SummaryIn New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) fights for justice as a blind lawyer in the daylight and as Daredevil at night.
SummaryIn New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) fights for justice as a blind lawyer in the daylight and as Daredevil at night.
Creator/executive producer Drew Goddard (“Cabin in the Woods”) serves up a dark, edgy, violent and, at times, gruesome series that has some teeth to it.
Bernthal and Yung make Castle and Elektra an effective season-long two-pronged assault on Matt Murdock’s heroic identity, which gives Daredevil’s supporting characters a clearer purpose as well.
Netflix’s Daredevil makes the case that not all superhero shows are created equal and this one improves markedly on both the previous “Daredevil” movie and the other, current Marvel universe TV series.
The pulpy style and brutality (torture is one of Daredevil’s tools) clearly seek a higher sense of realism, which must be balanced against the notion of a blind superhero who can shimmy up walls and whose spectacularly hearing lets him to function, among other things, as a human lie detector. Helpfully, Cox brings the necessary mix of grit and Marvel-esque self-doubts to the dual role.
So much about Marvel’s Daredevil works exactly the way it’s intended, including the pace of the action and the extent and style of the gore. What still doesn’t work--what almost never works where the name Marvel and live-action film/TV meet--is the hammy dialogue, especially when characters express their feelings to one another.
The series gets off to a slow start, parceling out bits of the title character’s origin story over flashbacks in the first two episodes, and taking its time to introduce the supporting cast. But once Vincent D’Onofrio appears onscreen as Wilson Fisk, the dapper crime-boss villain known in the Marvel comic books as Kingpin, things pick up considerably, and Fisk turns out to be an even more fascinating and complex character than the protagonist.
Ultimately it’s very purple in its prose, yearning to be film noir, but--lacking the writing or grit to achieve that--playing more like hokey blood porn.