Release Date: February 14, 2003
Starring: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell, Jon Favreau, Joe Pantoliano
Directed by: Mark Steven Johnson
Written by: Mark Steven Johnson
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (action/violence, some sensuality)
In a typical comic book superhero movie, the audience is usually asked to engage in one main assumption. For instance, if we assume that it’s possible for a human being to gain superhuman strength and sensory awareness after being bitten by a radioactive spider, then the rest of the movie should make sense. If we assume that there was once a distant planet named Krypton whose only survivor crash-landed on Earth, then the rest of the movie should make sense. And so on. The problem with Daredevil, then, is that it asks the audience to suspend disbelief far too often for it to be a credible comic book superhero movie. Instead, this is a film content to indulge its subculture of fans with the star power of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, blissfully ignoring the rules of real life.
Comic book readers and Daredevil followers will call for my head, but think for a moment: The most memorable films of this genre are firmly grounded in reality. Even in 2000’s X-Men, the last good comic book movie prior to Daredevil, it wasn’t impossible to believe there might be mutants walking among us and at war with one another, or that there might be those in Congress who would enact fascist measures for the sake of protecting our children.
With Daredevil, however, we have a less matured vision of the world of comic books, in which the villain has no purpose except to be villainous, and the hero has a blind spot (literally) and father issues and girl troubles but deep down he’s good and noble. The New York City of Daredevil is nothing but the characters of the movie and a few NYPD flatfoots who die with the same alarming regularity as the red-shirted ensigns on "Star Trek." This fantasy-world philosophy is essentially the same thinking that was behind 1997’s ill-fated adaptation of Spawn, starring Michael Jai White, and it’s only because this movie has more star-power that it’s slightly more credible (and palatable).
Daredevil is a movie that oozes star power, almost for the sake of oozing star power. Ben Affleck has the lead as Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer by day (his sight was taken away in a chemical accident as a child) and the titular masked superhero by night (in the intervening years he’s developed a kind of sonar vision based on his fine-tuned hearing). Jennifer Garner, she of TV’s “Alias” stardom, plays Elektra, Murdock’s main squeeze. Michael Clarke Duncan is the villain, Kingpin; Joe Pantoliano is a New York Post columnist named Ben Urich; and Colin Farrell, in his most questionable role in recent memory, is Kingpin’s twitchy hit man Bullseye (in case you forget, just look at the crosshairs that seem to have been seared into his forehead).
This sterling cast of question mark characters comes together for 90 minutes in a gloomy version of Gotham as seen from the eves of skyscrapers that resembles what you would probably get if you crossed the worlds of Batman (under Tim Burton) and Spider-Man, which is promising, except that like most comic book movies nowadays, the promising parts are here and gone in the blink of an eye. More time-consuming are the movie’s numerous plot holes, like where these characters have come from and why we should bother watching them. The Daredevil franchise isn’t ingrained in American pop culture like the Batman or Superman series, so you’ll forgive me if I ask director Mark Steven Johnson (Simon Birch) for a little convincing.
In the lingo of the genre, Daredevil is technically an “origin” story, since it explains how our hero got to be in the predicament he’s in (though rather hastily -- how is it that Murdock took a barrel of toxic chemicals square in the face but only his eyes were damaged?). But this film pales in comparison to another origin superhero story, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. In the latter film, Peter Parker’s path from the voice-crackingly awkward reaches of puberty to the gravity-defying stages of early superherodom was pretty obvious; the same could be said for his archnemesis, Dr. Osborne, a.k.a. the Green Goblin. Matt Murdock’s life is a blur, and the same can be said for those around him -- Elektra, Kingpin, and Bullseye are all frighteningly underdeveloped, and not all of them make it to the final frame, either.
Certainly some of the movie’s success depends on the actors’ abilities to acquit themselves in roles that have become familiar to readers long before the movie arrived in theaters. Jack Nicholson worked wonders as the Joker in Batman, Hugh Jackman pulled it off as Wolverine in X-Men, and Tobey Maguire did it as Peter Parker in Spider-Man. Ben Affleck, however, comes up a bit short as Daredevil -- what the movie needed was an actor who was capable of remaining as cheekily affable by day and by night. When Affleck dons his superhero garb, it suddenly seems as though his walking stick/lethal weapon has more personality than he does.
Daredevil had quite a lot of work cut out for it, especially considering that our blind hero is one of the less familiar stars of Marvel Comics’ ultra-successful illustrated empire. In fact, Marvel’s recent track record may have worked against this movie. Following, as it does, rather successful adaptations of X-Men and Spider-Man, it was unlikely that the cast and crew would reach the same heights -- though, like most cult endeavors, it’s likely that fans will turn a blind eye to the movie’s weaknesses and praise it just the same.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)