It probably says a lot about me that my first reaction upon hearing that Ben Affleck had been cast as Batman was not “Oh, that’s horrible!” or “Oh, cool!” or even, “Hmm… that’s interesting.” Instead, my first thought was “Oh, Jesus… the internet is going to shit over this.”
Personally, I find it hard to get worked up about a movie that has no script, no other confirmed cast, and isn’t coming out for another two years, and I find it even harder to get worked up about the casting of Affleck, because he’s not a bad actor. Oh, he’s made bad movies, sure. A lot of bad movies. A whole lot of bad movies, even. But he was never the worst thing in them. And I think he’s more than made up for them with his recent choices. The man has two Oscars, for crying out loud! No, neither of them are for acting, but… you know who did win an Oscar for acting?
George Clooney!
I rest my case! Or, I don’t know, I might be muddying the waters of my argument.
Either way, I digress…
The point is, it doesn’t matter how much Affleck has improved as an actor, how much skill he’s displayed as a director, how he’s proven himself as a writer, he’s still going to get bludgeoned by fanboys that use movies from over a decade ago to support their argument that he’s a terrible choice. Which brings us quite nicely to Daredevil. The go-to response from fanboys when they complain about Affleck’s casting is that he was in Daredevil, and Daredevil sucked. But does it really?
I figured that amidst all this hoopla was the perfect time for me to go back and find out.
As it happens, I’ve owned the directors cut of Daredevil for a couple of years now, but never felt the need to break it open. Having been reasonably entertained by it in theaters, I tried to watch it again when it premiered on cable, and abandoned it after the first twenty minutes. But I had heard that the extra half hour in the directors cut did a lot to flesh out some of the problems of the film, and was much better than the theatrical release. So I picked it up on sale, and… promptly buried it in a box of DVDs, never to be thought of again. Until now, that is…
It was with a certain amount of anticipation that I put the movie on. Ever the optimist, I hoped that this more complete version of Daredevil would prove the critics wrong and prove an uplifting story of redemption. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen. This movie is still pretty damn bad. But… BUT… it’s not Ben Affleck’s fault!
To provide some context, let’s look back at where we were in 2003. Super hero movies were not quite a thing yet. We were just coming off the smash hit Spider-Man in 2002, which to my mind was the first movie to embrace the inherent goofiness of its source material. For better or worse, it was unapologetically a comic book movie.
The problem with Daredevil is that it wants to mix the high flying, acrobatic fun of Spider-Man with the dark heart of Tim Burton’s Batman films, and the film can’t bear the weight of such a schizophrenic tone.
Also, it’s terribly written and horribly directed, which doesn’t help…
I can see how this sort of thing would look good on paper. In theory, it’s the best of both worlds: the moral and psychological complexities of Batman, but with the kinetic action of Spider-Man. But in practice it falls flat. In oh so many ways, it falls flat.
Let’s start with the story, and how there’s too much of it. The first mistake is the extended origin of Matt Murdock. The movie begins with a twenty minute sequence of Matt Murdock as a child, dealing with his drunken father and learning to cope with his blindness. What would be dealt with in a couple of pages in a comic book gets stretched out to an almost unbearable length wherein we see none of the stars of the film, and which has pretty much the same level of narrative impact as if we had just been told this in a couple of short exchanges. Even if it turned out to be heavy handed exposition (and given the quality of the screenplay, it undoubtedly would have been), a few minutes of that would have been way better than what we have now, despite a decent performance from David Keith as Pa Murdock.
The movie also commits the Hollywood sin of needless narrative streamlining, in that it turns the Kingpin into the man who killed Daredevil’s father. Let me tell you why this bothers me. Firstly, it’s one of the laziest, hackiest screenwriting tricks there is, used to create a false sense of personal investment. “Never mind the fact that the Kingpin is a bad guy who is responsible for multiple murders and (according to the movie) all the crime in New York, but… that dude killed my father, son! It is ON!”
Secondly, if this movie wants to grapple with the complexities of the law and justice (which it seems to want to do before deciding, “Nope! Too hard. Let’s just throw in more flips and shit”), it’s pretty reductive to give Daredevil a sense of closure. And they don’t even get that part right! The Kingpin was the guy that killed Murdocks’ dad, but the gangster Fallon is the one who put the hit out on him. But the movie forgets all about this almost the instant it happens, and Fallon is never seen or mentioned again, not even with all that extra footage. Honestly, it’s tempting to go through everything that’s wrong with this movie on a scene by scene basis, but neither you or I has that kind of time, so let’s get down to brass tacks here.
The movie, in its theatrical form, was choppy and disjointed. Other issues aside, does the directors cut solve that problem at least? Um, no. But we do get more Coolio, so how hard should I complain, really? If you remember the trailer for Daredevil (and why wouldn’t you remember a trailer from over a decade ago?), you may remember a brief shot of Coolio, dressed in prison orange. And if you saw the movie, you might recall that there was no trace of Coolio in the movie proper, leading a much younger version of me to wonder “What the fuck?”
Turns out the entirety of the extra footage involves a deleted subplot wherein Matt Murdock defended a falsely accused Coolio against murder charges.
This solves one of the many problems of the original movie, that after an opening scene where he loses a case and goes after the accused as Daredevil, Matt Murdock does absolutely no lawyering whatsoever (when his being a lawyer as well as a vigilante is one of the most interesting aspects of the character.) But weirdly enough, this entire subplot is played for laughs, as Coolio hams it up as a weed loving idiot and Jon Favreau (as Murdock’s partner Foggy Nelson) proves a cartoonishly bad lawyer. Not that this stuff isn’t funny, but it’s only tangentially related to the main story, and pretty much slides right out (which, of course, they did.)
And again, the tone is all over the place. Daredevil returns home after letting the accused man get run over by a train, and man alive, is it dark. He is bruised and battered, and scarfs down painkillers like they’re candy. He gets dumped over the phone by a woman who accuses him of being emotionally shut down. Slipping into a sensory deprivation tank, he overhears a neighbor being shot and has to ignore it, just so he can get some sleep. In roughly two minutes we’re treated to the most despairing portrait of heroism I’ve ever seen. And the very next scene features Foggy tricking Murdock into putting mustard in his coffee, and then Jennifer Garner shows up and fights him on a see-saw.
Yeah, this movie is a mess.
There are a few things this movie does right, though. The main one is casting. There are some well chosen names and faces filling this one out, starting with Colin Ferrell. Ferrell is batshit crazy in this one, and the most electrifying performer in the entire picture. I don’t know whether or not what he’s doing is actually good or not, but it’s sure as hell fun to watch.
Joe Pantoliano is inspired casting as Ben Urich, and Jon Favreau makes for good comic relief. Even Coolio is fine, even if he’s starring in the sitcom version of the film. And there are some pretty great character actors filling out the bit parts (Leland Orser as the Kingpin’s right hand man; Paul Ben-Victor as a sleazy rapist.) But Kevin Smith in a brief cameo as a wisecracking coroner named Jack Kirby…? No. Just… no.
And as for Michael Clarke Duncan… well, I’m pretty sure he would have been good, if he had the script to back him up. He sells what little they give him to do here, but for such an imposing, integral figure, (and an iconic one, as well) he comes off as an afterthought. I think this is one of the main problems of the movie, and ironically, it’s the opposite of what I usually complain about in these types of films. It seems like the creators were more interested in giving fans the iconic characters and moments instead of pacing themselves, leading to everything feeling rushed and forced. They collapsed thirty or so years of history into 100 minutes, robbing it of its effectiveness.
This is no more in evidence than in the relationship between Daredevil and the love of his life, Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner, who is woefully miscast. She handles herself well in the action scenes, but she just can’t sell the condensed version of her story arc. Because there’s so many other things going on, she gets lost in the mix and her eventual fate has no impact because we barely know her. And she has little chemistry with Affleck, which is clearly something they got over at some point in the process… but anyway…
Finally. here we are. The elephant in the room. The fly in the ointment. The bat in the belfry of nerds everywhere:
Ben Affleck.
Look, he did the best he could with what he had. He is 100% committed to the role, which is the most you can ask of any actor, but there is so much working against him here. Let’s just start with the costume. I mean that is, like, a masterpiece of shitty design. It comes from that pre-super hero movie boom logic that deep down, every super hero is a leather fetishist. (Which is why the movie version of the X-Men dress like they’re the afternoon shift at an S&M dungeon.) I think he should get an award just for not looking embarrassed to be photographed in that getup. So just in costuming alone, Affleck is behind the eight ball.
But then, they give him dialogue like this:
“They say your whole life flashes before your eyes when you die. Its true… even for a blind man.”
“Violence doesn’t discriminate. It hits all of us… the rich, the poor, the healthy, the sick. It comes as cold and bracing as a winter breeze off the Hudson. Until it sinks into your bones… leaving you with a chill you can’t shake”
“Quesada! Time to give the Devil his due!”
“I was the boy without fear…”
And finally, my personal favorite:
“Hey, that light? At the end of the tunnel? Guess what? That’s not heaven… that’s the C train!”
Meryl Streep couldn’t do shit with that dialogue. (Though I gotta say I wouldn’t mind seeing her try on the Daredevil costume… for, um… personal reasons.)
At the end of the day, the answer is no. Affleck wasn’t great in the movie. But that’s not because he’s out of his depth, or because he’s inherently terrible, it’s because the movie itself is fruit from the poisoned tree, to insert some gratuitous law jargon. Which is why we all need to calm down about this ‘Batfleck’ business. Is Ben Affleck Christian Bale? No. No more than Henry Cavill is Christopher Reeve. But we don’t know anything about what kind of movie Zack Snyder is trying to make, or what version of Batman he’s interested in using. So please stop bitching until we at least see a trailer, and please stop using Daredevil as proof positive Ben Affleck going to suck as Batman. Leave Daredevil in the past where it belongs, as a relic of a bygone time, and as a movie with one of the worst soundtracks in the history of cinema. Seriously, it’s like a parade of bands that tried so hard to be Nickelback, and just couldn’t manage. And why in the hell did we decide as a nation that Evanescence was listenable?