Deviled Hams
“A man without fear is a man without hope.” When a priest delivers that cruelly illogical line to Ben Affleck’s costumed avenger, it mostly just feels like the hopeless man is the one who sees Daredevil.
From its first moments, Daredevil begs to be taken seriously. An injured Affleck lies semiconscious on the altar of a Catholic church — wearing a horned red cowl and a three-color-panel-vintage comic-hero costume. (The outfit’s art deco-inspired lines are cool; its resemblance to a Chevy Monte Carlo’s interior vinyl is not.) It’s clear we’re joining him midfight. It’s clear we’re in for a flashback.
Affleck is Matt Murdock, a Hell’s Kitchen lawyer who, as a child, was blinded by spilled chemicals. The accident sharpened his remaining senses — including, apparently, the superhuman ability to receive medical care without insurance — and brought him closer to his father, a dockworker and failed prizefighter under the thumb of organized crime. Not just because the senior Murdock is played by David Keith do we know he’s doomed. When nascent crime lord Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan) kills Matt’s father, the blind boy swears revenge — and goes to law school.
Less developed is Matt’s — and the filmmakers’ — common sense. You’d think someone whose hearing is so acute that he must sleep immersed in a water-filled isolation tank would consider moving out of New York City. Or that your friendly neighborhood revenge seeker would simply wait for his target to leave a crowded underworld bar rather than engage a roomful of felons. Or that, less than a year after Spider-Man, a Marvel Comics-based movie would try to establish its own identity rather than emulate Sam Raimi’s CGI bombardment and its soundtrack of MTV leftovers.
But Daredevil can go one place Spider-Man couldn’t — the bedroom. Affleck’s first encounter with Jennifer Garner — a scene in which Garner, spooked at being followed by a handsome blind man, tries to beat him senseless — struggles to establish the adversarial romance of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It comes closer to Kate and Leopold. The pouty, pushed-up daughter of a Kingpin-connected billionaire, it’s no wonder she doesn’t want Matt to know her name is Elektra. What if he’s a Freudian analyst? Because a gentleman always tells a lady not to pull her punches, and because a lady swoons when allowed to give in to a man she has almost maimed, the pair are soon seminude in the most embarrassing love scene since the Neil Diamond Jazz Singer remake.
Kingpin knows that the best way to rub out an enemy is to hire Irish rough trade, so leather-clad assassin Bullseye (a bald, googly-eyed Colin Farrell) is imported to dispatch Elektra’s father. On the plane, Bullseye sends a ricocheting peanut down the windpipe of a gabby elderly woman next to him, killing her (so much for airport security and customs). It’s a poor negotiator who accepts a contract from someone called Kingpin but doesn’t insist on flying first class.
Director Mark Steven Johnson (Jack Frost) was previously unkind to the aged as the writer of Grumpy Old Men. Here, he turns up the portent to Crow-like levels, using slow motion to indulge both tired visual motifs (roses, blood, rain) and exhausted trendiness (Spider-Man acrobatics, Matrix kung fu). Worse, he stages a black-tie ball on a Wednesday night and pipes in Muzak.
Vin Diesel reportedly once topped the list of potential Daredevils. The relatively patrician Affleck conveys little here that even a limited side of beef like Diesel couldn’t. It would have been a familiar crew for Diesel, too. Cinematographer Ericson Core shot The Fast and the Furious, and second-unit director Alexander Witt helmed XXX‘s action sequences. Daredevil is even less personal visually than those computer-built movies.
Slower and narrower, Daredevil is also thrown off pace by grisliness that’s mistakenly played for laughs. Affleck’s droning voiceover, all windy solemnity, is more at odds with the movie’s smug sadism than with Farrell’s leering character. Johnson’s characters slash and stab, but his edge as a tragedian is dull.
The only overinflated thing in Daredevil that works is poor, puffy Swingers writer Jon Favreau, whose punch lines as Affleck’s de rigueur sidekick are, one suspects, ad libbed. If Daredevil earns Favreau more clout than his gig hosting the cheerfully raucous Independent Film Channel show Dinner for Five, he should make sure his spit take in the sequel is CGI. He’s the only man without fear in this hopeless movie.
