Daredevil

Few people understand the importance of Daredevil. It's an attempt by a studio to see if comic books are a valid medium to tap for ideas or not. There's very little risk when you make a Spider-Man, Hulk, Batman or X-Men movie because they are name brands, they're known commodities. All you have to do is put together a decent film, one that's not too silly and you've got a winner. The real tetst comes when you take a second-tier character like Daredevil or a third-tier character like Blade and put them in a movie. That's when Hollywood will know if they should put their weight behind the recent trend of successful comic book movies. Now, you might be thinking, that Blade and its sequel should've proved the potential for no-name heroes however those movies were less superhero and more supernatural. Daredevil is the first no-name superhero (i.e. dressed in spandex) to come out since comic book movies have started making money again (with the two Blades, the X-Men and Spider-Man movies). If it does well, the studios will feel more secure in backing the Punisher, Ghost Rider, Hellblazer, ad nauseum.

So the question rises: does Daredevil rise to meet the challenge set before it? For the most part, yeah. It is obvious how much both Mark Steven Johnson and Ben Affleck love the character. There's no real problem with how Jennifer Garner plays Elektra, although the character is not very well written. I'm not a huge fan of the way they chose to do Bullseye but Colin Farrell does it well. I do like Michael Clark Duncan as the Kingpin. The only three problems I have with the movie is the writing (which is atrocious), the editing (which is nauseating) and Ben Affleck's "Daredevil voice" (which just sounds silly).

A lot of the dialogue is just "on the nose" writing (my favorite bad line is when Daredevil is asked what he wants, Daredevil responds in his laughably bad voice "Justice.") and the motivation for any of Elektra's actions are either unclear or just not strong enough. The best written scenes of the film are between Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson, those are the ones that just feel the most natural to me. The editing, which is in the vein of a music video, just goes by too quickly to appreciate the action. These might've been some great fight scenes but I couldn't tell because the edits weren't clean. In going with the music video editing style is an overabundance of music throughout the film. It's distracting really, not to mention it's not very good (although I was a big fan of the use of House of Pain when Bullseye was introduced).

The radar vision is very good, it's a nice visual style and I think it works well.

All in all, it's a movie worth seeing and it's definitely one that comic fans should support if they want to see any more comic movies down the line.