I have always been a Marvel Comics reader, but when I was a kid, the blind superhero Daredevil, “the Man Without Fear,” was not a character I ever paid much attention to. I would see him pop up in crossovers here and there, but nothing about him ever really grabbed me. My favorite hero was Ghost Rider, and when his title wrapped up in early 1998 (after declining in quality for a couple of years), I was ready to step away from comic collecting for a little while... and then came news that made sure I would remain a collector. Marvel announced that Kevin Smith, one of my favorite filmmakers and the person who has brought more hours of entertainment to my life than any other, was going to be writing an eight-issue story arc for Daredevil. I bought every issue as it hit store shelves – and over the course of those eight issues, Kevin Smith made me fall in love with the Daredevil character. He moved on from the title, but I stayed subscribed and also started buying any Daredevil crossovers that came along, as well as back issues. As an aspiring filmmaker, I would soon be making the daydreamy statement that, “If I ever had the chance to direct a superhero movie, my top two choices would be Ghost Rider and Daredevil.”
The Marvel adaptation Blade had done well in 1998. X-Men was a hit in 2000. Spider-Man was an even bigger blockbuster in Spider-Man. And these successes paved the way for a Daredevil movie to reach theatres in 2003, just a few years after I had become interested in the character. Kevin Smith even makes a cameo in the movie, playing a coroner.
This was back in the days before Marvel Studios was created, when Marvel adaptations would be made by different studios. Blade was at New Line Cinema, Spider-Man was at Sony, and X-Men was at Fox, the company that also had the films rights to the Fantastic Four... and to Daredevil. And this was also back in the days when studios were a bit uncertain on how to approach comic book adaptations, as they thought that comic-accurate costumes would look embarrassing on the screen. This is why Fox put the X-Men in black leather costumes, and why they had trouble figuring out what Daredevil should look like. Surely he couldn’t just wear the same red costume he had been wearing in comics since he was introduced in the 1960s. An executive even suggested that he should just wear a red hoodie. But thankfully, the costume ended up being reasonably close to what can be seen in the source material, just with a bit of a leather biker outfit edge to it.
Adventures in Babysitting and Home Alone director Chris Columbus had been attached to the Daredevil adaptation for a few years as it bounced from studio to studio, but when it came time for it to receive the greenlight from Fox, it ended up in the hands of an unexpected writer/director: Mark Steven Johnson, who was known at that point for writing comedies (including Grumpy Old Men, a movie I have always loved). His only previous directorial effort was the family drama Simon Birch. Not something that would point to Johnson being the ideal choice to handle a potential action blockbuster. What Johnson had going for him was the fact that he was a huge fan of the comic books. He knew his Daredevil... and while he has gone on to say that his biggest failing when making this movie was that he was too much of a fan and held the comics too dear, I would say his failings are a propensity for cheesy humor and a misstep in the early presentation of the title character. There’s also an overuse of needle drop songs, but that was actually do the film’s benefit because the soundtrack, which includes bands like The Calling, Evanescence, Fuel, Nickelback, and even a touch of Rob Zombie proved to be quite popular. Overall, I really don’t think Johnson did much failing on this movie. Daredevil doesn’t have a great reputation, but I have always found it to be well-made and entertaining.
The idea was that this would be "more character-driven, darker, edgier” than the average superhero movie, which is absolutely the correct approach to take to Daredevil. The film begins with the character falling into a Catholic church – again, very fitting for this guy – after being beaten up, looking to be on the edge of death. His life flashes before his eyes... and for an extended period, Johnson shows us the character’s origin story. As a child, Matt Murdock (played in flashbacks by Scott Terra) was the bullied son of a washed-up boxer, Jack Murdock (David Keith), who warned the nickname “The Devil” when a sports writer said he fought like the devil. Jack, who encourages his son to become a doctor a lawyer, claims to be a dock worker – but he’s actually making money by roughing people up for mobster Eddie Fallon (Mark Margolis). Immediately after making this shocking discovery about his father, Matt is blinded in an accident when a forklift hits a barrel of biohazard chemicals, which then splash him in the face. This is a bit different from the comic book, where Matt was blinded when a canister of chemicals fell off a truck while Matt was saving an old man from stepping into the truck’s path – but the comic origin does get a nod soon after when we see young Matt keeping an old man, played by Daredevil co-creator Stan Lee, from stepping into traffic.
Matt is able to do this because the chemicals that blinded him have also left him with a sort of sonar vision / radar sense, since his four other senses now function with a superhuman sharpness. With these enhanced senses, he can still sort of see the world around him – and this movie has what I find to be the perfect cinematic representation of Matt’s radar sense. This should have been retained for the version of Daredevil that now exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because it’s awesome.
Matt rebounds from the accident, trains himself to get around with great agility, and learns to fight, standing up to his bullies. But his dad has been up to shady business, so there are more bad things ahead. Fallon has been fixing the boxing fights. He wants Jack to take a fall. And when Jack wins the fight instead, the mobster has him beaten to death.
Jump ahead to present day. Matt has indeed become a lawyer, with an office in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan. (Ellen Pompeo makes a quick appearance as secretary Karen Page.) The adult version of Matt Murdock is played by Ben Affleck, a longtime fan of Daredevil who even wrote the introduction to Kevin Smith’s Guardian Devil story arc when it was collected together in one book. I have been a fan of Affleck since Dazed and Confused and Mallrats, so I have always been rooting for him. He does a fine job handling both the dramatic and humorous material he was given to work with here, although he does have an inherent goofiness to him that occasionally makes Johnson’s cheesy moments feel even cheesier. Still, being muscular and 6’3”, Affleck can look like a regular guy in suits and everyday clothes, then sometimes appear to be a total beast when he’s in superhero mode, which is something we’d see again years later when he played Bruce Wayne and Batman in the DCEU movies.
Matt’s senses are so enhanced, he can even tell when someone is lying by the way their body reacts to telling the lie. So he knows when someone is innocent and when they’re guilty, and he only works with the innocent – even if they can’t pay. Something that causes some frustration for his legal partner Franklin "Foggy" Nelson (Jon Favreau), who would rather get paid in cash.
But Matt doesn’t just fight crime in the courtroom. Drawing inspiration from his father’s boxing persona, he spends his night fighting crime as the costumed vigilante known as Daredevil. We see this after a scumbag called Quesada (Paul Ben-Victor) gets acquitted of assault charges even though he was guilty. Matt has to watch Quesada walk away from the court during the day, but that night he tracks the criminal down to a bar, kicking off an action sequence that ends in the subway, where Quesada is knocked on to the tracks. And Matt / Daredevil lets him get run over by an oncoming train. This is my one big issue with the film. Daredevil is not a killer. He shouldn’t be portrayed as a killer. But Johnson decided to have him start off as a killer and come to the decision over the course of the film that he shouldn’t be an executioner. The movie should have just had him in that mindset from the start. At least Johnson doesn’t have him massacring bad guys in the style of The Punisher – you know, the character Daredevil has serious issues with because he chooses to kill people – but the Quesada / train scene never should have been in there.
Newspaper investigative journalist Ben Urich (Joe Pantoliano) has taken notice that there seems to be a vigilante at work in New York City – and he also suspects that there’s some kind of criminal kingpin operating in the city. He’s right on both subjects. The Kingpin is businessman Wilson Fisk, and at the time there was some online objection to the fact that Michael Clarke Duncan was cast as this character simply because he had a different skin color than the character has in the comics. Fans would provide a list of overweight white actors who could have gotten the job, overlooking the fact that the Kingpin is not simply overweight. He is not out of shape. There’s a lot of muscle in there. He is incredibly strong and a skilled fighter. My introduction to the character was in the pages of Ghost Rider #1 in 1990, where he’s shown taking down a team of armed martial arts masters as a simple exercise. That’s not a job for any random plus size actor. Duncan, at 6’5”, 315 pounds, muscular, and trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu was a great choice for the Kingpin regardless of skin color, and he did a terrific job bringing the character to life.
The Kingpin is associated with Nikolas Natchios (Erick Avari) – and with Natchios pulling out of their arrangement at the same time that newspapers are taking notice of his criminal activities, Fisk calls in an assassin called Bullseye (Colin Farrell) to kill Natichios, who will be posthumously be framed as the Kingpin. While Daredevil got a costume that’s reasonably close to the comics, Bullseye did not. There’s not much of a costume here; he just wears an alligator skin trenchcoat and has a bullseye carved into his forehead. He looks cool, though, and Farrell clearly had fun going over-the-top and chewing the scenery while playing the character. He even got to keep his own Irish accent for this one.
In the final days of Natchios’s life, Matt meets and starts to pursue a relationship with the man’s daughter, Elektra (Jennifer Garner). Their “meet cute” involves a playful demonstration of fighting skills on a playground, which is often pointed out as being the cheesiest low point of the movie. And it is very silly... but we shouldn’t focus so much on what Johnson did wrong when he also did so many things right – like showing how difficult Matt’s life as a hero is. He gets beaten up, his body is sore and scarred, he loses tooth and pops painkillers. His personal life isn’t great, either. Before he meets Elektra, his previous love interest dumps him on his answering machine. His senses are so enhanced, he has to sleep in a sensory deprivation chamber, which wasn’t something from the comics but does make sense. He has to shut out the world, and sometimes even ignore crimes, so he can get rest.
Matt and Elektra’s romance is complicated when Daredevil fails to stop Bullseye from killing her father and the assassin, whose gimmick is his ability to use objects as lethal projectiles, even kills Mr. Natchios with one of Daredevil’s own billy clubs. So Elektra blames the wrong guy for the murder and decides to use her martial arts skills and a pair of sais to get revenge (and Garner learned how to handle those sais in a very impressive way). Bullseye also wants to kill Daredevil for giving him trouble. So Daredevil has to deal with two people with skills comparable to his own coming after him while he works on bringing down the Kingpin. It’s a solid story for an introductory Daredevil film that works as a standalone but also contains set-ups for potential sequels that, unfortunately, never got made.
There are two versions of Daredevil available. The theatrical cut is 103 minutes and moves along at a faster pace so it can get to the action, while the director’s cut adds about 30 minutes to the film, allowing the story to have more depth and including subplots that expand the effort to find out who the Kingpin is and bring him to justice. The theatrical cut is good if you just want to see the exciting stuff, but the director’s cut is a better movie.
We have gotten bigger and better superhero movies than Daredevil, but we have also seen some that are much worse. For a film that was made at a time when studios were just starting to get interested in the superhero world and still hadn’t fully cracked the formula, Daredevil is a strong achievement. Sure, it has cheesy moments and there were some questionable decisions, but it also has some great moments – and given that a good portion of the worse movies we’ve gotten actually came from this movie’s home studio of Fox, it’s even more of an achievement that this one managed to be as good as it is.
I liked Daredevil when it was released and continue to enjoy it more than twenty years down the line. This fan was mostly satisfied with what the movie had to show. I was left hoping to see sequels and was disappointed that they never happened.
Given that I used to say, “If I ever had the chance to direct a superhero movie, my top two choices would be Ghost Rider and Daredevil,” it’s a hell of a coincidence that Mark Steven Johnson went on to make a Ghost Rider movie after making Daredevil – but that’s something to cover in a different write-up.
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