Now it's time for a Wilgus Movie Reviews special issue in which we flash back to movies that should've been good, but royally sucked.



Daredevil

Let me begin by saying that I absolutely love Daredevil. His is one of the most imaginative and inventive characters ever to grace the pages of a comic book. Comic artist Frank Miller took the hero to new heights in his famous series of Daredevil and Elektra comics. The story is of one Matthew Murdock, a son of a boxer street kid who loses his sight from an accident involving strange chemicals poured over his eyes in a car accident. The chemicals do, however, enhance every other sense in his body, particularly his hearing so that his reflexes and senses are even better than before. His father, old and down on his luck, falls in with a bad crowd of gangsters working for the notorious crime-lord, the Kingpin, and ends up crossing them by winning a match that was supposed to be fixed against him. He is murdered by the Kingpin’s cronies and young Matt swears vengeance, and when he fills out, he dons a dark red suit and mask and goes by the moniker, Daredevil. By day, however, he is a criminal justice lawyer, taking on only innocent clients. A cool, not overly clichéd hero story such as this deserves a great movie. Unfortunately we didn’t get one.
It is too easy to say that Ben Affleck's sloppy acting ruined the film. To be fair, however, Ben wasn’t the one that ruined the film. It was acclaimed director Mark Steven Johnson. Yes, the one and only. This was his directorial debut although he wrote Grumpy Old Men, Simon Birch and did the story for the wildly successful Jack Frost with Michael Keaton in which the former Batman icon almost dies and is transformed into a disturbing CG rendition of a snowman. Whatever got into his head to take on a superhero film, particularly one as grittily beautiful as Daredevil, is beyond me.
Mr. Johnson begins with a cool element. A dark New York skyline, and a wounded Murdock in costume stumbling into a beautiful Catholic Church building. The tones are dark and gothic, with dark maroon digital grading, really cool. The entire movie, however, ends up being a flashback, which is annoying because there is little tension if you know that at some point the film is going to pick up again where it left off at the beginning. But I was ready to forgive, I was just happy to see Daredevil in his slick dark red action suit clutching his multi-purpose Billy Club, but then we go from the flashback to YET ANOTHER FLASHBACK through which we see Daredevil’s origin. The origin story went pretty much as afore stated. The only weird thing was that in this version, the young Matt never meets Stick, his mysterious and totally cool blind mentor. He just kind of makes himself into a little black belt and uses his all-too-perfect, highly choreographed moves to beat up on neighborhood bullies. This is the first real point in the movie where we catch a glimpse of the true lameness of this movie’s fight scenes. Here Matt does this Matrix move kind of thing where he runs up a wall and flips backwards off of it. This is where our hero, sadly, begins to look like a Neo wannabe. The movie doesn’t really start to suck until later on, though when he surfaces from the second flashback into the first flashback and meets Elektra, an overly sexy femme-fetal heiress, everything a shallow male wants in a girlfriend. Jennifer Garner’s entrance into the film seems to bring with it an overwhelming wave of idiocy with her contrived lines and macho attitude. Also this is where Ben Affleck really starts to go sour on us. His tongue-in-cheek attitude is simply NOT becoming of the Bruce Wayne-esque Matt Murdock.

The film’s first major fight scene is where the silliness begins. Murdock, who upon “seeing” the girl (he actually kind of smells and senses her aura; she could be like 300 pounds for all he knows) tries to get her to tell him her name. She doesn’t want to and he follows her out back to a vacant playground where they (I kid you not) take off their jackets and proceed to go all kung fu on each other for no particular reason IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PLAYGROUND. I present to Mr. Johnson, comic book class 101: Q. how do superheroes keep their secret identity? A. They blend in with the millions of people in the city by pretending to be mild mannered. THEY DO NOT FIGHT IN PLAYGROUNDS IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Only when they change into their tights and latex do they start breaking out the kung-fu. Not here. Certainly not in broad daylight in front of thirty schoolchildren. I kept wondering why they were even fighting in the first place. There is no explanation.



Oh yeah, the villains. Colin Farrel plays Bullseye, an assassin who can turn pretty much anything into a dart or projectile of some sort, and Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin. Duncan actually does a pretty good job and doesn’t make his character look like some gangsta’. Farrel doesn’t do well at all. He fails to make his character interesting or menacing in any way. His character is always a downer to any potential coolness. His lines show just how bad the writing is.

Kingpin: "How do you kill a man without fear?"
Bullseye: "By puttin' the fear in him." Kingpin: "Ummm...okay. Or you could just throw some sharp crap at him and make him bleed to death"
Bullseye: "Yeah, yeah, that'd work, too. Hey check out my brand! Got it when I was pledging at St. Mary's"

ok ok so that's not exactly how the scene went, but given the dialogue, it darn well should've.

Bullseye's costume is really hideous. He’s got a dark Matrix-like jacket and this target shape BRANDED INTO HIS HEAD. No wonder he’s a bad guy, you just can’t be a good guy with that thing in the middle of yer head. They never really explained the gigantic and obviously painful indentions in his forehead. I kind of felt bad for him, really. Police wouldn’t have much trouble identifying him with that big bull’s eye on his noggin (except that he fools them by wearing a TOBOGGAN! How perplexing!). Apparently, Johnson thought that if Bullseye kills every guard or bystander he sees then we’ll be convinced that he’s bad. Oh we get it, Mark. He’s bad. Admittedly this is kind of what Bullseye does in the comics but Mr. Johnson does a remarkable job at making it look goofy.



The real disappointment comes as the story heats up. The action scenes are poor. They look like a stunt show. I could almost see the wires and mats. Daredevil seems to fly between buildings instead of jumping, and things get kind of sketchy. Bullseye kills Elektra’s dad and makes it look like Daredevil did it. She swears vengeance and goes after him while falling in love with his alter ego, Matt Murdock. She is in for a shock and after a fight with daredevil finds out that they are one and the same. She doesn’t have much time to think about it ‘cause that Bullseye guy comes in and kills her (best part of the movie). Anyway, Daredevil and Bullseye battle the hell out of each other all the way into the church building from the beginning in a brilliant display of cheesy Matrix-like stunts and sub-par fighting. My favorite is when Bullseye picks up a dozen shards of glass and hurls them at Daredevil who evades them by doing like two slow motion back flips. Maybe Bullseye just sucks. “Oh, man, he was MOVING, dangit!!” At the end Daredevil does something to Bullseye’s hands which pisses him off ‘cause he won’t be able to throw a dart again, and then he stands arms outstretched like a crucifix and Daredevil kicks him off the building and he falls to his death. Johnson was obviously trying to make Bullseye look like Jesus for some reason, but I don’t understand the symbolism there or any correlation between the Son of God and this lame excuse for a bad guy. Maybe it was Johnson’s weak attempt at hatin’ on some Christians, but it falls flat, looks silly and that’s when I wanted the movie to be over. No. Then Daredevil has to beat the crap out of The Kingpin in an equally lame trying-to-be-stylish fight scene with water everywhere. Then it’s over. Man I was happy to be done with that crap. Johnson, I hope you’re happy. You’ve had your way with one of the Marvel greats and now just leave us alone, please!