Daredevil

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.