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FILM | Daredevil
Sunday, February 23, 2003

Seen on February 13th, 2003 at Odeon Marble Arch, London

What a fucking terrible movie. What an absolutely God-awful movie. What a steaming pile of shit this movie is.

I've known for months. I suppose I can break the silence now -- while I was working at my internship, I got a chance to see a tape of two scenes from the film several months in advance, since they wanted to have Moby on the soundtrack (they did end up doing so, by the way, with the essentially pleasant "Evening Rain," which was previously unreleased). Those two scenes blew. And they blew pretty hard. They were just character-development scenes, but it was already obvious that the film was over-directed, badly scripted, and brutally miscast. What I didn't know was that the film on the whole would also be terribly edited, ridiculously plotted, equipped with miserable special effects, and be as boring as dry white toast -- things like that can't be deduced from two clips, y'see. But the finished product is all of those things and more.

Let's start with the cast. Ben Affleck is serviceable, at best, as Daredevil (I say "Daredevil" only because the Matt Murdock alter-ego is pathetically underused), adding very little beyond a square jaw and his usual out-of-character smirk. Jennifer Garner is utterly lacking in personality -- it's one thing to play Elektra as something other than the stone-cold ice-queen she is in the comics, but you'd better replace it with something other than a vacant stare and a fat-lipped smile. When she puts on black leather and starts trying to kick ass, it's almost laughable, since her every previous scene has been shot with a nice-girl reverence so pathetic you'd expect clip art of kittens and bunnies to be superimposed around the border of every frame while the My Little Pony theme song plays in the background. Michael Clarke Duncan is utterly atrocious as the Kingpin; he would have been an interesting casting choice if Duncan hadn't decided to play him as a grinning maniac who looks like he wants to rape you with every passing moment. Colin Farrell, on the other hand, applies exactly the same manner to Bullseye and almost -- almost -- pulls it off; he's still too hammy to truly be respected, but he's the only character in the film who seems to be enjoying himself (we know this is not true, of course, as the film blows goats and could not possibly have been enjoyed by anyone involved except, perhaps, its cretin director who seems to think he's done a good thing, but Farrell's a good enough actor to make us believe he's having fun). There's a spark there, but it's the only one in the film.

The script is a string of hard-boiled cliches with no discernible plot. The visual direction is ludicrous; not only is the wire-fu truly abominable (I turned to Jeremy with a grimace of bitter irony during the climactic fight scene and said "Remember back in the old days when one character would throw another character, and the director would cut on it so that it actually looked like they'd been propelled through the air instead of yanked on a rope, and we could believe in it and engage with the action? Man, didn't that suck?"), but the color pallette is over-saturated and the so-called "iconic" images are just parodic in their derivativeness. The visual effects are preposterously bad -- if you don't have the budget to make a giant set-piece such as, oh, I don't know, a church organ that two characters fight on, look realistic, then don't put it in the movie.

I'm gonna run out of negative superlatives sometime soon, so I'm just gonna let this grind to a dead halt. Please believe me when I say that I'm not speaking with the bias of a comic-book fan; the hilarious thing about the film is that they really are largely faithful to the comic. They just misinterpret it and treat it with a noirish reverence that parodies the material instead of glorifying it. This is the kind of movie I would've made about Daredevil if I was eleven years old. It is the worst film that I've seen in a movie theatre in going on five years; it's of Battlefield: Earth caliber. Do not ever give it your money, in any way, shape, or form, or I will find you and punish you. 'Nuff said.

02.23.2003 | 07:39 PM | TrackBack (0)

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God, I agreed. This pushes past many other terrible films to be the worst thing I have ever seen. If you haven't seen it, please don't. You'll just encourage them to make a sequel.

Go watch The Ring instead.

Posted by: Kabs at March 1, 2003 09:14 PM

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I guess I'll just have to rent Tigerland again instead. Oh well.

Posted by: Jack at March 2, 2003 05:44 PM

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"I'm not speaking with the bias of a comic-book fan; the hilarious thing about the film is that they really are largely faithful to the comic."

I am speaking with the bias of a comic-book fan and that movie still sucks hard. I had high hopes for this movie because Spiderman was as good as I had hoped it could be. They missed the chance to make a really good movie because the Daredevil character as it was originally written is quite compelling. Instead, and for obvious reasons, they chose to base the character on Frank Miller's latter day Daredevil which is wildly popular among comic fans. They are faithful to the comic book and that is the problem, they were faithful to the wrong comic book. Also, the Kingpin character was a joke.

I also agree that The Two Towers isn't as good as the first one, but still a great movie nonetheless. Being a huge Tolkien fan I am more than happy with the results. I wish it all the sucess it gets. It deviated from the written story in significant ways, which the first one never did, but it's a 1000 page novel and compromises had to be made. Knowing where the story is leading the compromises made sense to me.

Posted by: Paul McRae at March 9, 2003 05:47 AM

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