Between “Daredevil” and the deep blue sea, there’s not much difference: Both are cold and wet and dark, difficult to navigate. The sea may kill you, while the movie probably won’t, but the sea nourishes oysters, lobsters, crabs, Chilean sea bass and Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, while “Daredevil” only produces indigestion.
It must be stated upfront that the movie is certainly the most violent of the comic book superhero genre, that oh-so-profitable recent market niche discovered by American FilmCorpIncAmalgamated entities. Its body count is high, and the victims mostly get stabbed or slashed to death, in ways uncomfortably graphic for its PG-13 rating. It’s film noir crossed with psycho fever dreams, and it certainly lacks the joy and jokiness of “Spider-Man.”
On the other hand, if you like it dark, dark is what you get. It’s even darker than the better “Batman” movies. Ben Affleck’s “DD” — he leaves the initials in a flare of burning fuel at the site of his escapes — is just barely super. In most respects, he’s quite mortal, which means he gets cut up badly (by a chick!), he gets a tooth knocked out, and his body, cross-hatched with scars like an Iwo Jima vet’s, seems bone-tired. He’s a brooder, too, and the writer-director, Mark Steven Johnson, whose first big film this is, loves to find him in heroic rumination, posed against the skyline, his body radiating fatigue and existential angst. He’s the only superhero you can imagine knocking off at the end of a day, throwing the freakin’ leather hood into the hamper, peeling off the boots and those skintight skin tights, collapsing on the sofa in his undies and reaching for a bottle of refreshing brown liquid.
He seems human, that is to say. Too bad he’s the only human thing in the movie. In fact, that’s another oddity of “Daredevil”: Everybody eventually turns into something super or mythic, and poor Matt Murdock (Affleck) comes to seem the least remarkable of them. Compared with Colin Farrell’s flagrant impersonation of Charlie Manson on angel dust, Affleck’s broody narcissism feels undernourished.
The film begins, as per the Superhero Code, section 11-2, Subparagraph B, with origins, or “how supe got that way.” Young Matt Murdock of Hell’s Kitchen, N.Y., N.Y., in the recent present, learns that his beloved dad (David Keith), whom he thought was a longshoreman, is really an enforcer for a mobster. Fleeing the scene of the discovery in emotional disarray, he blunders into a barely believable industrial accident during which toxic waste is splashed into his eyes. The evil chemicals take his sight but weirdly amplify his other four senses, giving him incredible, almost sonar-like hearing acuity. As part of the package, the accident also magnifies his coordination and athletic skills. He grows up to be a lawyer by day, a masked vigilante by night.
His tailor seems to be Tom of Finland, and somewhere grad student keyboards are already clickety-clacking away on the important topics this film raises, like “Deviant Sexual Subtexts in ‘Daredevil’: Leather Hoods, Bindings, and Oh-Such-Tight-Pants.” But that’s another story.
In “Spider-Man,” the project turned on making you believe a boy could swing, and conjuring the feeling of the exhilaration of arcing through gravity amid the towers of Gotham. Spider-Man swung like a pendulum do. Daredevil’s device is somewhat shakier and much less convincing. When he does the locomotion, it’s as old as Tarzan’s deal, with flung wires in place of helpful jungle vines. After the fashion of a gaucho, he’s a bolo artist, continually looping wires or filament to some sort of anchoring projection, then swinging à la Man of the Apes across New York’s canyons. But so adroit is he at this arcane art, the movie proposes, he’s able to do it in mid-fall. He can jump off a 30-story building and, as he’s falling, sense something (he’s blind, remember) to lasso, fling the filament and catch himself so effortlessly he transmogrifies the dive into a ride. No wonder his body is tired. His joints must be pure spaghetti by this time!
Maybe you can buy into this; I never could. It seemed preposterous, where Spidey’s web-flinging was at least a movie illusion believable enough to go along with. I know, it sounds like a kindergartner’s query: Can Spider-Man swing better than Daredevil? (Answer: Yes.) But on such matters turn mighty issues of story enchantment.
The plot quickly becomes predictable. Our hero, by day losing cases, by night takes care of miscreants the sloppy law has let slip. However, he meets a babe, one Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner of the TV drama “Alias”), who herself possesses advanced martial skills. For foreplay, they immediately try to kick each other in the face. Can true love be far behind?
The details that follow are too arbitrary to delineate. She’s the daughter of a billionaire who has been targeted by the evil Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan), who hires an Irish killer named Bullseye (Farrell) to kill her father, then her, then Daredevil, who has begun to sniff out his evil plan. Lots of fights on rooftops happen, in that exaggerated modern fashion, where you’re not sure if what you’re seeing takes place in the real place of real space or the no place of cyberspace, with all the back-flipping and building-leaping that goes on. Again, you never quite believe it.
What you believe in, however, is the charisma of Farrell, not quite but soon to be a star. Though he’s only in it a bit, he dominates those scenes and he does something Affleck can’t manage: By his presence and demonism, he makes you believe his gimmick, which is even shakier than the fishing-line swinging of the hero. Bullseye is not a shooter, he’s a thrower. You wouldn’t want to pie-fight him, let me tell you, because he’d kill you. Anything he can pick up is a lethal weapon. He flings throwing stars, pencils, even peanuts, with fatal velocity and precision. He can turn a playing card into a .357 Magnum. Believe it? Not for a second, after the movie’s finished, but while he’s up there, in his brogue, doing his creepy punk undulation and wild-eyed rover boy, he is convincing.
As for Garner, well, she tries hard in a thankless role. A former ballet student, she looks best in movement, particularly when she can get those long legs into play. But she’s basically pretty bland. The same can be said for Duncan, who as a villain is at least liberated from the Mythic Spiritual Negro roles he usually gets.
For the most part, “Daredevil” doesn’t take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it’s through the midtown air.
Daredevil (115 minutes, at area theaters) is surprisingly brutal for its PG-13 rating.
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