DAREDEVIL ** (out of ****) Starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell, Jon Favreau, Joe Pantoliano, Erick Avari, and Scott Terra Directed & written for the screen by Mark Steven Johnson, from the comic books by David Mack 2003 PG13 “Daredevil” is a routine superhero movie, competent but unremarkable.  A few aspects of the movie, had they been exploited, are worth mentioning as having the potential to push it ahead of the crowd.  Daredevil (Ben Affleck) is one of the few superheroes to actually question the basic motivation behind being a superhero.  You know the story:  the superhero spends his life seeking justice after some figure from his childhood was murdered.  Batman’s parents, Spiderman’s uncle, and so forth.  But to what kind of psychic damage does a life powered by vengeance lead?  And how moral is justice when it is indistinguishable from vengeance? “Daredevil’s” Alfred character—the old man who knows Daredevil’s secret identity—is Father Irish Guy.  (He’s played as kindly and paternal by Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Derrick O’Connor, which is a small kind of amazing when you think of how loathesome he was as Adolf in “Lethal Weapon 2.”)  Father puts Daredevil’s moral conundrum like this:  violence begets violence.  Evil means cannot be employed to shift the moral balance back to good.  Daredevil, and his alter-ego, half-believe the priest—he goes to confession for his attacks on criminal—but he is too angry to stop.  He continues his quest, which is to kill evil-doers who have slipped through the justice system. The clever thing about “Daredevil” is how the superhero’s revenge twists around and bites him on the ass.  By the time he comes to see things from Father’s point-of-view, he has already become the object of wrath for another leather-clad superhero (Jennifer Garner), who has mistaken Daredevil for her father’s murderer.  The real bummer for Daredevil is that she’s also the woman he loves. Unfortunately, as I intimated before, this moral quandary is more a flavor than actually exploited.  The rest of “Daredevil” is exactly what you would expect, complete with the superhero’s origin story.  Daredevil, before he was Daredevil, was blinded as a boy.  But this was no ordinary blinding, this was toxic waste blinding!  (When are comics going to start having warnings on them, like cigarettes, that the average human’s contact with toxic waste and A-bombs is mostly negative, if not fatal?)  The toxic waste heightened all of DD’s remaining senses; he can hear for miles and use a kind of radar to get the lay of a room, even through walls. But how many times can we see a guy in leather take out a room full of heavily-armed men?  Kung-fu in big budget movies has become endlessly perfect and mostly uninteresting, and this is what DD uses on the bad guys.  More interesting is how the movie visualizes his radar and sounding techniques:  shapes and figures are outlined in blue, coming in and out of focus, on a black background.  The sound guys for “Daredevil” must have had a field day doing his fights; DD also finds bad guys by tuning in and out certain sounds and frequencies, and tracks attackers by ignoring their gunfire and only listening for spent casings bouncing off the floor. DD’s blue vision is interesting for a while, but things become routine pretty quick.  The big villain (lovingly named Kingpin and even more lovingly played by the gigantic Michael Clarke Duncan) hires a hitman, DD fights the hitman, then DD fights the Kingpin.  There’s also some forgettable romantic stuff between Affleck and Garner.  We get the same old soundtrack of abrasive rap music and R rock bands—you know, those “college radio” bands like Creed and Fuel, who have the distortion all the way up on their guitars and sing by adding the letter R to every word.  The orchestral score is by Graeme Revell, making a disposable rehash of his score to “The Crow,” and the cinematography by the wonderfully named Ericson Core uses the same deep urban tones as “Batman,” “The Crow,” “Fight Club,” “Seven,” and scores of other recent films. Ben Affleck (“Changing Lanes,” “Shakespeare in Love”) is a fine actor and does what he can, and Jennifer Garner (TV’s “Alias”) occupies her role completely neutrally.  Mild comic relief comes from Jon Favreau, as the alter-ego’s buddy, and Joe Pantoliano, as the lone newspaper man who believes in Daredevil.  His brief scene with a medical examiner features a cameo by another filmmaker, who is also a comic book enthusiast, and whose identity I shan’t reveal.  Michael Clarke Duncan (“The Green Mile”) is completely satisfying as the looming, cigar-smoking Kingpin, but even better is his hired hitman Bullseye.  As played by wild, bug-eyed actor Colin Farrell (“Minority Report,” “Phone Booth”), Bullseye must be the least subtle assassin in the history of the movies.  En route to the hit, he tears through downtown traffic on a giant motorcycle, amidst yells and honking horns, and makes his attack while doing acrobatics any circus would be proud of.  How he frames Daredevil for this crime is unfathomable, and the ensuing fight between them, in a church, involves an absurd amount of catching things out of the air.  Bullseye is given other nice touches, like the flair with which he puts on his jacket and the fact that he lets the Padre leave the church before he and DD do battle. “Daredevil” is clean and efficient, and most of it sounds good on paper.  I liked its Church imagery in the same way I can admire any movie that takes religion seriously.  But after “Spider-man,” “X-Men,” “Batman,” and others I’ve already forgotten, I can’t remember “Daredevil” very clearly.  If comic books are your thing, have at it.  But for many of us, “Daredevil” is just…there. Finished September 6th, 2003 Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night                                                                                             Back to home.