Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

38 12 Rounds
48 17 Again
76 Adventureland
48 Angels & Demons
54 Battle for Terra
xx Bruno
80 Coraline
40 Dance Flick
83 Drag Me to Hell
72 Earth
45 Fast & Furious
61 Fighting
34 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
72 Gran Torino
73 Hangover, The
47 Hannah Montana: The Movie
51 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
54 Imagine That
41 Knowing
32 Land of the Lost
56 Monsters vs. Aliens
34 My Life in Ruins
51 My Sister's Keeper
46 Next Day Air
42 Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
54 Observe and Report
25 Obsessed
48 Proposal, The
70 Public Enemies
61 Soloist, The
83 Star Trek
64 State of Play
55 Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
52 Terminator Salvation
35 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
77 Under the Sea 3D
88 Up
43 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
34 Year One

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

sort by name

sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Daredevil
20th Century Fox Film Corporation


6.2

based on 35 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 88 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

GAMES:

Game Boy Advance Game

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for action/violence and some sensuality

Starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell, Jon Favreau, Joe Pantoliano, David Keith, and Coolio

Ben Affleck stars as the blind Marvel Comics character who is a lawyer by day and vigilante by night.

GENRE(S):	Sci-fi
WRITTEN BY:	Mark Steven Johnson Stan Lee (comic book & characters) Bill Everett (characters) Frank Miller (characters)
DIRECTED BY:	Mark Steven Johnson
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: July 29, 2003 Video: July 29, 2003 Theatrical: February 14, 2003
RUNNING TIME:	100 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

In short, the actors deserve a big round of applause -– especially Affleck, for finally wiping the smug look off of his face (OK, 80% smug-free); Garner, for her dead sexy mix of attitude and adrenaline; and the grunting, googly-eyed Farrell, for … well, for being "fookin’" nuts, I guess.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie is, in short, your money's worth, better than we expect, more fun than we deserve.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Not woeful, not wonderful, merely watchable.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

It's an adequate superhero yarn, but, hopefully, it's not the best of the burgeoning genre that 2003 has to offer.

TV Guide Frank Lovece

The movie's physical violence isn't gratuitous -- it's the emotional violence that makes this a movie for grown-ups, not kids.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

It isn't a great film, or even a greatly original one. Still, it has many grace notes, and interesting oddities.

Film Threat Michael Dequina

A faithful translation of the character and one of his more memorable tales on the page; it satisfies as an adventure and as a more intimate story.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Its overall effect is distinctly underwhelming.

Film Threat Kevin Carr

If you manage to sit through the whole film, don’t leave before the humorous tag in the credits.

Slate David Edelstein

Johnson rips off a lot of "Batman," especially in the cathedral climax, but that's not so bad: The movie looks best when it looks like other, better movies.

LA Weekly John Powers

Johnson clearly digs the idea of Daredevil as an agonized hero, slathering the screen with gloomy lighting and Catholic imagery, yet the movie has far less emotional weight than, say, "Spider-Man" (whose building-hopping pyrotechnics it often appears to be copying).

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The film is at its worst, however, when Daredevil takes over. That's partly because Affleck, a handsome fellow with possibly the most inert film presence of any actor since Sonny Tufts, looks ridiculous in Daredevil's red leather pantsuit and horned mask.

Variety Todd McCarthy

This franchise-hungry champion of the underdog brings no sense of fun to his pursuit of bad guys; it's just the fate he's stuck with.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Though it begins as a praiseworthy depiction of a unique man, it turns into a formulaic disappointment long before the overly violent end... Comic-book adaptations must remain open to sequels, but this kind of coy cowardice is despicable.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Alone among the cast, Farrell seems to understand that this movie -- which is lazy and stoned, for all its loud music -- needed somebody to go ape-shit, to pretend to give a crap or at least to have fun.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Unfortunately, Garner doesn't have as much screen time as her prominence in the advertising would indicate: Daredevil has a hard time staying alive when she's not on the scene.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

For all its ambition, Daredevil can't overcome the fact that at its colorful center lies a perfect blank in a bad suit.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Like Affleck himself, the film is perfectly satisfactory without being deeply satisfying.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Slick, expensive and filled with good-looking actors flexing muscles, but once it grabs our attention it doesn't really reward it...this movie doesn't have fear -- or sheer wonder and marvel -- enough.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Far too often, the film has to submit to the inevitable and stop so that Affleck can struggle like a yoga student to bend his face into a human emotion. He even cries. So might you.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

A shame Johnson couldn't give the movie over to Bullseye, since Farrell displays more danger with a cocked brow and sharpened pencil than Affleck with pages of melodramatic mush he can't force out without sounding like a high-school drama student with a sore throat.

The New Yorker David Denby

The movie is derivative, flat, halfhearted, its squareness unrelieved by irony or fantasy. [3 March 2003, p. 94]

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

This dull actioner, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, uses voice-over to hurry along Daredevil's genesis tale, and Affleck's rigid performance is a perpetual drag on the story.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Casting Affleck would have paid off had the conflicted, acerbic star of “Boiler Room,” “Changing Lanes,” or even “Bounce” shown up. Instead we're left with the cardboard hero of “Armageddon” and “The Sum Of All Fears,” a caretaker leading man wholly dependent on the quality of the movie around him. Sadly, there's not much of that.

Newsweek David Ansen

Torn between moody grandiosity and cartoonish mayhem, Daredevil tries to have it both ways, and succeeds at neither.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Mind-numbing, would-be comic-book franchise, which often seems as blind as its hero -- not to mention deaf and dumb.

USA Today Mike Clark

Kevin Smith shows up briefly as a lab technician in the miserable Daredevil, and that's a pity. This is a movie that desperately needs the presence of Smith's trademark sidekicks Jay and Silent Bob, with Smith as Bob, ragging worse than ever on his old pal Ben Affleck.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Tacky and disposable.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

An action blockbuster that's one of the biggest misfires in its genre since "Godzilla."

Village Voice Ed Park

Affleck and impressively amazonian Alias star Jennifer Garner (as the ninjitsu-savvy daughter of a wealthy tycoon) are lankier than "Spider-Man's" Maguire and Dunst, which is good if you like lanky, but their relationship substitutes cliché for chemistry.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.2 (out of 10) based on 88 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

(Anonymous 555] gave it a10:
I don't understand why people think this is so bad, just remove the terrible music and the crappy fight scene in the park and you have a great movie. I think if they released the director's cut in cinemas it would have made a lot more money. You should watch the director's cut it awesome!

[Anonymous] gave it a7:
The only real problem was that Ben Affleck was not the best. But this movie is great.

Jim P gave it a1:
Piece of crap. Especially when that mute keeps saying "I never miss!" what's that about?! One of THE worst films I have ever seen. Ben Affleck should be ashamed. Period.

Robert J gave it a2:
In the genre, this film is a prime example of how not to do it. As a movie in general, it is absolutely lousy. Predictable, cliche, with rather uninspired action sequences, and average acting at best. A waste of time for anyone who doesn't have a particular interest in the main character.

Sam gave it an8:
I can see how people hated this movie and loved. I for one and none of them, I am one of the people that just flat out enjoyed it. I liked the effects, the dialouge isn't that bad and it was sometimes pretty funny. I liked this movie. In fact, I liked it a lot.

Pon R. gave it a7:
Not bad. Expected it to suck, but it actually worked within the parameters of the given story. Good fun.

Hayden M gave it a10:
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner do amazing in this great, dark movie.

Daredevil 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Daredevil
20th Century Fox Film Corporation