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78In 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.
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75The movie is, in short, your money's worth, better than we expect, more fun than we deserve.
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63Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.
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63It's an adequate superhero yarn, but, hopefully, it's not the best of the burgeoning genre that 2003 has to offer.
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63Not woeful, not wonderful, merely watchable.
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60The movie's physical violence isn't gratuitous -- it's the emotional violence that makes this a movie for grown-ups, not kids.
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60A 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.
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60It isn't a great film, or even a greatly original one. Still, it has many grace notes, and interesting oddities.
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58Its overall effect is distinctly underwhelming.
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50Slick, 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.
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50For all its ambition, Daredevil can't overcome the fact that at its colorful center lies a perfect blank in a bad suit.
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50The 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.
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50Daredevil 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.
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50Though 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.
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50If you manage to sit through the whole film, don’t leave before the humorous tag in the credits.
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50Alone 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.
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50Johnson 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).
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50Unfortunately, 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.
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50Johnson 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.
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50This 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.
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50Like Affleck himself, the film is perfectly satisfactory without being deeply satisfying.
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42Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.
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42Far 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.
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40Casting 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.
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40A 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.
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40Torn between moody grandiosity and cartoonish mayhem, Daredevil tries to have it both ways, and succeeds at neither.
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40The movie is derivative, flat, halfhearted, its squareness unrelieved by irony or fantasy. [3 March 2003, p. 94]
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40This 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.
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38Mind-numbing, would-be comic-book franchise, which often seems as blind as its hero -- not to mention deaf and dumb.
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38Kevin 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.
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30Tacky and disposable.
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30For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.
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25An action blockbuster that's one of the biggest misfires in its genre since "Godzilla."
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25How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?
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20Affleck 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.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 34 out of 71
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Mixed: 12 out of 71
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Negative: 25 out of 71
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