Daredevil is blind, his power is he can see. He sort-of works as a lawyer, but mostly as a vigilante.
He likes to beat baddies
bloody, and to get beaten
up himself.
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Nerds on the internet love Daredevil because,
unlike Spiderman or Thor, your auntie couldn’t
pick him out of a line-up.
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Like, really beaten
up. Beaten bloody
and raw, punctured,
bludgeoned. There is a guy who gets decapitated by having his head slammed
in a car door, there is a guy who head-butts a jagged metal pole through
his own eye-socket;
to put over to the audience how scared he is of the main baddie.
The main baddie
is the crime Kingpin,
who oversees: The Russian Mafia (they beat-up
women) The Triads
(they cut out the eyes of their heroin-sweatshop slaves),
The Yakuza (they are also ninja-assassins), and corporate accountants
(the most evil of all criminals – take that, one percenters).
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Nerds on the internet love Kingpin
because he has some sort of undiagnosed
anxiety disorder, and all the nerds on the internet
think they have some kind of undiagnosed
anxiety disorder too.
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Intricate criminal underworld.
Ooo, so complex.
Brutal violence. Ooo, so gritty.
Everyone drinks whisky.
Ooo, so grown-up.
At a wedding
where TV shows are the guests, Daredevil is the surly 13 year old, sulking
that they have to sit on the kids’ table.
‘Take me seriously!’
Daredevil screams,
with its pretentions
of being a serious crime show; after all, it has not one, not two, but three organised
crime syndicates; that is three times as super serious!
And it’s a show about lawyers, serious
lawyers.
And it is graphically violent.
So bleak, like real life.
Marvel’s Daredevil
isn’t ashamed of being a comic book character, but it does have a chip on its shoulder;
and tries to distance itself
from its Marvel stable-mates
by having a level of barbarousness you just wouldn’t
get in Marvel’s Agents
of Shield.
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The people who like Marvel’s Daredevil:
Netflix original series
are the same people who call comic books ‘graphic
novels’ – you don’t need that in your life.
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And while this violence isn’t cartoonish, it is over the top.
Like Game of Thrones,
Daredevil is so unrelentingly
violent that it feels pointless
developing any kind of attachment
to any of the characters;
they are just going to end up with some horrible fate. So, like Game of Thrones,
you switch off emotionally.
And without any emotional connection,
what is left?
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‘*blerg* Excuse me, I just coughed up some gritty
realism, *cough* so bleak *cough*
’
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Well, there are some good fight scenes.
Very good, in fact. Although
punch-fatigue soon sets in. I appreciate DD can’t see their kissers, but does he ever just spark someone
out with one punch? He takes as long to dispatch a hired goon as he does an end-of-level boss.
There is some very occasional
lawyering, something I would have liked to have seen more of before resorting
straight to fisticuffs;
I mean, at least pretend
you have exhausted
all legal avenues
before taking the law into your own fists.
Your own bloody,
bloody fists.
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Daredevil yellow: quick, apply
the grittiest color filter
we have!
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Daredevil is disappointing because
it is almost
good, it is almost great.
But it is crippled
by
a lack of confidence in itself as a premise,
and its desperation,
its pitiable desperation,
to be seen as credible
by those outside
the Marvel sphere.
Marvel’s Daredevil:
Netflix original series
score: 3 out of 10
 |
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Season two preview:
Kingpin beats the same Russian with a golf club for 8 episodes
while DD ‘watches’ from the corner,
masturbating.
