OK, so, I watched all thirteen episodes of Netflix’s Daredevil, so let’s get this party started. Spoilers are your own goddamned problem beyond this sentence, so for those of you still on board, let’s dance with this devil (pale moon light at user’s discretion).
For better and for worse, Netflix’s Daredevil is absolutely of a piece with the cinematic universe that has been steadily constructed since Robert Downey Jr. looked down the barrel of the camera and declared himself Iron Man. Often very good, never consistently great, stylish but without a truly self-designated style, Daredevil shares the virtues and failings that have marked the MCU as it continues its expansion to take over the world and enslave the polar bears to build an ice palace- excuse me, I meant, “make a lot of money”.
Daredevil bears the bonus weight of ushering in Marvel Studios’ first real attempt to bring their A and/or B-list characters to television, not to mention needing to construct the street-level view of the universe, since the closest thing the movies have to an everyman is a super-genius who turns into a giant, indestructible monster whenever he gets angry (come to think of it, the only thing anchoring Mark Ruffalo to ‘everyman’ status is his innate Ruffalocity).
This much, Daredevil carries off with aplomb. The Hell’s Kitchen depicted here is a grim, grimy corner of the world, but it is still a world inhabited by iron men and demigods, a place where the sky can open up and reign down alien destruction. Even as the show is working hard to stress its down-n-dirty bonafides (about which, more in a moment) there’s an ease to which the show braces the ridiculous side of the coin that means the show doesn’t flinch when ninjas bust in and start, you know, ninja-ing up the place.
As you may know from the less-than-beloved Ben Affleck movie, Daredevil is the story of Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox [the putzy-guy from Stardust/the IRA guy from Boardwalk Empire]), blinded at a young age by radioactive chemicals that took his sight but heightened his other senses to superhuman level. By day, Matt works as an attorney with his best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson [he of the Bash Brothers from the The Might Ducks saga]), trying to help the innocent and underrepresented denizens of Hell’s Kitchen. By night, Matt stalks the rooftops as the vigilante Daredevil.
Sort of, anyway. As Netflix’s series picks up, Matt still doesn’t have the superheroism quite down. No one calls him ‘Daredevil’ yet, and instead of his classic red duds, Matt traipses about in his best Dread Pirate Roberts cosplay (this look made famous by a Frank Miller-penned origin miniseries, with its origins resting in the Trial of the Incredible Hulk TV movie).
The 13 episodes of Netflix’s Daredevil track Matt’s journey from pajama-punching to the moment when he finally takes up the horn-headed look, as he and Foggy take on the case of terrified murder suspect Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll of True Blood) and follow the case up to the highest echelons of crime in NYC: Wilson Fisk, as played by Vincent D’Onofrio (Adventures in Babysitting).
Charlie Cox makes a strong Matt Murdock (he’s on shakier ground once he’s in costume and meant to be intimidating people, but he seems to settle into that aspect by the end of the series) but Fisk is Daredevil’s great achievement, Marvel’s first fully successful attempt to create a memorable central villain since Tom Hiddleston slithered up as Loki. D’Onofrio plays Fisk as a frightened twelve year old locked in the body of a hulking monster, a brilliant but ruthless businessman with as firm a grip on his sanity as an Oompa Loompa hanging onto a charging rhino. By turns pathetic and terrifying, D’Onofrio creates a fascinating villain, one who comes damn close to overpowering the entire show.
Other major characters include Bob (“The Warden in Shawshank Redemption”) Gunton as Owlsley a slippery underworld figure, Vondie Curtis-Hall (Chicago Hope) as enterprising reporter Ben Urich, Toby Leonard Moore as Fisk’s devoted assistant Wesley, Rosario Dawson as Claire, a night nurse that befriends Daredevil, and Ayelet Zurer as Vanessa, an art dealer that steals Fisk’s heart.
That’s a lot of moving pieces for a show, and Daredevil only somewhat balances them out properly. The show has that Game of Thrones problem of resource management. Some, like Dawson’s Claire, simply vanish for giant chunks of the season, while others, like Woll and Henson, eat up large chunks of episodes even when they have nothing going on. Making the latter even worse is the fact that Henson is probably the weak link of the cast, never really settling into Foggy as well as his peers do their characters. Luckily, Henson has strong enough chemistry with Woll and Cox that the character is still fun to spend time with.
As is the show, generally speaking. The art-designed grime often feels one step removed from a Walter Hill joint, while the writing for the show maintains the sort of easy, character-driven humor that makes the MCU such an enjoyable place to spend time. Daredevil benefits from some truly excellent action set-pieces, with Daredevil’s brawls staged as Raidian punch-ups, shot with an eye for clarity and high impact. The show blows its wad a little too early in regards to the action (nothing in the remaining eleven hours ever comes close to topping the tracking-shot fight that closes episode two) but most every episode has some strong action beats.
But while each episode is entertaining at the very least, Daredevil falls into the binge-watching trap of episodes bleeding into one another. The early episodes sidestep this by giving each hour its own designated story and arc, all ramping up to the reveal of D’Onofrio as Fisk. But once Fisk is out in the open, the pacing goes to shit. The inter-episode stories disappear and the Daredevil TV show becomes the Daredevil nine-hour movie you didn’t know you wanted.
And that’s a problem. It’s a problem because they clearly did not have enough narrative to support that running time, and so episodes are filled with our ostensibly intelligent characters running around trying to prove something that they and we have already figured out, which is just shitty plotting. There’s lots of energy being expended by the characters, but nothing is actually getting done.
And it’s a problem because the show screws up the structure of Fisk’s arc by opening with him at his most vulnerable. Instead of showing us Fisk as the intractable, unstoppable godhead of Hell’s Kitchen crime, the show opens with Fisk flustered by love and loneliness and settles for having other characters TELL us about the man Fisk was and about the change he’s undergone.
There’s a good deal of that sort of writing, and it grows unfortunately more pronounced as the show goes along. Characters will spend time explaining their relationships to the same people they are in said relationship with, while conspirators loudly explain their plans to one another. On a show like Arrow or The Flash, this kind of big, bold-text writing works because the shows are plotted out with broad, soap opera dramatics. Every character is a half-second away from launching into a tear-ridden monologue about their emotional state, AT ALL TIMES, but the shows are cast with the sort of the actors that can handle that sort of thing (mostly. Fucking Roy).
Daredevil, on the other hand, wants you take it seriously. It wants to be prestige. This isn’t your kids’ superhero stuff, the show seems to be saying, as it has a guy hurl himself face-first through a wooden spike, or when it features a close-up of Daredevil using a road flare to melt a guy’s flesh together (different guy than the face-spike guy). The show tries so hard to be an adult-minded drama, that when it trips and stumbles into superheroic cliché, it’s all the more glaring. Daredevil may be more ‘adult’ than The Flash or Arrow, but its pretenses of darkness are every bit as juvenile as those shows’ melodrama, and at least those shows know of what they are about, and they execute their aims without apology or backwards glance. When The Flash spends time on secret identity nonsense, it feels of a piece with the show’s voice. When Daredevil gets into the same boring nonsense, it’s all the more glaring because it’s obvious that the makers of the show want to be in the conversation with television along the likes of The Wire or Breaking Bad. As far as pulp pretenders to that category goes, Daredevil is not the hysterically miscalculated mess that The Walking Dead was before I decided that life is too fucking short and stopped watching, but at its worst moments, it does recall that same self-aware pose of ‘mature television’ that so often rings so false.
As does the show’s attempts to murky-up the morality of its main character. Matt spends far, far too much of his early days as Daredevil questioning whether he should be Daredevil. His crisis of conscience doesn’t really track (he worries that there’s no difference between him and Fisk. Here’s a difference, Matt: you rescue kidnapped children, he stomps underlings’ heads into goo) and since we all know that Daredevil is going to continue featuring a character called Daredevil, having Matt agonize over the choice plays as empty wheel-spinning, no matter how much Cox invests himself in making Matt’s struggle play.
(It also, like the Fisk material, leaves the character no place to go. Is he going to consider quitting every single season? ’Cause that’ll get awful boring, awful quick.)
I will give Daredevil credit for telling a complete story over its thirteen episodes and closing with a note of finality. By the end of the show, Urich, Wesley and Owlsley are dead, Fisk is behind bars, the Nelson and Murdock law firm is back in business and Daredevil has his name, his horn-headed outfit, and the public’s trust. As the finale winds down, the feeling is not dissimilar to coming to the end of a trade paperback of comics. You read a collection of issues that designate a certain arc, and when the arc is over it’s time to read the next one.
And I’m excited for that next one, whether that’s a second Daredevil season, or the other Netflix shows, set to feature Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist. Marvel has clearly proven that their eye for casting, world-building, character, and entertainment can be carried over from one medium to the next, and that the MCU is viable with street-level characters.
But Daredevil frustrates me in the same way that Winter Soldier or Guardians of the Galaxy frustrate me. I love these characters, I love these stories, and I generally love the people in front of and behind the cameras. I want Marvel Studios to be making great films, great art, but they can never quite hit that level.
Oh well. Daredevil was still a whole lot of fun, eye-stabbing scenes aside, and here’s hoping that Marvel can continue to build and improve on this new corner of the universe they’ve opened up.
Maybe ease up on the eye-stabbings, though. Try for, like, maybe one per season.