Super Zero

I knew Spider-Man.  Spider-Man was a friend of mine.  You, sir, are no Spider-Man (Film Review). 

by Michael Sean McGowan

    Okay, so I'm not really well versed in the medium of comic books.  Okay, so I didn't even know who Daredevil was until I found out that a movie was being made in his likeness.  Please forgive my ignorance and my incapacity to critique a movie like Daredevil within the context of comic book lore.  However, I am not left completely kryptonite-addled: as an advocate of good taste, I can say plenty.  I do know people who have devoted their artistic love and life to the epic lore of characters like Superman, Spider-Man, and Hell's Kitchen lawyer Matt Murdock's namesake alter-ego, and I know from their intelligence and devotion that there is no way the stories contained in those squared-off, colorful pages could be as half-assed as this movie and still retain their respect.  For every comic book film that has found success in the past twenty years there have been the countless duds.  For every Superman there has been a Captain America.  For every Batman there have been disasters like Roger Corman's aborted Fantastic Four.  And now that Spider-Man proved stories about crime fighters in tights could still be done with quality, we are in for a deluge of over-baked knock-offs that will rest on the laurels of a trademark and maybe a big screen name or two.

    The victim in question here is Ben Affleck who is saddled with the title role: a man living out his vigilante fantasies from boyhood when he was blinded by toxic waste (those damned industrial chemicals cause so much trouble in these stories, don't they?).  Now, using his other four "heightened" senses (especially hearing) as kind of a preternatural sonar, Affleck's Matt Murdock prowls the streets of Manhattan in a red vinyl suit and hood delivering justice to extras who, I guess, can't afford to get a better agent.  Like any superhero story in our post-modernist times, Daredevil asks the moral questions of whether the ends justify the means.  Is it right for any one person to act as judge over others?  As I said, these questions are asked, but I didn't pay much attention to them because they have been asked before in much better movies than this and, besides, I was faced with my own perplexing query: why would any self-respecting crook be afraid of a man who looks like the star of a 70s bondage movie?

    Affleck has an easy-going presence in just about any movie he is in; he has never quite shed the chummy quality that made him appealing in movies like Chasing Amy or Good Will Hunting.  If you catch him on talk shows like The Daily Show he comes off as funny, unassuming, and relaxed.  These are the same characteristics that could have been a major plus for him in a role like this- they worked in favor of Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man.  But Affleck is standing inside of a house of cards- everything about Daredevil is so rote and uninspired that its pathos infects everything it touches, even him, like a virus.  Successful comic book films have always been brought to life by visionaries who could relate to the character.  Tim Burton's universe was perfect for Batman's self-imposed alienation.  Sam Raimi, a life-long Spidey fan, had enough devotion to his hero to make sure his movie was done right.  Daredevil, on the other hand, feels like it was made by hacks for whom this is an easy feather in the cap.  Keep the superhero titles coming- there's more where that came from!

    Watching Daredevil, I was reminded of something I once said about Gone in 60 Seconds: how the failure of most movies comes from a general breakdown of storytelling.  But in the case of that 2000 stinker and this one, there is something more insidious going on- a far deeper degree of rot.  Daredevil isn't just an example of storytelling gone wrong, it seems to have little use, or time, for even the basic tenets of storytelling.  This is the Man Without Fear in the Movie Without a Plotline.  Okay, I know superhero stories aren't supposed to be Citizen Kane, but please...  Daredevil drops its characters into pigeonholes and lets them stagnate for 90 minutes.  We have the villains, the Kingpin (Green Mile's Michael Clark Duncan) and hired henchman Bullseye (Colin Ferrell) who exist for only one reason- if we didn't have villains in a movie all we would have are five minutes of commercials, ten minutes of trailers, and and hour and a half of a flickering white screen (which I would almost say would be preferable to the end result being reviewed here).  Kingpin and Bullseye don't seem to have any existence outside of just being heavies who rant and rave about the hero as if he was their sole, focused object of attention since the day they were born.  What is the plot of this movie?  Simply, the bad guys try to kill Daredevil.  That's it- and even in that sentence I'm afraid I may have overstated things.  You could say that this is a story that tells itself, but it doesn't even seem to want to put in that much effort.

    My hope is that Jennifer Garner, the star of the hit series Alias, doesn't do a David Caruso and start thinking that Tinsel town is calling.  She's extremely attractive and, evidenced by her sparring scene with Affleck on a schoolyard playground, very athletic, but her five-minute stint in Catch Me if You Can was more tolerable and had more weight than any sweat she put in here.  She plays an heiress who goes all ballistic when she believes that Daredevil murdered her father and seeks revenge (of course, it just wouldn't be revenge if she couldn't do it in skin-tight leather).  Garner, by far, carries the biggest weight of witless dialogue in the movie and her scenes with Affleck are cutesy to the point of nausea.  For those few holdouts who are still interested in see this, I won't tell you what happens to her at the end, although the movie believes it is tragic, which it may have been if it didn't seem written off as a footnote.

    Even stylistically, the movie is sub par.  This I could accept if I could bring myself to care about the characters or the predicaments they find themselves in, but here it is just more litter for the garbage bin.  In sharp contrast to Spider-Man, whose action sequences were seamless and fluid (it was one of the first movies where I heard naysayers argue that the special effects were too good), the fight sequences in Daredevil are under lit and feel like they were edited by a hyperactive six-year-old.  This was an old tactic of American action movies before John Woo and The Matrix came along: create enough visual confusion and chaos and you'll fool the audience into believing that something is happening.  The climax of the movie, a duel between Daredevil and Bullseye along three-story high church organ pipes, is a farce- the green-screen work is laughably obvious.

    Daredevil opened with a trailer for The Hulk, which is being helmed by Ang Lee, a director who has taken us to Thirteenth Century China, Victorian England, and the sexually repressed American suburbia of the 1970s, so there is hope that that movie will have the kind of flavor that Daredevil serves as a void of.  Daredevil was never one of the more famous comic book titles, but neither was The Crow and that, in the right hands, managed to carve out its own visionary niche.  But with no story, no real characters, and no wit, Daredevil has nothing to guide it and Matt Murdock and his ilk will have to fight their battles on the dusty shelves of a video store discount rack.  D-