Starring: Colin Farrell, Michael Clarke Duncan and Jennifer Garner
Director: Mark Steven Johnson
Rated: M15+
WE know from Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love and Changing Lanes that Ben Affleck is a good actor, so why is it that he stars in so many lame projects?
In recent years Ben has done the theologically confused and offensive Dogma, the long and dull Pearl Harbour and the ridiculous The Sum of All Fears. But Daredevil takes the cake. It’s just plain awful.
Matt Murdoch (Ben Affleck) grows up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. His father Jack (David Keith) was once a great boxer, aka ‘The Devil’. Aged 12, Matt witnesses his father at work on the wharves, beating up another man who cannot pay his debt to the Mafia.
Devastated at what he sees, Matt takes off until he is struck by a forklift mover that in turn pierces a drum of harmful chemicals. Matt is left blind. Full of remorse his father hits the straight and narrow, that is, he goes back into the boxing ring!
While Jack trains for his bouts, Matt hones his surviving senses which are now fully alert to the external world. When Jack is killed for not fixing his bouts, Matt vows revenge.
Years later we find Matt, now a successful lawyer taking on all the hard cases from Hell’s Kitchen. When he doesn’t get the verdict he’s after by day, he puts on a silly looking costume that night and becomes Daredevil, exacting revenge and giving out his version of justice.
His antics eventually bring him face to face with Bullseye (Colin Farrell), an Irish sociopathic darts champion (I’m not making this up), who is working for Jack’s killer.
At least with Superman and Spiderman, we didn’t have to take any of it seriously. Unfortunately even though Daredevil’s script has some self-deprecating humour, there are enough reference points to serious issues to move it beyond pure fantasy and have it offend most sensible people.
At one stage Daredevil plaintively states to his love interest Elektra (Jennifer Garner) that ‘I’m the good guy’.
If so why doesn’t he just become a better lawyer, and stop the midnight jaunts where he kills those exonerated that day in the court and wounds just about everyone else in sight. He is a dangerous vigilante, of the most extreme right-wing type, hell-bent on revenge at any cost.
Matt is also a devout Catholic and the film is dripping in iconography. Churches, candles, crucifixes, the stigmata and the Sacred Heart all get a run. Matt seems to live on top of, or next to the church wherein his bed is a coffin filled with water which, when he lies down in it, comes up and over his ears. Daredevil mustn’t roll over during the night.
In more ways than one Matt is a very sick man. He goes to confession after each of his midnight escapades as Daredevil.
The priest tells him he can’t absolve him because he has no sorrow for sin or any sincere desire for an amendment of his life. A voice of sanity in the script.
Alas, poor Fr Everett (Derek O’Connor) goes on to absolve him anyway, and by the end of the film thinks Daredevil’s revengeful bloodlust is admirable. On both scores Fr Everett is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
You get the picture. The only thing going for Daredevil is the special effects. But even then it looks like a dark and grungy Spiderman meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in NYC.
Only go if you have done no penance this Lent.
