If Osama bin Laden is so hot on the idea of suicide bombings, I wonder why he doesn’t offer to lead the way. Y’know, show how it’s done. Otherwise it’s like being one of those people standing safely on the ground, shouting to the guy on the ledge ten stories up “Jump! Jump!”
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Imagine my surprise, given the recent somewhat antagonistic atmosphere, to have received an invite to a preview screening of “Daredevil.” Now I gotta say, every pro I know came out of the advance screenings during the Creation Con with absolutely nothing positive to say about it. So I went in preparing to be underwhelmed.
Guys: It’s a good film. Darker, more disturbing than Spider-Man. Certainly edgier. Overall, I thought it was great. Action, a brooding Matt Murdock (only finding relief when sleeping in a sensory deprivation tank), cool radar sense effects, plus snappy performances from Farrell as Bullseye and Duncan as the Kingpin (who looked just like the Kingpin except black), and enough comic book in-jokes for me to say, “See! See! I’m not the only one who does it!”
Minuses are that Elektra is underutilized, existing mostly to be Matt Murdock’s girlfriend with not much identity beyond that. And I could have done without the voice over. General rule of thumb: Unless a VO narrative is done by Bogart, leave it out. The CGI has the same “weightless” feel as Spider-Man, and one wishes the producers hadn’t felt they needed to compete, since one can buy it more easily when dealing with the superhuman Spidey. Here it looks even more fake.
The big area of dispute, I can already tell you, is going to be that Daredevil kills/allows bad guys to die. At least to start. I fully understand why. They wanted him to have a character arc. Think about his arc in the Miller stories: He begins as a pure crusader who doesn’t kill, and ends up allowing Bullseye to fall…to his death, for all DD cares. Does that *really* sound like a character arc for a superhero movie? Writer Johnson chooses to go the other direction: DD starts out hard, cold, soulless. Will he find redemption? *That’s* a movie character arc. Anyone who goes in and can’t separate comic book requirements from movie necessities is going to have problems. Anyone who can judge a movie on its own will, overall, have a good time.
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