Daredevil
TV Series Creator:
Drew Goddard
Showrunner: Steven
S. DeKnight
Starring: Charlie
Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vondie
Curtis-Hall
Rating: Three and a
Half Stars Out of Five
All 13 episodes of
season one are available to stream on Netflix.
Matt Murdock's
father, Battlin' Jack Murdock, was a boxer. He wasn't a very good
one. He won a fair share of his bouts, lost more. But, as Matt puts
it, he was good at taking a beating. It was his secret weapon. It's
called the rope-a-dope. It allowed Battlin' Jack, when successful, to
trick his opponents into a false sense of security in their
superiority, only to pull the rug out from under them and knock them
out after they give him an opening.
Daredevil
would like to think it pulls off a rope-a-dope on its viewers, but
like Battlin' Jack, it is not entirely able to succeed. It manages to
evoke several themes, from the guilt of Catholicism to the hidden
maliciousness of savior complexes the inherent tension between the
swift justice of passion and the careful jurisprudence and fact
gathering. It sets up scenarios to make the viewer think it's leaning
the wrong direction, the less heroic direction, only to slide over to
the other side by the time it's done. But it doesn't entirely do
that, and when it does, it does it in a clunky manner.
Take
Matt Murdock's (Charlie Cox) Catholicism. The show begins with the
blind, super-powered protagonist giving a confession of sorts to the
priest at his local church. But he has nothing to confess. He only
has exposition about his father to give, and parts with a request to
receive forgiveness for what he is “about to do,” namely, put on
a ninja costume and beat up a bunch of thugs and criminal developers
that are ruining his neighborhood, New York's Hell's Kitchen. It's a
longing for permission, not actual forgiveness. Putting aside that's
not how confessions work, it displays a deeper misunderstanding of
the character's faith. It is ingrained in the furthest corners of
Matt's being, a struggle between what he wants – to hurt people for
their transgressions – and what should be
done – build a case against these powerful people and bring them
down through a rational, civilized system.
That
is what makes his unique background so riveting in the Marvel Comics
stories that share the Netflix show's name. He's a lawyer by day,
masked vigilante by night. More specifically, he's a bleeding heart
ACLU-style attorney and a hyper violent avenger going much further
than even the most fascist, don't-break-the-rules power fantasies
would. He can't choose between the warring sides of himself, so he
does both, often with disastrous results. But for the first half of
the show, he is absolutely the angel of punishment, utilizing tactics
that would make Death Wish's
Paul Kersey squirm. He tosses small time crooks off buildings,
collapses tracheas with lengths of chain, and generally shows no
mercy. It is only later that the show (rather unconvincingly)
explains he didn't kill these people – they're badly wounded but
not dead. These belated explanations don't hold much water because in
the moment these acts are committed, the staging and performances are
meant to imbue a sense of shock and malicious intent. It's supposed
to be a break from the rest of Marvel's wildly popular Cinematic
Universe – you'll recognize Iron Man
and the rest of the Avengers crew
from your cinema screens throughout the last several years. Daredevil
ain't your daddy's Avenger, no sir. He's full of rage, an unbalanced,
vengeful orphan, and he's going to make the bad guys pay as harshly
as he can.
But
oh, they're okay in the end. It feels like a market correction, a
decision made halfway through development to soften the character's
image, make him more palatable to an audience accustomed to more
heroic heroes. When he explains that he was fully aware of a dumpster
to break a fall or that he knew just when to stop before killing
other men, it rings false because we don't get the internal struggle
until much later.
In the
early going, the moments that could be used to make us feel Matt's
reluctance to go over the top are instead spent with character
building on henchmen who don't end up mattering much to the story
beyond some expository stepping stones to the main villain, Wilson
Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio). There are a pair of Russian gangster
brothers we learn a ton about, like their time in a gulag and a
subtextual icky relationship between them that might go beyond
regular brotherly love. They look like major players, but nope. A
quick double cross and some fist fighting lead to Daredevil getting a
piece of information on Fisk and we forget all about the Russian
dudes.
These
are some of the stops of the early part of Daredevil.
The starts are fewer, but they're more spectacular. The action, for
one, is the right kind of departure from the universe the show
shares. Leaving out the “PG-16” rating producers hinted at with
copious amounts of blood and swearing, the act of fighting is
different in this show than in, say, Thor. People
don't look like they're connected to wires, with the unnatural
physics that creates, to say nothing of the reliance on CGI in the
movie side of the Marvel enterprise. Daredevil, when in action, whips
around like a precision-minded rag doll. He has a Judo style, with
lots of flipping and momentum shifting to create a large amount of
torque. This is helpful as Cox is slight of frame in comparison to
the battle-tested thugs he slugs it out with. With the loosened
restrictions on blood offered by the non-broadcast Netflix television
model, we get to see the literal impacts of Daredevil's fighting
prowess, measured in the nearly caved in heads of his adversaries.
These guys don't look like they'll ever fully recover, if they wake
up at all.
The
various directors behind Daredevil's
look utilize a much different cinematic toolbox than their
moviemaking brethren. They understand the power of the presentational
style, and restrain themselves from injecting the camera into these
sequences like an unwanted extra character. In the much ballyhooed
hallway fight that ends episode two, Daredevil invades a human
trafficking ring's lair and the camera merely turns around as a fight
ensues, with no obvious cuts – CGI is used to piece this intricate
choreography into a cohesive, “unbroken” moment. Similarly, but
more impressively, is a sequence a little down the line, which
showcases deep focused background moments from the vantage point of a
car. The camera slowly swivels from the car's interior as we witness
the vigilante destroying a small army of men outside, all while a
different blind man sits in the back seat, blissfully unaware of the
carnage around him – sightlessness is a bit of a theme with this
“justice is blind” character, in case you can't tell. All of this
takes place in a deep green, yellow, and brown world. It's harsh,
it's dark. It is not inviting. At first (unpleasant) glance, you
wouldn't want to spend any time there, but if you squint, or in
Matt's case, don't see it at all, you can understand how this place
can feel oddly homey.
Matt's
supporting cast isn't so bad, either. We have Foggy Nelson (Elden
Henson), Matt's best friend and law partner, the more well adjusted
of the duo. He's a wiseacre, a bit of a doofus, a grounding force,
and fiercely dedicated to the letter of the law and its ability to
even the playing field for society's less powerful. We have Karen
Page (Deborah Ann Woll), the fledgling law office's
secretary-clerk-investigator (she's the only employee and a major
plot driver, so she has to wear a lot of hats), whose tenacity gets
her in as much trouble as it helps the firm – her can-do spirit
helps her overcome the initial damsel-in-distress role she's tasked
with. And there's Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall), a hard-nosed
reporter at a local paper with a lovable gruffness if not,
unfortunately, an overly useful role – he's more of a reiteration
device, investigating things that are not mysteries for the audience
or Daredevil. But again, likeable presences all around.
The
powerhouse performance, however, is reserved for D'Onofrio's Fisk. As
the up-and-coming Kingpin of Crime, one might not expect Fisk to be
so reserved. But he's painfully shy. Everything he says requires
extreme exertion. It looks like it hurts him to make eye contact.
Simply going out in public, as his role later requires of him, would
be enough to make his therapist applaud his progress. He's a filthy
rich man looking to gentrify the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood,
cleaning up the slumlike area for the good of the people. He sees no
problem with utilizing illegal methods and strong arm tactics to push
out the sullied poor who make the area their home. But his
utilitarian end goal is what makes him so compelling. The
neighborhood, as depicted, is a piece of trash. Buildings are falling
down, low level mafia members run the streets, and the local bar
looks like something out of The Road Warrior.
It's a depressed location that could use some sprucing up. And Fisk
sees himself as the man to fix the problem.
Once
Fisk comes front and center during the middle portion of Daredevil
season one, things start to
improve rapidly. This is when Matt's character, and conflicting
motivations, begin to click. We get some stakes in the form of the
enormity of Fisk's criminal enterprise and the low, low levels he
will go to in order to achieve his goals. And the tension between
these two extremely violent men and their contradicting notions of
being the only man able to fix everyone's problems – something that
is obviously impossible for either – is rich.
Daredevil almost
makes it. It comes very close to overcoming its clumsy opening
chapters. It could stand to lose an episode or three, or at least a
couple red herring backstories in order to focus on the people who
matter in this story. Like its protagonist, though, Daredevil
is a show that is better at
knocking 'em down than setting 'em up. Maybe, in that process,
though, the knockdown will provide the setup for season two.
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