Comic-Con 2010 starts this weekend and to commemorate the occasion I will be reviewing one comic book adapted movie per day leading up to and through Comic-Con, starting with Daredevil (2003).
When Daredevil was coming out back in 2003 I can remember thinking that unless they got an incredibly unknown actor to play the part of Matt Murdock/Daredevil the movie would fail. When it was announced that the incredibly main-stream Ben Affleck would be playing Daredevil I gave the collected “facepalm.” No disrespect to Ben Affleck or anything, but he’s just not someone, if I’m Marvel, I want anchoring one of the most gritty and malcontent superheroes ever created.
I won’t get into the accuracy of the movie because it’s largely debatable on any level, and mostly because Stan Lee (creator of Daredevil) was a producer on the film. But I will get into the logistics of having too many story-arcs in the film. The movie time-lines Murdock’s transformation into Daredevil and why he is such a gritty crime fighter but the movie gets so convoluted with the addition of love interest Elektra (Jennifer Gardner), bad guy Bullseye (Colin Farrell), and crime boss Kingpin Wilson Fisk (Michael Clarke-Duncan). In the film’s defense, Daredevil came after the release of the first X-Men movie where there were so many superheroes sharing screen time that it actually worked, so I don’t blame Fox for trying to copy-cat that success by trying to fit as many characters into this movie as possible. It just didn’t work though. Half of he movie’s CGI just seems out of place (I know it was the early 00’s, but still…) and the fight scenes seem to rely too much on suspension cables and the like that they just didn’t seem real enough.
Daredevil was directed by first timer, Mark Steven Johnson, who has since directed Ghost Rider (massive failure despite getting a sequel) and the atrocious When In Rome. It’s no surprise that Johnson has had a hard time getting directorial work, his average movie review score is a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. One thing that I did notice was that Jon Favreau plays Murdock’s legal assistant in the movie, it’s a strange bit of foreshadowing because Favreau ends up directing Iron Man & Iron Man 2 down the line, which are two other Marvel produced films. Fact is, Favreau directed the hit classic Elf in 2003, I can only help but wonder what could have been had Fox gotten Favreau to direct instead of Johnson, but I don’t want to give up Buddy the Elf to find out.
If you’re going to check out Daredevil watch the Director’s Cut edition of the movie, it’s much better than the theatrical release and I think you’ll enjoy it more so. Obviously in today’s age of comic book adapted movies, the bar has been set by The Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan, but I’ll cut Daredevil some slack as a pioneer into the genre and just chalk it up as a miss.
this movie was supposed to be one of the best action film of all time , but it felled out of the game on every single level , except one that a Cinderella love story sparked between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner after this project. movie was made out of big bills but only action that i thought was interesting to watch was by Elecktra…. even the movie that came after this one , Elecktra , was based on this character and it was a good film . on the other hand Ben Affleck was no good , no offense but he is only a romantic comedy actor . Colin farrell also did justice to his part…… and you have said totally right that the release of the movie was at the wrong time . I was so sad that Hollywood People were not able to pull this off .