Daredevil | Review

Newest Superhero suffers from same recycled format.

So how does the director of Simon Birch get to helm this project? You read the comic books all your life and then mull over the produces to give you a chance to make a film about probably the least well-known of the Marvel comic book characters. In the feature, director Mark Steven Johnson attempts to bring the all the components of Frank Miller’s noir comic book series, but the tones are inadequately these emphasized.

Like most, I suspect Daredevil was not a part of my regular reads as a child, so I had some things to learn, but instead comes across as your regular, heavy action superhero flick starting off with the traditional story of the origin of the character, telling us why he is strong, why he is weak, who is his love interest, who are his enemies and ending the final confrontation and typical ‘unmasking’ of the truth. Matt Murdoch (Ben Affleck-The Sum of all Fears) is perhaps one of the more interesting characters from the mind of creator Stan Lee because of his vigilante ways when night approaches and by the simple fact that the dude is…blind. Johnson aptly explores the character’s highly developed sensory system with and presents us with the some cool cold-fusion visual effects and busts our eardrums with some high-pitched unfriendly decibel-level sounds that get us into the character’s mind. However, since most kids today are more into reading instructional manuals to Nintendo games than comic-book reading makes us sit through this annoying back-story with an unnecessary narration by the annoying Affleck giving us the details about the “dare” and “devil” in his name and the red in his suit. Thankfully, his law-partner “Foggy” (Jon Fauvreau-Made) provides a couple of one-liners of comic relief, though he gets annoying with his alligator in the sewers shtick, and then there is the red-hot presence of a Jennifer Garner (Catch Me If You Can) as Elektra-the love interest and crime-fighting sidekick. With some sets that look like a Motley-Crue video we have the latex heroes fighting it out with the likes of ho-hum character of Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan-Planet of the Apes), the crazy Bullseye (Colin Farrell-The Recruit).

It’s a shame that this really complex character wasn’t portrayed under a darker persona; I would have preferred seeing Daredevil’s likeliness to his humanlike features rather than the caricatured rendition of the common superhero, however Johnson’s strong point in to visually explore his ‘handicap’. The first encounter of the daylight versions of Elektra and double-d might be a cute but the I had trouble understanding that the two don’t question one another’s skills after this big Nadia Comaneci gymnastics kung-fu fighting display. In all, Affleck is far from being the best choice for the role and he can thank costume designer Jim Acheson who made the webslingers uniform for making him somewhat passable on the screen. The Man without Fear shows his battle scares to us before he submerges himself into a goodnights rest in a coffin-like apparatus filled with some h20, but when he gets an artery puncture type of wound the believability factor is thrown in favor for the ultimate showdown sequence. Steven Johnson ultimately has trouble balancing the act of character’s back-story with the rest of the plot with the end result of an unchallenging story about a challenging character. Filled with the far-fetched moments, tacky one-liners and a couple burst out laughing moments this fails to paint a portrait of the hell in Hell’s Kitchen.

Walking into the screening of this picture I didn’t expect much and neither should you. Justice isn’t served with this piece, so if I were you I’d pass on this one and wait for X-Men 2 and Ang Lee’s The Hulk.

Rating 0.5 stars