All the
Hollywood money, beautiful faces, and marketing in the world
can’t make Daredevil an enjoyable movie, that is, unless
you are willing to leave your intellect at the door. If you are
one of those annoying people who check to see if anything is out
of place from frame to frame, or count the number of bullets
ejected by a gun and whine that the character never reloaded it,
then avoid this movie. However, if you are short on cognitive
ability in general, or have no problem going to a show for the
pure sake of escapism, then you might as well watch Daredevil.
This is simply because there aren’t any other good offerings
right now.
News of
Daredevil came directly on the heels of the wildly
successful Spiderman. With Ben Affleck constantly in the
news, it has been hard to avoid hearing or seeing something
about this movie. Hollywood is sure to run the whole superhero
thing (practically a genre in itself) deep into the ground
before it lets up. This year we not only get Daredevil,
but also Hulk and X-Men 2. There are talks about
Spiderman 2, a new Superman trilogy, a rebirth of
the Batman franchise and a Catwoman spin-off. So
don’t lose sleep over missing Daredevil,because
there will be many more opportunities to see mega-stars in
tights.
The main
character Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil (Ben Affleck), had a rough
childhood in New York City. After being blinded by often
misplaced and always pesky radioactive material, Matt finds that
his other four senses have been heightened. This doesn’t merely
mean that he can hear and smell better, he also has sonar
capability similar to that of a bat, can suddenly leap huge
distances while tumbling like a trained acrobat, and seemingly
feels very little pain as he takes a heck of a beating. The
Daredevil persona is used to bring justice to evildoers. Matt
meets the beautiful; martial arts trained Elektra (Jennifer
Garner) one afternoon and falls head over heels. Kingpin
(Michael Clarke-Duncan) is a big crime boss in New York who for
some reason hires Bullseye (Colin Farrell) to kill off some
people for him. Daredevil gets caught in the middle of all this
and (super) heroics ensue.
An
exceptional actor fills every role in this movie and the
characters have promise of being intriguing, but unfortunately
the lameness of the script doesn’t allow this to happen. There
is no connection whatsoever with any of the characters in a
story that serves as merely a backdrop for action sequences that
we've all seen before. The fun of going to a superhero movie is
to believe that there may actually be mutants out there or a man
who is enormously wealthy who chooses to dress as a bat. It is
the job of the screenwriter and the director to deliver us a
world that we can slip into with our imagination; one that isn’t
chock full of glaring inconsistencies that are impossible to
ignore, which make the possibility of fully enjoying a movie
unattainable.
It’s
guaranteed that Affleck will deliver the bucks and we will
almost surely see Daredevil 2. It will probably be rushed
out for next year giving us another under-scripted,
over-budgeted, unimaginative cookie cutter movie. The best part
of my ten dollar ticket price was to see the trailer for
X-Men 2, which surprisingly was more captivating in its two
minute running time than Daredevil in its entirety.
