Daring Don't

No idea why I woke up thinking about the Daredevil movie this morning, but there you go. I've got a tall stack of smartass remarks I've been hauling out when the movie comes up in conversation, so I might as well give the old horse a fresh flogging and see if I can't make a full twenty-five-point Reaction out of it. Though hardly a current film, it's at least somewhat relevant given that the "Director's Cut" DVD has just been released -- which is somewhat odd since the original is six years old; what has the director been doing in all that time?

Oh, right: Elektra and Ghost Rider. Yeah, I guess that would keep a guy pretty busy.



This is not, incidentally, a Reaction to the director's cut, because I had enough trouble finding a copy of the original -- along with the emotional stress of realizing, halfway through, that I was going to so much effort for the purpose of deliberately watching Daredevil -- and anyway, the theatrical release is what I paid ticket price to see (well, my friend paid ticket price, because I'm a bum, but the price was paid, is the point). If you have to spend an additional $24.99 to "really" see a movie, then it had damn well better be Fellowship of the Ring. Despite the glowing reviews on imdb of how much "better" the director's cut is, I'm pretty sure it's still not even Return of the King. It's probably not even King Kong. I doubt that it's even so much as Bad Taste. The Peter Jackson scale of quality is quite a useful critical tool, by the way.

They had their chance with the theatrical release, is what I mean to say, and while an enhanced DVD release is a nice value-added bonus to a movie, the existence of DVD's is not an excuse to serve up a shit sandwich with a promise that the special deluxe edition will have steak.

In the interest of fair disclosure (fairness of course is my hallmark) I have to admit that I've never much cared about Daredevil in the comics either. Not an active dislike, I just have less interest in him than just about any of Marvel's other headliners. I may perhaps have missed the best DD books, but the impression I've always gotten is that he's a blind guy whose superpower is that he is not, in any practical way, actually unable to see. So where other Marvel characters in 'classic' mode spend big thought balloons in the middle of the action explaining how they can, for example, sense the approach of danger, or shoot beams of energy, or how come their hammer acts like a boomerang, DD's writers have to spend the same verbiage explaining how he can do amazing things like read newspapers or pick out a tie. Plus: he's a lawyer! Eh.

So I may not be the target audience for this, though it appears that the targeting has less to do with the Daredevil franchise than with the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez franchise (yes I know it's Jennifer Garner in this movie but I'm pretty sure the marketing when it was released banked heavily on the potential confusion). I will say that the movie does a decent job of introducing the character to a non-fan audience; let's see if it does a good job of anything else whatsoever. Short answer: Guess.

Long answer:

1. Ahh, it's 'biohazardous' material, not 'radioactive', that gives Daredevil his powers in this version. Just like Peter Parker was bitten by a genetically-engineered spider and Bruce Banner became the Hulk because of DNA tampering. That's how you can tell a modern Marvel production from the silly old sixties stuff: they're so much more realistic about these things now.

2. If he's sensing by sound, it's 'sonar', not 'radar'. 'Radar sense' would be interesting in itself, but it's not what's happening here. I don't care what they called it in the comics -- if they wanted to stick with the 1960's Marvel level of scientific acumen, they would have stuck with good old radioactive waste too.

3. Poor old Stan Lee, wandering confused around the streets of New York the way Dave Thomas used to roam around asking random people to try the crispy chicken sandwich, dependent on phantoms of his four-color creations to keep him from walking into traffic.

4. It's a cute little tribute, but you'd think a professional boxer would have realized by now that he's just been facing a bunch of comic-book artists. Though I would pay for tickets to see a boxer beat on Miller and Bendis.

5. Every time Ben Affleck appears there's something about him that makes it seem as though he's turning to the camera to say "Hi, I'm Ben Affleck. I'm in this movie!" before actually starting the scene. Surely that's just me?

6. All right folks, it was cute when it was just John Romita's name on a marquee, even if it was only a few seconds after the obligatory Stan Lee cameo. It got precious when the mobster guy listed three other Daredevil artists as boxers. Now Joe Quesada is a speaking part, and it's just getting a bit thick.

7. Wait, wait, wait. So, it would appear that Matt Murdock is prosecuting a criminal trial, in which the editor-in-chief of Marvel is up on charges of rape. Straightforward, right? But then Murdock refers to the woman bringing the rape charges -- who is sitting behind his table in the courtroom -- as his 'client'.

As we will see later, Murdock is an attorney in private practice, so if this is a criminal trial (as implied by the presence of a jury), he can't be there as prosecutor: prosecuting attorneys are civil servants, who don't have 'clients' in a trial (they represent, and are paid by, the state, city or federal government), and while they may carry on certain legal practices outside of that, this doesn't include also being a criminal defense attorney, which is the type of business Foggy is explicitly trying to drum up more of. Moreover the accuser in a crime would be a witness for the prosecution, not part of the prosecution team.

So perhaps what we have here is a civil suit in which the woman is suing Quesada -- which would imply that he had already been acquitted of the rape charges in a previous criminal trial -- and the jury being there is just a mistake. In that case Quesada is facing monetary damages, not prison time, and Matt has no reason at all to expect that he will do anything other than 'walk free', because his freedom simply isn't at issue. Although it's not entirely unreasonable for an attorney to see escaping a fine as 'going free', especially if it means he personally won't be paid for the trial.

8. The idea that specific, predictable physiological responses -- such as an accelerated heartbeat -- are sure indicators that someone is lying is simply false, and in terms of legal and financial damage caused to individuals who 'fail' a 'lie detector' test, actively dangerous. I can't blame "Daredevil" for this really, since it's a dangerous concept precisely because it's so widespread, but still. Of course, it might be considered singularly appropriate in a comic-book based movie, given that the creator of Wonder Woman was (despite his own vocal equivocations) one of the chief architects of this pernicious concept.

But hey, it's not as though Murdock were using an increased heart rate as the sole material evidence needed to carry out a sentence of death on this guy, right?

9. "Hi, I'm Ben Affleck. This is my Daredevil suit!"

10. This is a pretty cool fight scene, I'll give 'em that; Daredevil looks plausibly badass. But I just can't help it -- like Roger Rabbit with the 'Shave and a Haircut' bit, I just have to point out that bullets travel faster than the sound they make, no matter how good your hearing is.

11. Bam! There, along with half of the (alleged) rapist, goes any trace of sympathy I might have had for this film's version of Daredevil. Now he's just Rorschach, who -- whatever impression Zach Snyder may have gotten -- is not a kickass superhero, but a psycho dick (a kickass psycho dick, but still not a hero).

I wouldn't say that a superhero can't ever kill someone in a good story, but this kind of callous, deliberate assault and murder -- and for a man with superhuman strength and agility, I do consider this scene to be an act of murder, with plenty of time for forethought and extra gloating thrown on top -- is unacceptable for a character they're trying to sell me as a Spider-Man level of good guy (who for contrast accidentally killed one person while trying to save her thirty years ago and still gets into cold sweats about it). Especially when he leaves his 'calling card' in gasoline on the scene, and even more especially when he's motivated by a fit of pique over personally actually being the crap lawyer who couldn't get a conviction (or rather, a fine).

For the record, let's note that we, the audience, have no solid evidence that Quesada is guilty of anything worse than greenlighting One More Day. Yes, he's sleazy. Yes, the woman in the courtroom is visibly upset. Yes, he celebrates winning his case in a fairly suggestive manner. But he never confesses, we never witness the crime nor see any reason to believe Daredevil did, and the courtroom setup above indicates that he's already gone through a criminal trial and been acquitted. An accelerated heartrate is the only evidence that Murdock, who presumably went to law school and everything, needs to kick some guy onto the subway tracks; and one single 'radar-vision' shot of the heart -- plus the fact that the killer is played by Ben Affleck, wears a devil suit and keeps reassuring us out loud that he's "not the bad guy" -- is all we're supposed to need to buy that this is okay. Well, I'm not eating that, it smells like shit.

Either believe that the system works, Mr. Murdock, or get out of the lawyer suit, because in a world of superhero morality, a lawyer who goes around killing people he can't get locked away(/fined) is a villain, asshole. And don't throw 'shades of grey' at me here, either -- seriously, don't even try to tell me that the rest of this glossy, high-production orchestral-soundtrack flick remotely begins to approach framing Daredevil's 'heroism' ironically. Even outside the four-color realm, a man abusing his superior capacity of force to carry out a unilateral death sentence on someone the criminal justice system has set free runs counter to the very concept of law, no matter what kind of costume the guy is wearing.

I'll be really generous here, and ask this movie to provide me with one heroic act. One saved life. One act of self-sacrifice to protect another. Hell, just show me that Daredevil so much as slightly improves another human life in any way before the end of the movie, and I'll buy him as a hero rather than a deeply confused man with superhuman ability who wants to be a hero but in fact is a premeditated killer who happens to choose 'bad' people as victims.

Think you can manage that, movie? Let's check back on that at the end.

12. As I said before, I haven't read the comics much, but is Foggy Nelson supposed to be the kind of guy who constantly attempts to play petty tricks on his blind friend? What a dick. Fortunately for Matt, he can hear the difference between mustard and honey (I'm being a smartass. Obviously they smell different and a round mustard bottle feels quite unlike a plastic bear, even to a non-super blind guy. So Foggy is being a retarded dick here).

13. Elektra's name works fine in print, and I'm aware that "Natchios" is a perfectly respectable Greek surname, but she presents an unusual problem in a medium with sound: her name spoken aloud sounds like "Electric Nachos", which in turn sounds like she got her Coyote Ugly name off the menu rather than the name generator (apparently the name generator is not online anymore for some reason so here's a gratuitous link to Seanbaby instead). Even Foggy points this out in the movie itself, which brings up a valuable note to writers in any medium: having a character point out a story problem, amazingly, does not equal solving the problem. It just makes it clear that you noticed, which takes away the only excuse that exists for not fixing it.

I wouldn't go so far as to suggest changing her name for the movie, but it might have been a good idea to say her surname less often, or perhaps been more careful to (admittedly) mispronounce it "notch-EE-ose". Your assignment now: try to watch the film again without hearing "Electric Nachos" every time.

14. Mysterious Powers I: All right, so Daredevil has superhuman strength, dexerity and agility (and probably also charisma, wisdom and THAC0) because of the radioactive -- sorry, 'biohazardous' factor in his origin; I can accept that as Marvel logic, even the part where he says that an enhanced sense of touch makes him 'strong'. But Elektra has a comparable level of extraordinary ability because...her daddy's rich? Not so much buying that. Not until I see Paris Hilton winning the gold in gymnastics. Besides..."My father had me train with a different sensei every year"? Isn't that a bit like being a very good lawyer because you went to a different law school every semester? I mean, really, one year and then you start all over again with a new one?

15. Mysterious Powers II: Introducing Bullseye, who has the uncanny ability to hit any target with anything, and as we will see later, also has agility and strength to match biohazardously-empowered Daredevil, because...um...

16. Changing Bullseye's forehead logo from part of a fairly lame costume to a tattoo is not a bad idea, visually, but the way they've gone about it here looks less like a prison tattoo and more like he drew it on by pressing really hard with a blue ballpoint. Go ahead, take him seriously now that I've pointed that out, on top of him being Colin Farrell in the first place.

17. The 'radar-vision' effect looks really cool, especially in the sequence where it's introduced, and I'm totally onboard with this as a power of Daredevil's; that he can 'see' the girl clearly in this scene because of the rain pattering on her face is actually a clever application of the concept and would be sort of romantic if he weren't a psycho dick murderer. But...in this scene...he can also see her pupils. You...you are aware there's a solid object in front of the part of the eye that has a hole in it, right?

18. Seriously? He's really honestly carrying around a stick with his little devil logo on it right out in public in his Murdock persona? Crying out loud man, do you think everyone else is blind too? Ben Grimm's got better secret-identity skills than this guy.

19. Presumably Fisk had informed Bullseye that Mr. Nachos would be at this fancy ball. How did the assassin know that his target was actually in a limo several blocks away? Part of his not-missing power?

20. Sadly none of Elektra's myriad sensei taught her any deduction skills, such as "looking". Some guy threw a stick through my father -- I shall blame that other guy who just kicked him off a motorcycle and tried to stop the stick, and I shall continue believing that until I find out that it is my boyfriend who is mysteriously running around in a secret life with a strange devil costume!

21. Ahh, there's something wrong with this print of the film. It's got Kevin Smith on it.

22. "Too much pride can kill a man." Hmm, nope, I'm just not digging that one up in my book of old sayings. Google on the phrase pretty much turns up just this screenplay and people quoting it. How about "Pride goeth before a fall"? That really is an old saying, and better in keeping with the religious imagery thrown higgledy-piggledy all over this movie. (Seriously, what's up with that? Aside from the little red horns, what about Daredevil or this storyline gives any meaning to all the crucifixes and Virgin statues lining ninety percent of the shots?)

23. "How do you kill a man without fear?" It...almost sounds profound, but the answer is easy: with bullets, knives, poison, blunt implements, drowning...not being afraid is not actually going to help with any of that. In fact, a man without fear is probably going to be easier to kill, all things being equal, what with him not being scared of things like sharks or chainsaws and all. The better question is "How do you kill a guy in thick leather armor who can leap around like a mountain goat and dodge bullets?"

24. Mysterious Powers III: This may actually be the greatest superhero origin in movies ever. Kingpin, here, has the strength to pick a full-grown man up, swing him around like an inflatable doll and throw him ten feet through the air because he grew up in the Bronx! Er. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if growing up in the Bronx made black people super-strong, American history would probably have rolled out a bit differently.

25. All right, it's over. Time to review.

Lives saved: None. Absolute fail on protecting either Elektra or her father, and if Elektra really survived as the ending rather implausibly and without justification (beyond the outside-the-scope-of-this-film existence of Elektra: Assassin) suggests, it's not because of anything Daredevil did. As far as saving people goes, we actually see him choose not to stop a crime in progress because his girlfriend wants to get it on. He does stop one guy from getting a beating, but it's only because the assailant happened to be shouting Kingpin's (you know, the criminal mastermind who wants to keep his very existence as the Kingpin of crime a secret) name over and over a few yards away from where Matt is lurking.

Acts of self-sacrifice: None. He does get grievously injured, but it's not in the act of protecting anyone, it is in fact the doing of his own girlfriend just before the bad guy shows up and kills her while DD crawls around bleeding.

Improvement in the lives of others: None. He does murder Bullseye, which will presumably prevent further deaths, but frankly, there's not a whole lot to suggest that Matt himself won't go on to kill just as many as Bullseye ever would, whether he wants to or not (Bullseye's body count in this film -- four, if we assume that the one guy actually dies of some small windpipe punctures -- is higher than Daredevil's only if we further assume that DD didn't kill that Kingpin-shouting guy with a stomp to the head or any of the people he trashed in the bar).

Maybe we can credit bringing down the Kingpin as an improvement in people's lives -- but if Matt does this at all, it's by some kind of magic that happens offscreen; at the end of his fight with Kingpin he suddenly declares that "It's all coming out, they're coming for you" despite there being not one single shred of reason to believe this. What evidence do the police have? What evidence did Matt have? How is it "all coming out" now if it didn't when Natchios was framed? Sadly in our modern liberal justice system, the fact that a well-known businessman's knees and peculiar water-filled office decoration have been broken by a vigilante of whom the police are at that very moment in hot pursuit is not considered evidence of wrongdoing.

He certainly doesn't improve Foggy Nelson's life by insisting that the firm stay as poor as lawyers can possibly be (while, himself, somehow socking away enough to pay for several custom leather suits, a bunch of spring-loaded grappling-hook canes, and a sensory deprivation chamber). And Ben Urich, who could potentially profit from Daredevil's existence (and has some kind of custom keyboard where 'Print' and 'Delete' are next to each other), decides not to for reasons of his own, apparently because he admires this mystery man who's committed two murders that we know of and dramatically failed to prevent two more despite being tipped off by Urich himself that the second one was coming.

Successful acts of vengeance, even: One-half. He kills Bullseye, who is the direct agent of Elektra's (presumed) death. But he fails to kill the man who is responsible for the killing of Elektra, her father, and Matt's own father. He spares Kingpin because his father didn't want him to fight, a decision he makes after crippling the man by smashing both his knees. He also leaves him alive knowing Daredevil's secret identity, since surely Kingpin won't reveal that he's been beaten by a blind man, therefore it's safe to leave the secret in the hands of the single most dangerous man who could ever possibly have this information in any event.

Oh, and cases won as a lawyer: None.

So final score: We have exactly five reasons to come away from this film feeling that Daredevil is a hero. One: he's got a costume and a grappling hook, which Kevin Smith thinks is really cool. Two: he's friends with a priest. Three: He keeps saying out loud that he's "not the bad guy". Four: Ben Urich approves of the way he stands dramatically on a rooftop. Five: He's Ben Affleck.

Guardian Devil, indeed.