Daredevil
Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting
What Daredevil represents is more powerful than what it actually is. What it is is a standard superhero story, with time given over to the orgin of the Man Without Fear and a star-crossed romance with Jennifer Garner, and a chance for Colin Farrell to use his real accent and shave his head. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing special about it, either.
What it represents is the final victory of the Hong Kong action picture over more traditional American fare. Daredevil is awash in chopsocky, kung-fu, and the ballet-style action that is the signature of the Hong Kong style. All that is needed is for Daredevil to shoot a number of people with two guns blazing with a flight of doves behind him to make the comparison complete.
Take, for example, the one scene that is almost mandatory in Hollywood movies nowadays, the Meet Cute. Daredevil’s alter ego, lawyer Matt Murdock (Ben Affleck), is in a coffee shop, chatting aimlessly with his partner, played by Jon Favreau. Electra (Jennifer Garner) walks in, Murdock goes over and flirts with her; she walks out, and he follows her. All very normal and predictable, up to this point. (And it’s the only time when Affleck is allowed to be charming; he’s awfully grim here.)
What happens next is that Murdock comes on a little too strong, Electra starts to fight him, and then they spar on a playground, with a lot of kids watching as they jump up and down the see-saws. It’s flirting crossed with kung-fu aerobics, and it looks exhausting. If it weren’t for the exigiencies of the script, one wonders whether Murdock wouldn’t just give up and find some other girl that wouldn’t be so much work. Dating, after all, is hard enough without incorporating it with jujitsu.
The scene may not be realistic, but it shows what Daredevil wants to accomplish. Its goal is not so much to bring the comic book to life as it is to replicate the success of the most popular and influential action movies of the last few years. That would be The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, if you weren’t paying attention. From The Matrix, you get the slow-mo bullet-dodging sequences, and there are a ton of those. Nobody fires a bullet in Daredevil, mind you, but Colin Farrel’s character is named Bullseye, and he can throw darts and paperclips and cocktail peanuts and anything else that’s handy and kill you that way, unless you can dodge out of the way at slow-motion speed. This happens a lot.
The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon influence is much more pervasive. We don’t see Daredevil flying over any bamboo trees or jumping off of any waterfalls or anything like that, but he flits along the rooftops of New York just as if he had spent a lot of time and energy at a Shao-Lin monastery. And the fight scenes in Daredevil are as well-choreographed as anything in CTHD. But in emulating the successes of these movies, Daredevil misses out on some important points.
First, the fight scenes in The Matrix worked, but they only worked because they were new. The first time we saw Keanu Reeves dodging bullets, it was different and spectacular. Seeing Ben Affleck do it doesn’t rate any great applause. Daredevil is The Man Without Fear, and the movie doesn’t seem to be afraid at all of being cheap and derivative.
Second, what made the prior movies work was the excellence of other elements. The Matrix was, if nothing else, highly imaginative filmmaking in terms of its plot and its villains. The plot in CTHD was a lot less baroque (and a lot less important) but the acting was superb across the board. Daredevil doesn’t have much of a plot, and only Jon Favreau makes much of an impression.
The origin story is told in an extended flashback covering Matt Murdock’s boyhood. There’s an excellent scene where the young Matt is in a hospital, recovering from the accident that cost him his vision. He can’t see, but he can hear the echoes of the IV drip and the sounds of the street all too clearly, and the combination is terrifying and overwhelming.
(The one thing I liked about Daredevil has little to do with the action of the film. The movie handles Murdock’s blindness very well, much better than in a lot of Hollywood flicks. The one scene where it seems as though Murdock does something that someone who’s blind wouldn’t do — other than jumping off tall buildings, naturally — pays off in a small, hilarious scene. We see him folding his money just so, and using a Braille typewriter to make notes. He even uses his cane correctly, in the odd moments when he’s not whacking someone with it. Not to mention that the opening credits use Braille, to great effect.)
The problem isn’t with the Daredevil character per se, who is basically played by Affleck’s stunt double most of the time anyway. The problem is Affleck, who simply isn’t comfortable in his role. Affleck is on his way to being the next Harrison Ford — he even replaced Ford as Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears last year — and like Ford, he’s better as the likable rogue than as the stalwart hero. The most magnetic part Affleck has ever had was his brief cameo in the underappreciated Boiler Room; his quick patter and million-dollar grin stole the movie. Here, he’s all grim and square-jawed and resolute, and it just doesn’t suit him. It’s a really dull performance, and the only way you can explain it is that we see Affleck eating Percodan by the fistful, which would be enough to take the edge off anyone.
Jennifer Garner plays Electra in such a deliberately off-putting way that it’s hard to recommend her performance, either. She is so angry and feral most of the movie that it seems out of place when she starts snuggling up to Affleck. She certainly looks attractive, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being attracted to her character; you’d really have to be a Man Without Fear to want to date her in the first place.
Favreau has all the fun lines in the movie, and it’s a pleasure to see him here. Additionally, he’s got the only thing close to a sense of reality; when Affleck and Favreau go to the obligatory big supervillain-superhero dance mixer, Favreau is actually looking for rich clients, the way any good lawyer would do. (Affleck is a surprisingly bad lawyer; we see him try one case — as a prosecutor, apparently, which he isn’t — and he just makes speeches.)
The one strange part is that of Colin Farrell, who is Affleck’s chief antagonist. (Michael Duncan Clarke is in the background as the imposing Kingpin.) Farrell is a prodigy of aim; he can kill henchmen with a thrown pencil as easily as flicking darts. But every time he fights Daredevil, he doesn’t work from long range. He gets in close and does all the acrobatic kung fu stuff that the movie just loves. But why would he ever train for that? If you can kill people with the odd cocktail peanut or paperclip, why would you ever want to learn kung fu?
Well, the answer to that is that Daredevil is just giving its audience what it thinks it wants; endless acrobatic kung fu battles that are occasionally punctuated with plot developments and acting. If Daredevil represents the final triumph of the Hong Kong action picture in America, it also marks another stage in the decline of the American action movie.