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Daredevil

Only two episodes in and it’s already official: Daredevil has the best fight scenes in the history of live-action superheroes. Honestly, it’s not even close, which is both a compliment to the show and an insult to its genre. After all, fights are to superhero stories what singing is to opera: the part where all the characters’ emotional energy takes physical form and, ideally, knocks your socks off. Yet some 15 years into the modern superhero-movie era, we’re still saddled with either weightless CGI-enhanced acrobatics or blurry quick-cut Christopher Nolan Batman bullshit. So when that final five-and-a-half-minute spectacular of a slobberknocker finally ended, all I could think was this: It’s about time.

Unfortunately, getting there required a battle of its own. Instead a hallway full of thugs, we had to fight our way through endless flashback to Matt and his boxer dad and scene after scene of Foggy Nelson flirting, and it’s a pretty tough slog. In the words of Battlin’ Jack Murdock, “Better get the scotch.”

I’ll spare you an extensive rehash of the, like, two-thirds of the episode that these storylines occupy. Basically, Matt’s dad won a fight he’d been ordered to throw by gangsters who killed him for doublecrossing them. It’s the Bruce Willis segment of Pulp Fiction minus the Gimp, pretty much, though this element of Daredevil’s backstory predates Tarantino’s flick by about three decades.

Farewell, Battlin’ Jack, we hardly knew ye.

Elsewhere in the not-so-interesting areas of the episode, Foggy takes his new employee Karen out for an impromptu pub crawl when she reveals that she’s too traumatized by the violence that went down in her apartment to go home. Technically, these scenes would need to have at least one joke that lands to qualify as comic relief, so that excuse for them is off the table. But they do provide Deborah Ann Woll with another opportunity to make her character’s pain real, which she continues to do very well. Normally, that kind of trauma is simply used to escort the leading lady into the hero’s orbit and then forgotten, but Daredevil seems serious about taking it seriously.

The hour’s best stuff, though, begins in a dumpster. In our first glimpse of Matt Murdock, fledgling superhero, he’s been beaten into a bloody pulp by the kidnappers he was tailing at the end of the pilot, and he’s crawled in with the rest of the garbage to hide.

Matt spends most of his scenes in the care of Claire, an ER nurse played by Rosario Dawson (yeah, this show is exceedingly well cast, especially for superhero TV). She and Charlie Cox have solid odd-couple comic chemistry, and their characters are well matched, too: They’re both experts in their fields, medicine and ass-kicking, respectively, who are a bit off-put by how well the other one knows their trade. Claire saves Matt’s life by puncturing his chest to relieve his collapsed lung; Matt returns the favor by dropping a fire extinguisher on a Russian goon’s head.

I believe the legal term for this is quid pro quo.

As superhero movies get more and more cosmic in scale, it’s shocking — in a good way — to watch a show in which a hero gets this torn up this early in the run. It’s equally surprising to watch him get the location of a missing child from one of the kidnappers by, let’s not mince words here, torturing it out of him. A wise old nerd once told me that you can always tell a bad Batman story by whether or not he’s acting like Daredevil in it: The Dark Knight’s supposed to be a brilliant detective, while Daredevil just hits people until they give up the goods. Or in tonight’s case, he stabs them in the eye socket.

That’s the third major eye trauma in two episodes, if you’re keeping track at home.
What makes the scene refreshing is its honesty. At root, superheroes are a celebration of solving problems with violence, which in the real world is a really ugly ideology. By all means, stare that right in the face and make that violence as ugly as you can.
That’s kind of the credo of the final fight, in which Daredevil rescues the kidnapped kid from his captors by beating up like half a dozen guys in a single hallway. (What’s up, Oldboy?) There are no magic knockouts for our hero here: Dudes get knocked down, but they get up again, as the song goes. Even though he comes out on top, DD looks exhausted throughout the rumble, executing trick moves only to collapse to the ground immediately after. His single most elegant maneuver? Lobbing a microwave oven at someone’s head.

But this very human messiness required some super-sharp filmmaking to make it convincing. Director Phil Abraham spends a long time establishing the environment the fight’s going to take place in, following goons from room to room in order to convey the size of the hallway and the number of people who’ll be in it. With that groundwork laid, every punch, kick, chokehold, and gunshot—not to mention microwave to the head—has clear, instantly recognizable stakes. You know exactly who’s where, what they’re doing, and what will happen if they don’t pull it off. No bang-bang-bang editing, either: The camera eye never blinks as the brawl rages on, immersing you in the action in a way that chop-chop-chop editing and hyperactive cinematography can’t touch.

In other words, it took a blind man to teach the superhero genre how to shoot fights. Let’s hope the right people at the big studios were watching.