Review: Daredevil
Hubs and I just reactivated our Netflix account after a long hiatus. We didn’t discontinue because we had any issues; we simply weren’t using it enough to make the subscription worth $150/year.
It was word of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that poked me to pony up again and that show alone was worth the price of admission. The kids are older now as well and it isn’t bad to have already paid-for entertainment on rainy or sick days – our TV is about 10 years old and treats Amazon streaming like a virus, but because Netflix uses our BlueRay player as an input, we seem to have less issues with the later.
I had a sort of vague interest in the new Marvel shows, so knowing I’d have access to those was a nice bonus of reinstatement. The first few episodes of Daredevil got pretty stellar advance reviews and someone had the foresight to cast David Tennant as a villain in AKA: Jessica Jones, both of which piqued my interest a bit more, though I wasn’t planning on making either show a high priority.
April 9th, a night that will live in infamy, I got suckered into working 4 extra hours (3p-5a. Yes, 3p-5a). It was a relatively quiet night shift and I finished Knight’s Shadow a couple hours before I was due for relief. Being, as I’m sure you can imagine, way too tired to focus on a new book, I realized the date had rolled over to April 10th and friends on the West Coast were posting their initial reactions to Daredevil . There were pretty unanimously thrilled so I figured, what the hell?
What the hell indeed. What the hell was I thinking expecting a decent show. I should have known better.
I should have known, after Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy I was going to get something fucking amazing.
First, Marvel continues their trend of impeccable casting. Charlie Cox has come a long way since Stardust and he is nailing the many faces of Matt Murdock, from stoic to snarky to beat to shit to violent rage. I’ve preached my love of the morally ambiguous hero before and, while I don’t want to give away the how for those who haven’t yet started, I will tell you the writers are nailing that particular aspect of the Daredevil mythos perfectly. Rosario Dawson is beating the crap out of the refrigerator and making Claire her own, independent, well-rounded entity who, while attracted to Murdock, isn’t going to let him call the shots. Deborah Ann Woll, one of the only actors I enjoyed on True Blood, is the utter face of innocence with a deep dark core; Eldon Henson is making sure Foggy Nelson is worth his air time; and Toby Leonard Moore is doing his very due diligence on the uber-creepy Wesley. Vincent D’Onofrio is terrifying, and I mean absolutely terrifying as Wilson Fisk, aka The Kingpin, everything from his awkward silences to his removal of someone’s (redacted) with a (redacted) in an absolute rage promising a villain with a cold soul but, like the hero, a certain moral ambiguity that prevents the standard one dimensionality of evil; he is all the more frightening for the glimpses of humanity and emotion.
The scripts aren’t anything spectacular, but the arc is solid and very much enhanced by the ability of the actors. The story is grounded in psuedo-reality, though it isn’t clear to me yet if Matt has worked to develop his non-visual sense acuity or if we’re supposed to believe there is a superpower in play; I’m inclined toward the former though having watched only five episodes, I can’t say for sure. The writers have done a good, and mostly subtle, job of tying the show into the MCU: Hell’s Kitchen, for example, where the majority of the story thus far takes places, is a casualty of the Avengers Battle for New York, both the people and the place itself disintegrating into anarchy, rife with corruption, and ripe for takeover. Claire asks Matt if he, “Has a job or you’re one of those billionaire playboys I keep hearing about.” The baddies comment that, “Every time one of those superhero smashes someone through the building,” they stand to make a figurative, and often literal, killing in redevelopment. There are the usual jokes about bionic suits and magic hammers.
The fight choreography is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on the screen. I want to have inappropriate relations with it. Not the choreographer, mind you. The choreography. I know, I know. That all sounds very strange. I’m a former martial artist and one of my very first crushes on an actual person was on Bruce Lee. Deal with it. The style has elements of parkour, jiu jitsu, muy thai hands, escrima or Kali without the sticks (which makes sense considering, as my friend Frank pointed out, Daredevil does eventually start using fighting sticks), kung fu, and an additional element I can’t quite put my finger on but brings the other desperate styles into a cohesive whole. The way it’s filmed, the fact that they have Cox and his stunt double in all black against the dark, the fact that the double is so freaking fast … yes, I know there are probably some wires and camera tricks involved, but whoever is putting this together and whoever is doing it, knows their shit and it is a thing to behold.
I do want to add a violence caveat: there’s a lot of it and it is very graphic. If that’s difficult for you to stomach or upsets you, I will, sadly, recommend you skip this one. When I say graphic, I mean we see broken bones popping through skin, body parts being smashed by car doors, and people beating the shit out of one another, all accompanied by very intense sound effects. I’ve been watching on my iPad Mini, which has likely tempered the effect somewhat, but I imagine that on a large screen with a good sound system, the violence is even more graphic and intense. This is definitely one to watch after the kids under… I’d like to sat 14 or 15, are in bed.
Five out of five fingers on the Hand of Glory for the first 5 episodes of Daredevil on Netflix. I’ll let you know what I think of the season as a whole when I finish, which will likely be by the middle of next week and that’s only because I have a comic script to write and kids and should probably sleep at some point. To this point, each episode has been better than the one previous, and my expectations are now exceedingly high.
Don’t let me down, Matt Murdoch.
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