Dare you watch? (Daredevil (DVD))

Member Name: Wolfzilla

Product:	Daredevil (DVD)
Date:	27/01/09 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some decent performances

Disadvantages: characters, plot, soundtrack, fights, BORING

Released in 2003, in what was probably an attempt to cash in on the success of Marvel's recent Big-Screen adaptations X-Men and Spiderman, Daredevil was met with decent success financially, but didn't quite strike the same chord with viewers or reviewers as the prior Marvel movies did. Some put that down to a lack of familiarity with the character - your average member of general public is lucky to have heard of Daredevil, some might have remembered him from a guest appearance in the Spiderman cartoon but otherwise he's had little to no exposure outwith the medium of comics. In hindsight this excuse was a bit naïve, I'm willing to bet ¾ of Sin City's audience had never heard of its source material.

Daredevil follows Matt Murdock(Ben Affleck), Matt's childhood wasn't the best, he lost his boxer father when he was offed for refusing to take a dive and the boy was blinded in a freak incident involving a truck of toxic waste. However, Matt's other senses were supercharged when he was blinded, and he has devoted his life to fighting crime in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York city, both by night as the vigilante Daredevil, and by day as a lawyer.

The movie follows him as he falls in love with Elektra Natchios(Jennifer Garner), the daughter of corrupt businessman Nikolas(Erick Avari), who is in league with Wilson Fisk(Michael Clarke Duncan), known to all as 'The Kingpin' of New York crime.

When Natchios tells the Kingpin he wants out of their business ventures, he calls in an Irish assassin named Bullseye(Colin Farrell) to take care of the entire Natchios family. Daredevil tries to stop him, but Elektra ends up believing that Daredevil killed her father, and goes into training to kill him.
Things heat up on the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen as Daredevil tries to bring down Bullseye and the Kingpin, Bullseye tries to finish his job and Elektra tries to kill the man she believes killed her father, unknown to her he is the man she loves...

So the story write-up is pretty short, but it essentially covers the entire movie. The plot is very, very standard, especially for a super hero movie, with the plot not offering anything even remotely noteworthy. Everything here has been done before in more inventive, and generally more interesting ways, from the love/hate relationship of the two costumed ones (see: Batman Returns, and this was also planned for Spiderman 2) to the whole self-questioning angle done in every superhero movie ever, you have seen everything here before, but done with that little bit more class, skill and general likeability.

The plot's main fault is that it's just boring, something no comic movie ever should be. They've tried to take the Batman route and make things dark and gothic, not things I associated with Daredevil, and it just seems rather silly and forced to try and ensure Spiderman didn't totally show it up.
It's also littered with annoying holes, such as how a reporter came to the conclusion, without ever seeing either one, that Matt Murdock and Daredevil were one and the same.

Along with their X-Men movies, Daredevil carries on Fox's obsession with outfitting super heroes in leather outfits. While I suppose it's better than lycra in terms of practicality, I half wish they had got the Spiderman rights, to see if they made him up like a gimp.

This wouldn't be so bad, the X-Men suits worked pretty well, but Daredevil's design just plain sucks. Daredevil had a pretty plain costume to begin with (actually he has had 3,a mostly yellow one with a red torso, a sleeker black and red number and the all red outfit used here) and to try and make it more interesting, they have added lots of straps and buckles and stuff that just makes it look more like fetish gear. the mask is also poor, instead of a cowl covering the neck like in Batman, DD's just covers the top of his head making it look a bit like a daft bandana. I would have thought the black and red outfit would have been easier, and cooler to realise on the big screen, but I guess it isn't as recognisable. Although one ridiculous aspect of Daredevil's leather reworking begs to be mentioned:

Matt's hearing is supersonic right?(in one of the movie's coolest little things, he sleeps with his ears submerged in water to drown out the sounds of the city), but he wears a leather suit. Leather, the loudest material when moving on the planet, he must be in agony every time he moves a muscle.

I would be lying if I said the plot was total garbage. It occasionally throws in some little gems of decency that get your hopes up. Along with the aforementioned alternate take on a waterbed, Matt also has to pop painkillers after a night's work, which reveals a true human side. The scenes of him explaining to Elektra how he can gain a semblance of sight when water hits a surface, and he asks her to stand in the rain, is also a wonderful little scene, but then the fine folks behind the film completely undo all their good work by having ludicrous scenes of Daredevil writing the 'DD' logo in lighter fluid on the floor, waiting for someone to throw a cigarette on it to ignite it and reveal it's his work. This just disgusted me with it's stupidity, and it's never explained who coined the name 'Daredevil' to begin with, has he always called himself that? Then how did the press get his name? couldn't he have picked something cooler?

Even in my comic reading days, I never picked up more than 2 issues of Daredevil, so I can't say how much characters have been altered, if at all, from their printed counterparts in most cases. I don't think Bullseye was Irish, and I know for a fact the Kingpin wasn't black, but far as I can say honestly, I don't know how much else has changed. I hear that Daredevil killing villains is totally out of character, but I'm not picking up the comic just for the purpose of this review to find out, although one thing I do know is that DD is not Spiderman, and therefore should not be able to pull off some of the stuff he is doing in terms of gymnastics. Sure he is meant to be at the peak of physical condition, but really, be serious here.

Indeed, a lot has been made of the whole black Kingpin, and to be honest, Im not sure which side I fall into. I wasn't overly bothered, because I didn't even know Kingpin had anything to do with Daredevil, I always saw him as primarily a Spiderman foe, but I wasn't really impressed with the way the character was written anyway. While the Kingpin was pretty generic to begin with, this version of him tries to break the mold and just ends up a clichéd mess leaving roses on his victims.

Funnily enough, the acting is actually of a pretty high standard, if not really right character wise. I'm by no means an Affleck fan, and I'm not sure I believe his claims he is a huge fan of the comic, but I really did feel for him here, he did seem to be trying, and put in a decent show, but I just couldn't buy him as Daredevil. He just didn't seem to suit the role at all, which, as I say, is a shame because he actually does seem to put a lot in it, and he is one of the reasons the aforementioned rain scene works so well.

A similar case of performance good, but not really character is Clarke Duncan's Kingpin. While most people complained about his skin colour, and those on the defence cited the fact that he puts in a good performance as a villain, what they seem to neglect is that a good villain he plays, but he isn't the Kingpin, although the horrible writing job on the character saw to it that not even a real life version of the Kingpin could have played him well here.

Farrell takes what is a pretty worthless role in that of Bullseye and makes it memorable, amusing, and one of the movie's highlights, the film also sports a good supporting cast including Jon Favreau as Matt's friend Foggy Nelson, but I'm not at all a fan of Jennifer Garner as Elektra. Garner is most famous for her TV show Alias, and how her pathetic and emotionless performance as Elektra earned a spin-off movie I'll never know. She also isn't all that attractive, sorry to break it to you.

The movie tried to pass itself of as an action movie with Martial Arts overtones, which roughly translates to lots of fights done with wire-fu. They even got in Tsuyoshi Abe, a B-Movie martial arts fight choreographer, to do the fights. The stunt crew includes names like Kane Hodder and Nils Allen Stewart, but at the end of the day, the action scenes are boring, unoriginal, and just a waste of time. No fight captured my interest in the least, and this is the epitome of why wire-fu should never have taken off, the fights do nothing spectacular, and yet aren't at all realistic, meaning you have a middle of the road, boring level of quality.
The special effects...well they aren't that bad. The constant CGI looks very bad in some scenes, but good in others. The DD 'Sonar' effect is well realised though, and pretty cool at that.

The less said about the music, the better, I can assure you. Instead of taking the sensible route to a good super hero soundtrack (ie handing Danny Elfman your cash), Fox decided to take the other route and aim for the 'yoof' culture, littering the film's soundtrack with such hateable acts as N.E.R.D, Evanescence, Hoobastank, Saliva and House of Pain. Did they really think playing the aural bile that is N.E.R.D's lapdance would build up some sort of 'street' atmosphere about the Kingpin? the bloody irritating gothic rock rubbish of Evanescence, who crop up twice (that's 5 times too much) would honestly capture the feel of a gothic city? well the fact is, it just makes this film look like an expensive advert for the soundtrack CD.

On the whole, while Im willing to accept it isn't a complete failure, I really do not see any reason why anyone would want to put money and time towards a movie like Daredevil. It's a failed attempt to cash in on Spiderman via copying Batman, and does nothing more than make you appreciate those two movies more. I hear the director's cut DVD is much better, but after witnessing the theatrical debacle, why would I want to take the chance?

Im willing to give the film a second star, mainly because it did seem that most of the cast were trying, and doing a decent job, but the characters and story they were working with was utter garbage, so they were really powerless to stop this being a turkey. Unless you are trying some sort of sadistic challenge to watch every comic book movie ever, or just the bad ones(actually that makes up about 70% of all of them anyway), then I wouldn't wish Daredevil upon you.

Summary: Daredevil is one of the worst examples of the recent slew of comic book adaptations