Daredevil is a character that I knew very little about before watching this movie. If nothing else, the film made me want to learn more about him, his comic book origins, and his reasoning behind fighting crime as a masked vigilante. I want to do this, because Daredevil doesn’t explain all of this to its audience, instead making them make baseless assumptions regarding his past, present and future.
That isn’t to say that we don’t get a back-story, or characterization, it’s just that there is a lot that doesn’t get explained. Matt Murdock (Ben Affleck) is blinded when he is a child. His father is a boxer attempting to make a comeback, but when told to throw a match, decides against doing this. Because of this action, he is killed. Murdock, thinking that the most rational thing to do at this point is declare his intent to get revenge, does just this. He had been training beforehand anyway, training his already acute remaining senses to make up for his handicap. He decides to dawn a mask and fight crime.
By day, he is a lawyer, one who doesn’t represent anyone. He only represents people who he believes to be completely innocent of any crime. (He determines this by listening to their heartbeat). Of course, innocent people are also poor in this film, so he doesn’t get a large amount of money from these cases. His partner is Foggy Nelson (Jon Favreau), a man who wants to take on better cases. Murdock won’t let him, insisting that only the innocent deserve to be helped.
Justice is the overlying theme of Daredevil, one that is touched upon from beginning to end. It’s a righteous theme, to be sure, and it is one that makes it interesting. Keep in mind though, that most superhero films makes justice a priority, as it seems to be the best way of making a hero relatable to its audience. Most everyone wants to see justice done, see the bad guy lose, and if that is what the main character wants, an instant connection is created. Creating this connection to Matt Murdock seems high on the priority of director Mark Steven Johnson. Unfortunately, the story ends up being pushed aside for this connection.
The story suffering is brought forward most evidently in the character of Elektra (Jennifer Garner). While her character also has depth and a touching back-story, she doesn’t appear for much of the film at all, and her character switches sides in after almost every scene, sometimes even in the middle of them. Her character is interesting, but doesn’t get to build that much, due to a constantly flickering personality. She doesn’t stay consistent at all, and with every shift, everything that was built up becomes destroyed.
The villains are interesting as well, but like Elektra, are not given enough time to develop. The two main antagonists are Bullseye (Collin Farrell) and his boss, Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan). Farrell steals the audience’s attention whenever he appears, always doing something that will make you wonder what is coming next. He’s a crazy character, and one that I definitely would have liked to see more of.
Also warranting more attention is Kingpin. Kingpin, as I understand it, is a character in the comics who is a ruthless character, one who would so much as kill you as look at you. In the film, he isn’t portrayed as such. He’s a mean guy to be sure, but he doesn’t strike the kind of fear into your heart like you would expect. Duncan is a good actor, and his on-screen presence alone gives you a bit of fear, but he isn’t allowed to do anything that could be considered “ruthless”.
The story itself, while not giving the interesting characters enough time on the screen, is at least straightforward and allows for development of Daredevil. He is a man on a mission, albeit for not-fully-explained reasons, and that gives him purpose. Daredevil wants to eliminate Kingpin, essentially, and will go through any means necessary to do so. The trouble is, he doesn’t know who Kingpin is, even when the audience does. You want to yell to Murdock who Kingpin is, so I suppose the bond you feel with him is fairly strong.
It’s funny seeing Ben Affleck, or at least, someone with the same body type as Ben Affleck, jump around in as acrobatically a way as Daredevil does in the film. Affleck is just too big an actor to make it seem like he could be doing all of the things that his character does. This makes the action scenes sillier than they needed to be. Overall, they are entertaining enough to keep you interested, but they are somewhat off-putting, given the attempted grittiness and realism of the rest of the picture.
Also off-putting is the use of licensed music within the film. Normally, soundtracks are best used to set the mood of the film. In Daredevil, the music choices are loud, and don’t help set the mood–they take away from it. They are distracting, and shouldn’t have been included in the first place. As a matter of fact, they’re one of the main things that took me out of the film. It’s immersive enough without loud music blaring in the background; we don’t need to become deaf just to sympathize with a blinded lead.
Daredevil is a character I am now interested in. The film gives you a good bond with the title character, but stays away from giving you such a connection with the other, more interesting characters, such as Elektra or the two villains. The action scenes, silly as they were, functioned in breaking up the drama, and were entertaining enough. I wanted to learn more about Daredevil, but the film didn’t allow me to, only giving me clues that I had to base assumptions on. Daredevil is a competent action film, but one that ends up being unmemorable mostly due to it not developing on its interesting characters.