Hey folks, Harry here and I get the oh so delicious honor of *sauntering to my keyboard with a come hither look of overheated exasperation* introducing Alexandra (pant pant) DuPont's DAREDEVIL review. Hearing a gal go pitter and patter over a subject so dear... it's enough to make one swoon and dreaming of long discussions about other such topics whilst swaying in a hammock beneath huneysuckle blossoms and sipping the mint flavored tea with Ms. DuPont... sigh... Here she is...
Alexandra DuPont's Daredevil FAQ
You've seen Daredevil?!
Between a dress fitting and registering for
assorted tchotchkes at
Austin Books , indeed I have.
Lucky bitch! How's that "X-Men 2" trailer they're
attaching to the film?
It is marvelous -- and, in keeping with the
post-2000 Marvel Studios philosophy, it's largely
character-focused. Judging from the fleeting shots in
the trailer, there's more and better action, some
cross-country travel, enough characters to fill a
mutant "Love Boat," and (get ready, Lickerish) a
front-and-center role for Hugh Jackman , who looks
like he may have many funny/cool moments in the film.
Personally, I loved (a) the bit where police tell
Logan to "drop the knives," and he rolls his eyes and
responds, "I can't," and (b) the trailer-closing
moment where Wolverine shoots his claws at a
not-at-all-frightened cat. Hated Famke's hair.
Huh. Well, what's the upshot on Daredevil?
You know, many of us TalkBackers are primed to hate
it.
[Sighs] May I ask why, as if I didn't know
already?
It stars Ben Affleck! And it's directed by that
Simon Birch guy!
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I
thought Daredevil was actually pretty solid --
and the preview-screening rats around me seemed to
agree. Even worse, Affleck gives a nuanced, twitchy,
compelling performance that may be his best yet.
The movie's not perfect, mind you -- I'll get into
that in a minute -- but I'd argue that if
Daredevil had come out before Singer's
X-Men and Raimi's Spider-Man, people
would be heralding it as the first character-driven
Marvel superhero movie of quality. It's surprisingly
good.
Oh, give over! You liked Pearl Harbor!
Listen: A movie can be degrees of "good" or
degrees of "bad." I know that sounds painfully
obvious, but you wouldn't know it to read most
chat-room pundits these days. Everything "SUCKS!!!" or
"ROCKS!!!" even as old-school critical tools
(evaluations of craft, intent, passion, and
characterization, or even the simple appreciation of
kooky little eccentricities that can make a bad film
interesting) are discarded in favor of Eminem-style
online fronting -- a fiesta of exclamation points that
makes me wonder why a striving artist would even
bother trying to please us in the first place.
Take X-Men, for example: As a colleague and
I discussed in a recent review of the X-1.5 DVD,
the wire-work in that flick is Katherine-Hepburn shaky
and the storyline's largely pedestrian, but strong
characterizations push the steamboat over the peak.
Just so with Daredevil. Despite the fact that
the movie gets a lot of things exactly right, I
suspect it will polarize the online community -- but,
as Moriarty put it, if you can shrug off some of your
excess comics baggage, there's a mildly tragic, mildly
sexy, mildly nasty little piece of entertainment to be
had. And I'm sorry, but Daredevil's action
scenes are better than any of the set pieces in
the first X-Men.
What?s the story?
Oh, you know: Kid has rough childhood; kid gets
blinded by toxic waste; kid's remaining senses are
heightened to sonar-like intensity; kid loses father
to sadistic mobsters; kid grows up to become pro
bono lawyer by day and masked vigilante by night;
Kid hunts down local godfather even as he falls into a
tragic relationship with doomed, ass-kicking tycoon's
daughter. It's all boiled down (maybe too
boiled down) from the classic Frank Miller comics,
then wrapped around a very cool flashback frame story
that takes up literally two-thirds of the movie.
"Too boiled down"? What does that
mean?
Well, if Daredevil has one problem, it's
that some of it seems abbreviated -- particularly
w/r/t the Kingpin, who's barely developed as a
nemesis, even though he's nothing short of fascinating
in the comics. (Seriously: I'm thinking of one Miller/
Sienkiewicz yarn -- the title escapes me -- where
there's this whole irono-tragic subplot where the
Kingpin's trying to get medical treatment for his
dying wife and there's nothing he can do despite his
iron grip on the city and the whole thing plays out
like "The Godfather" with Lex Luthor as Vito. Anyway.)
I'm all for Michael Clarke Duncan as an actor --
Big Mike! Fook! Imagine the size of his flute!
-- but he comes off more as a big, cuddly guy in a
nice suit than he does as the Machiavelli of crime.
This tendency to distill -- to hurry the narrative
along at the expense of diving deep -- also hurts
Affleck's performance a bit. Mind you, I have almost
nothing but praise for Mr. Lopez in this film; he
gives a sensual, non-verbal performance, and he's
particularly good at conveying the physical pain that
results from his heightened senses. There's something
deeply touching about the moments when his main
squeeze Elektra (Jennifer Garner) removes his aviator
specs to look at his lazy, fogged-over eyes. Affleck
gets taken for granted a hell of a lot, I think,
because he's good-looking and radiates an essential
frat-boy normalcy that geeks hate -- but I simply
can't dismiss J-Bo or his deeply solid work in such
films as Dazed and Confused, Changing
Lanes, Good Will Hunting or even Chasing
Amy, which I sort of despise as cinema but love
for that one-minute monologue Ben gives in the car.
But back to the subject at hand: The only really
weak link in Affleck's work as Matt Murdock is that we
never really feel his great struggle with
vengeance; instead, because this movie needs to chug
along, we see a single, pull-no-punches scene where he
kills a rapist, we see a scene where he feels kind of
conflicted about his bloodlust, and we see a scene
where he declares himself "one of the good guys" and
turns his back on his cold-blooded ways. It's Cliff's
Notes Daredevil, I'm afraid -- and one wishes
that director Mark Steven Johnson had crawled around
in Matt Murdock's head for 10 more minutes (or
explored the by-the-numbers Murdock/Elektra romance
for 10 fewer minutes).
But you said you LIKED this movie!
Oh, very much. For one thing, it's often funny, and
the action scenes, though heavily edited, are
beautifully constructed. For another, there are many,
many visual nods to the classic Miller comics -- I
mean, anyone who can dismiss that spectacular opening
image of Daredevil curled around a cross, bleeding his
own private stigmata over the stained-glass saints
while dressed in a devil costume, is just plain
ungrateful.
For another, Jon Favreau is a hoot as "Foggy"
Nelson -- it's as if his character from "Swingers" has
subsisted on donuts for a year and mortgaged his soul
-- and Colin Farrell steals the film as an Irish
lunatic who can turn any household item into a weapon.
(Dear Lord, the man ricochets a peanut into an old
woman's mouth and chokes her to death just to shut her
up on an airliner!) Joe Pantoliano coasts through the
film on a sled of weary bald cool as reporter Ben
Urich, and the obligatory introductory scene between
Murdock and Elektra is a funny, ball-busting riff on
the whole "meeting cute" trope. (They had to
meet cute, folks; at least it's a courtship wrapped in
a playground fight scene.)
And then there's the efficient way the movie tells
its obligatory "origin story" and the way it conveys
Daredevil's sonar vision as a series of sound-strobed
negatives -- an effect that seems obvious but was
probably devilishly hard to come by. And stand up
straight, lads -- Jennifer Garner can wear those
leather hip-huggers. (This is a movie that seems
destined to drive many people to the gym out of sheer
embarrassment.)
Finally, I have to give some extra-special praise
to the team that designed the sound mix for this film;
they dunk the movie in just the sort of jarring,
eerie, overdubbed noise bath one imagines Daredevil's
every waking hour would sound like to him -- to the
degree that it?s a relief when Murdock retires to his
isolation tank for the evening. It's artful and maybe
a little unnerving; if you're noise-sensitive, you
might want to bring some ear plugs, but audiophiles
should love the workout. (That said, the rock songs
will date this film badly in a few years. But it could
be worse: The score could be by Michael Kamen.)
How's that CGI?
About as good as it was in Spider-Man. Take
that for what you will. As impressive as the advances
in integrating CG characters into real environments
have become -- the light-matching work in this movie
looked superb to my uneducated eyes -- the CG
Daredevil "stunt double" nevertheless moves in a
plasticine manner that makes him terribly easy to
spot. (It's kind of like spotting stunt doubles in
episodes of "The Fall Guy," only shinier.) But then,
this is a movie where people seem bounded by the laws
of physics until they suddenly leap 20 feet off a
building, soaring like cliff-divers in the Vomit
Comet; if you can buy that, you can probably handle a
leather-clad man moving like a character from Toy
Story in a handful of long shots.
That said, the comparisons to Spider-Man
don't end there. Daredevil, for all its
strengths, was the first of these new Marvel movies to
make me realize that the whole superhero genre is
straitjacketed by a dangerously rigid dramatic
structure: Tragedy followed by Angst followed by
Revenge followed by Acquired Nobility. It strikes me
that the sequels are where all these movies
will finally be set free to explore some dramatic
territory that doesn't involve howling about lost
father figures and unrequited love. If Daredevil
2 gets a green light -- and it might -- then we'll
be getting in to the whole "Elektra: Assassin"
territory and some juicy Kingpin stuff and I'll
totally be there with my eight bucks.
Warmest, Alexandra
DuPont
P.S. Coming soon, barring disaster: an interview
with a much-beloved cartoonist.
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