Throwback: ‘Daredevil’ Is So Bad Because It’s Trying So Hard To Be Good

Daredevil is a film full of good intent. It’s trying to play homage to the greatest parts of Daredevil’s history. It wants to nod to his Catholic angst, his boxer father’s personal bouts with failure, the youthful glee of having powers, the lawyer thing, the ninja thing, and his classic nemeses Bullseye and Kingpin. It wants to evoke the grim feel of Frank Miller’s ground-breaking work on the comic, but it also wants to feel like a quintessential Marvel comic book movie. It wants Matt to be the hero and the anti-hero. It wants Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson to be able to be besties and it wants to showcase his tragic romance with Elektra, while also nodding to his history with Karen Page. It also wants to give Ben Urich his due. In short, it’s a movie that’s way too ambitious for its own good.

Whether you watch the Director’s Cut or the befuddling mainstream version, Daredevil doesn’t know if it’s campy cartoonish fun, a badass exploitation film, a murder mystery, a crime noir, a moody romance, or a serious take on a beloved comic book character. Don’t believe me?

After an ominous opening where we see a wounded Daredevil stumble into a church for sanctuary, we flash back to his life as dweeby kid, Matt Murdock, in Hell’s Kitchen. He undergoes the typical superhero origin story, aka a normal kid becomes super after an accident involving toxic waste. Only, Daredevil also goes blind. Still, the upside is that the rest of his senses are heightened to a point that he somehow…loses…fear???

Hey, kid, that’s dangerous!

Okay, that’s not just dangerous. That’s totally unbelievable and unrealistic. That’s fine. But the next thing we see is a gritty boxing scene followed by Matt’s dad getting beaten to death by the Kingpin’s goons. So, it’s a fun pulpy superhero film and a Martin Scorsese tragedy.

We then flash forward to the present day. Matt is now a do-good lawyer who can’t seem to win a case or catch a break. When an accused rapist walks due to Matt’s own incompetence as an attorney, he decides to suit up and take the law into his own hands.

He follows a rapist to a crowded bar full of malcontents. Then, he beats everyone in the bar up and speaks in cheesy puns. It makes for a cool action sequence, but why couldn’t have Matt Murdock have strategically waited for his prey to leave the bar? You know tackle him in a dark street where his opponent wouldn’t have been able to see, but Daredevil would have.

After the rapist guy runs to the subway, Matt corners him and they fight and then Matt pushes the guy into the way of an oncoming train. He cries, “That’s not heaven, it’s the C train!”

What happens next? Well, like most tired and exhausted superheroes, he crawls home to his industrial loft that’s been custom designed for a blind superhero. After popping some pain killers, Matt is haunted by the sounds of a murder taking place in his neighborhood. He “sees” the woman dying a slow and painful death, but then he’s like, “Well, I’m already in my water tank bed. Might as well shut out the world, go to sleep, and let a murderer get away.”

So, Daredevil is pretty dark, right? Think again!

The next scene, Matt is hanging with his best friend and law partner, Foggy Nelson. They’re making Fight Club jokes and quips about seeing eye dogs running away from Matt. HAHA SWINGERS. Then, the woman of Matt’s dreams walks in. They flirt a little, she doesn’t want to give him her name, and then he decides to creepily follow her to a playground, where this happens:

There’s a whole fight scene in a kids’ playground. It’s silly and goofy and not very sexy. Still, it’s enough to get Elektra to give Matt her on-the-nose name. See, she’s a rich Greek girl with daddy issues and ninja training. What does the ninja training have to do with the Greek myth of Elektra? Nothing. But we immediately know this woman will have the world’s biggest Elektra complex.

Later, Matt and Foggy decide to represent Coolio. Now, it’s important to note that Coolio is only in the Director’s Cut. Most audiences saw a version of this film that cut out a lot of the courtroom drama that tied the plot together. Why was it cut? Well, it’s kind of boring and it proves that Matt Murdock is the worst lawyer in New York City. He’s just bad. Instead of preparing for court or working on any of his case files, he goes out at night and murders people. Then, he loses court cases and has to go back out and murder the bad guys who escaped the law. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but maybe if Matt Murdock spent more time preparing for court and less time fighting people, he would be able to win his court cases, and then he wouldn’t have to go out and fight people.

Anyway, there’s a moment halfway through the film where Matt is on a hot date with Elektra — INSTEAD OF WORKING ON HIS CASE — and hears someone in trouble. He chases the bad guy home, beats the crap out of him, and scares the bejesus out of a child. Matt says, “Hey, I’m not the bad guy.” The small boy continues to cry because while Matt might not be “the bad guy,” he hasn’t done a lot to prove he’s “the good guy.”

By the way, Colin Farrell is the bad guy. We know this because he’s a deranged skin head wearing a crocodile trench coat who murders old ladies with peanuts. He also kills Elektra’s dad and frames Daredevil for it. Oh, and his name is BULLSEYE. His power? He always hits his “bullseye.” It’s on the nose, but Farrell is so fun that you kind of stop caring about how stupid it all is.

Do you know what makes ninja training even cooler? Grief combined with an Evanescence song. Oh, actually, no. That’s not cool.

I will totally admit, after the Evanescence music video, I kind of tuned out. In my defense, I’ve seen this movie three times. (YES, I KNOW. SHUT UP. I LIKE COMIC BOOKS.) So, I had a general sense of where everything was headed. Elektra tries to kill Daredevil because she thinks he killed her dad, Bullseye reveals he’s the real killer and kills Elektra, Bullseye and Daredevil fight each other on a giant organ. Bullseye breaks a stained glass window and uses the shards as weapons. Daredevil evades this onslaught of flying broken glass by tumbling in the air. You know, stuff that’s just grounded in reality.

After defeating Bullseye, Daredevil moves in on the Kingpin (played by the late Michael Clarke Duncan). The two have a tense battle and at the very moment Daredevil could avenge both his father’s and his lover’s deaths, he stops himself. Why? Because he’s not the bad guy.

There’s about fifteen more minutes to the film. Kingpin is behind bars, but alive. Bullseye is in a full body cast, but alive. Elektra is dead, but manages to leave her braille necklace on a rooftop for Matt because she’s possibly alive. The New York Post‘s own Ben Urich threatens to reveal that Matt is Daredevil, but doesn’t. Coolio walks free. Basically, what that means is everything is exactly as it was at the beginning of the film. Daredevil is just a lot more smug about his moral compass. So, really, the whole movie was…pointless.

So, yeah, Daredevil the movie sucks because it’s trying to be too many things all at once — kind of like a certain blind lawyer/hero/anti-hero/loverboy. Let’s hope that the new Netflix series has a little bit less of a personality disorder problem when it debuts this Friday. [Where to Stream Daredevil (2003)] 

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[Photos: 20th Century Fox]