can't do beyond a glare. My biggest problem with Kingpin is that, despite lacking any superpowers, he can still throw grown men across a room with one arm. That first scene of his is pretty basic stuff, though - one of those archetypal "I want out"/"Nobody just gets out" scenes which barely scratches on what Elektra's dad wants out of; his role in the Kingpin's enterprise is left vague, as are the circumstances of the demise of Elekra's mom, mentioned once and forgotten. Then we meet the second of the two villains, Bullseye, played by Colin Farrell just before he became It Boy 2003. Adorned by a bullseye symbol seemingly carved into his forehead (bet that starts to stink if he doesn't clean it out with Q-tips, eeeeew), Bullseye can throw and catch objects with perfect and deadly accuracy. His first scene has him killing a man with safety pins; his second, an old lady with a peanut. Farrell plays it pretty far over the top, even crossing his eyes a little, and if it's juvenile and silly that his ultimate vendetta against Daredevil is because he made him miss for like the first time in his life, then I suppose it's not exactly out of character. Back in America, Matt and Elektra share a tender PG-13 love scene - even though I guess they're a real-life couple now, the two of them don't generate much heat, and it sounds way too much like a line when he says "You are so beautiful". It's short on visuals and eroticism, but at least tries to portray sex's tactile side, a bit, as much as an otherwise violent PG-13 movie can get away with anyway. So then Matt goes to a formal ball, at which Elektra, her dad, and the Kingpin are all in attendance. Favreau wants to court Kingpin as a client who might pay in something better than fish; Matt discourages this, saying "we only handle clients who are innocent". Kingpin says his last goodbyes to Elektra's dad, who heads home with his daughter and is caught in an assassination attempt from Bullseye, to be interrupted by Daredevil. When exactly did Matt have time to change into the red leather? They don't seriously expect me to believe he was wearing his Daredevil suit under the tux, do they? Superman and Spider-Man can get away with that, they wear Spandex. Not Daredevil. Phew! We're about 60% of the way into the movie now and FINALLY some hero-villain conflicts come about, though at this point the movie stops being absurd and becomes merely routine. Kingpin and Bullseye discuss, "How do you kill a man without fear?" Anyone else think that's a really dumb question? They conclude, "By putting the fear in him" - which, combined with Matt's established fear (becoming as evil as the villains he fights), suggests a more promising remainder of the movie, but that is not to be. There's a misunderstanding, three-way not-quite-superhero fight, a death, then FINALLY Daredevil bleeding in that church, three quarters of the way through the movie, and a climactic mano-a-mano showdown with a predetermined outcome. Many of these problems could have gone away with more coherent editing. I constantly felt like there was stuff missing from this movie, to explain people and situations which otherwise seem to defy explanation. But editing can't explain a lot of the problems that are left, like the obvious Spider-Man ripoff part where Daredevil acrobatically dodges thrown glass, Bullseye's talking-villain fate, and what essentially amounts to cheating at the end, where a dead character (we watched this character's heart stop) apparently survives for no better reason than to secure a second movie, or maybe to appease test audiences. The movie's dark look is terrific though, the action scenes are slick and flashy and don't look all that augmented by CGI (even if they are), and the nighttime locations are atmospheric, even if the daytime locations are dull as tap water. No sequel seems to be forthcoming (phew!) but Garner's Elektra lives on, in an upcoming movie one hopes can suck less than this but I'd watch her in just about anything (I even sat through 13 Going On 30). This movie was the first indication to my brother-in-law should stop buying movies he hasn't seen. Once Upon A Time In Mexico should've been the last straw, but it wasn't. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE