Daredevil Oh my god, a new review, what the heck is going on here... Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I went to see the new Ben Affleck comic-to-movie adventure, Daredevil. Then about a week later I went again with my other friends who were pissed off I didn't tell them I was going the first time.

But I digress

Before I go further, let me say that I have never read the comics, and never even seen the "Spiderman vs. Daredevil" cartoon that came out around the same time. I knew absolutely nothing about Daredevil before the trailers started showing up on TV.

Anyway...

The story is pretty standard as superhero stories go. As a youngster Matt Murdock suffered the loss of his sight. After he accepts his loss of vision he finds that while his sight is gone, his other senses have been enhanced (or have naturally compensated, whatever), and he can "see" through sound vibrations which allow him to known enough about his environment to get around, and quite well. As his skills are growing he suffers another loss, that of his father, in a violent manner. He decides to dedicate himself to avenging his fathers death and fighting for those who can't. Again, a pretty standard story.

To make a long story short, he becomes a lawyer, fighting for the downtrodden, meets a hot girl who can also kick some serious ass, goes after The Kingpin, the crime boss that runs his area of downtown New York.

Over all this was a pretty decent movie. I enjoyed it, though I probably wouldn't have seen it both times at full price. There were a few things that I didn't like. Some are technical, some not.

The main thing that I thought could have been greatly enhanced was some of the character development of Murdock. There didn't seem to be any attention paid to how he accepted his loss of sight (or not). There was an initial scene when he woke up in the hospital and found that he couldn't see, but after that he seemed like a happy blind kid. Even in the hospital scene I thought was a bit too cut and dry.

He could immediately "see" through sound waves. I thought that it would been kinda cool if he had "seen" a big black jumble, and slowly been able to start to "see". Not nesissarily spending a lot of time on it, but a bit of a montage of scenes would have been cool, showing his skills maturing.

The technical things I felt a bit ripped off about were later on in the film when Matt had become Daredevil. Obviously as a superhero he's going to do a lot of amazing stunts, jumping around, flying off buildings, and doing just amazing things. Some of it looked like absolute crap. In Spiderman the stuff that was done was obvious CGI, but the CGI at least looked good! Some of the Daredevil footage is just horrible. My non-existant little sister could have made it look even better with her barbie program. The plastic looking Ben jumping around the screen look so bad I grimaced sometimes...

You understand that I didn't like some of the CGI? Ok, enough with the bad, on with the good.

The story was pretty good, it went quickly enough that it didn't get boring, and didn't stall too much (probably why the longer intro that I wanted wasn't put in). The villans were a bloke named "Bullseye" and The Kingpin. The Kingpin was played by Michael Duncan who is best known in my mind for his role of John Coffey in The Green Mile. A very imposing man who I thought matched up with the role perfectly. Bullseye I'd never heard of before, but was played well.

There was lots of action, fighting, car chases, explosions... the whole schmere. In short, good movie, go see it. Posted by Arcterex at March 10, 2003 11:26 PM