Daredevil (Widescreen Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Dud Devil
Review: I'm not a big fan of comic books to begin with, though I can appreciate the artform, and I find this recent trend of taking old Marvel serials and transposing them onto the big screen to be uninspired and annoyingly unoriginal. In this pic, the Daredevil is a mild-mannered attorney by day, crimefighter by night, who leaps and soars and pirouettes with the greatest of ease despite the fact that he's blind. In this film, our hero decides to pick a fight with the local crime syndicate's kingpin, and the ensuing battle of good v. evil plays out to it's predictable conclusion, with lots of leaping about rooftops and breaking of glass [and you have to have the obligatory sharp cocktail party along the way, where all the characters, good and evil, dress up and insult each other while maintaining good manners]. The visuals relating to the way in which the Daredevil "sees" the world around him [using his acute, overly attuned other senses to create images in his mind] are really fabulously done. That's the high point of the film. The low point is Affleck, who is stiff as a board and inexcusably hollow. His co-stars are a little more useful - Jennifer Garner certainly is nice to look at, and Colin Farrell seems to be having more fun than anyone as the weasly assassin Bullseye - but they can't make up for Affleck's non-compelling lead. Whereas the original comic books deal with complex, paradoxical characters - superhuman on the outside, fragile on the inside - directors of these big-budget flics seem to be way, way, WAY too interested in special effects and style, and almost any film where style trumps substance is bound to be mediocre, at best. The Daredevil keeps insisting "I'm not the bad guy," and Daredevil is not a bad movie. But it's close.