Daredevil Review!

Alright! Today I'm reviewing the hit Netflix TV show Daredevil, which is about the really good lawyer Matt Murdock who lost his eyesight as a young child and gained super powers that enhanced his other senses. Throughout the series, we see Matt come into conflict with the ruthless kingpin of crime Wilson Fisk, former lover Elektra Natchios, secret ninja organization The Hand, mass shooter Frank Castle, and troubled FBI agent Benjamin Poindexter.

Right off the bat, Daredevil's first season gets several things perfect, namely the cinematography, action, casting, score, philosophies, writing, characterization, and overall emotional payoff. It hits it out of the park in nearly every regard, offering live-action iterations of the character's best comic runs and perfectly encapsulating the Daredevil fans want to see. 

Charlie Cox simply is Matt Murdock. His performance defines the character and the show, and by the end of the series, the two cannot be separated. It's as if they took how I pictured the character when I first read Daredevil Born Again and just did that. He is Daredevil. The same can be said for the supporting cast of characters - Deborah Ann Woll is Karen Page, Elden Hensen is Foggy Nelson, Vondie Curtis-Hall is Ben Urich, and Vincent D'Onofrio is the Kingpin. The characters from the comics were ripped from the page and onto the screen. 

A large part of that is the writing and tone surrounding them. Kingpin's appearances in the first season are so layered with tone and mythos that it does feel like the man is a legend, someone to truly fear. The show also does a fantastic job of delivering on why we should fear him, showing his brutal rage and cutthroat sensibilities. When he is on screen, something is bound to go down. It feels like he's always five steps ahead and unbeatable. 

The show also has absolutely amazing cinematography (Provided you like the color yellow). It reminded me heavily of The Batman, wherein scenes set at night are still left visible due to smart lighting. It's also here where we see a strange dichotomy between the Netflix TV shows and the MCU - while the Netflix shows are absent colorful costumes, the lighting is always vibrantly atmospheric. The opposite is said about the MCU - lots of colorful costumes, but relatively bland lighting. 

This is a note that applies to the entire series - the action. It's not often that action scenes feel especially gripping to me, but Daredevil's never let my eyes leave the screen for a moment. Well choreographed and gritty action makes you truly afraid of knives, screwdrivers, car doors, batons, pencils, scissors, and just about anything that the characters use as a weapon. Every action has a ton of weight behind it, making you feel each blow. 

Something I found interesting was that it applied Watchmen philosophies on why superheroes operate and applies it to Daredevil. In a way lots of superhero media forgets, Daredevil remembers that it's not normal for non-superpowered entities to go out and beat criminals to a pulp at night. Frank discussions on if it's a genuine need for Matt to function and the balance between mild-mannered and heroic personas frequently occur, each with a level of depth to them impossible to not admire. 

The second season left me with far more gripes than the first - secret ninjas invading New York City felt too much like Batman Begins, everyone Claire Temple came into conflict with at the hospital was cartoonishly evil, and the lighting took a turn for the worse as they seemed to think “darker tone = darker lighting.” It did the Man of Steel thing where a darker and grittier tone is shown by darker lighting. And not moody lighting, but just hard-to-see-what’s-going-on lighting. 

But the biggest sin of season two was having two loosely connected plot lines, one of which was far more interesting than the other. Matt leads plot #1, where he teams up with Stick and Elektra to defeat the Hand. Karen leads plot #2, where she and Foggy deal with the Punisher’s actions. Plot #1 just isn’t as good as plot #2. While it’s cool to see Elektra integrated into the show and Élodie Yung is more than competent at the role, she lacked the same “is” factor that the rest of the cast had. When Elektra is on screen it’s enjoyable, but it doesn’t instantly grab your attention like Vincent D’Onofrio does. Part of that might have been Elektra’s effect on Matt - he begins to become so unreliable for Foggy and Karen that it was hard to like him. And while the series does well at acknowledging that and making it a big plot point in later seasons, seeing Matt become an outright jerk to Foggy and Karen didn’t feel great.

But again, the worst thing about Plot #1 was that it distracted from plot #2. Daredevil offers up one of the genre’s finest actor-character matches with Jon Bernthal as the Punisher. He is the Punisher. And introducing him as a philosophical counterpart to Daredevil was a fantastic escalation from season one. His uneasy stance on screen, the mystery and emotion surrounding his past, and, most of all, the fantastic writing concerning his actions. By all accounts and definitions, Frank Castle is a mass shooter, yet I always ended up… rooting for him? It felt wrong, especially since I was watching this arc around the time Uvalde happened. It never felt right, but it was pretty damn compelling. Several of Bernthal’s scenes are the best the MCU gets - his rejecting the Kingpin, his confession in the courtroom, and, best of all, his argument with Matt over the logic of a no-kill rule. Those three minutes are peak television and the peak of the genre. Every scene where he shot people, even those that deserved it, put the fear of god into me. Especially when it was just bullets coming through a window from an unseen shooter. Superhero media can often fall prey to making guns ineffective, but the Punisher’s numerous fatalities make this issue nonexistent.

And because of how compelling the Punisher is, the Hand, Elektra, and the titular character seem less interesting. Like, it’s still great television, but it can’t help but pale in comparison. The ninjas with swords felt like a break in the realism the first season established and Elektra being the Chosen One even more so. And I do understand that irony, given that the main character thinks God himself gave him a Chosen One destiny,  but “the ninjas from Batman Begins need her to continue being immortal” felt silly. It was always fantastically choreographed and scored perfectly though, and the occasionally shifts to horror was genuinely frightening.

Now, to properly understand the third season of Daredevil, I thought I had to take a detour and watch The Defenders. While I'm happy to say that watching Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist wasn't necessary to understand The Defenders, I am sad to report that watching The Defenders is somewhat necessary to understand Daredevil season three. For the most part, I liked The Defenders, specifically the effort given to color code each of the seasons to each character's distinct palette. However, I disliked Finn Jones as Iron Fist (Not because he wasn't Asian, he just didn't feel like the living embodiment of that character the way every other cast member did, his shifts from über-realistic grim darkness to comedic jabs was odd and better suited for a teenage character, and I wish he had worn comic-inspired attire) and the fact that they took the weakest part of Daredevil's second season (The Hand), and then used it as the basis for an entire season. I loved Luke Cage though, Mike Colter just is Luke Cage.

I liked the dynamics of the group and every single scene involving characters from Daredevil, but ultimately, The Defenders was mostly fine. I was frequently engaged with the show (Mostly thanks to the color palettes), loved all the different discussions on the philosophy of crimefighting, the intro, and I liked the feeling of a big team-up episode but for an entire season. However, the villainous aspect of the show was lacking, and I consequently rate it 8/10.

Now, fun story - while I wasn’t planning on seeing The Defenders, a flashback in the first episode of season three (That I assumed was from said show) made me think it was necessary to watch. Then I watched The Defenders and that scene never happened, so… that was a fun digression. The only actual impact The Defenders has on season three is Foggy talking about how he gave M

att the costume before he “died” and the ultimate fate of Stick, whose absence (Along with Claire Temple) you probably won’t notice due to season three’s outstanding quality and well-paced plotting.

I’d say season three was a return to form for Daredevil, but the quality never really left. Daredevil just goes from “good” to “absolutely spectacular” with the return of Wilson Fisk as the season’s big bad, Matt’s personal vendetta with God,  and the introduction of Bullseye. While I can’t confirm that Wilson Bethel is Bullseye due to me not knowing too much about the character, I do know that he was highly captivating every second he was on screen. Even if he never wore a silly costume, he sets the standard for Bullseye. 

Bullseye feels like a one-man army, truly unstable and unstoppable in the show. Action scenes with him feel like a dream where you’re being chased by a monster and there’s no end in sight. It made me realize why he’s such a good foil for Daredevil - the man who can aim and ricochet anything against the man who can see everything. I also loved how they depicted his decreasing sanity, the reliance on this therapist’s tapes, and his final moral compass being Wilson Fisk. It was an excellent character study. With a Thunderbolts project in development for the MCU, I can only hope for his return.

The rest of the cast is, as expected, spectacular. Kingpin feels especially volatile here and truly unstoppable. When characters say there’s no escaping him I never doubt it for a moment, the show does an excellent job showing his reach and influence. His scheme to use the FBI to his own means was great too, I loved seeing how his plan went off in almost perfect success. It never felt like the writers were like “oh, he’s the unstoppable Kingpin, of course they’re working for him.” There’s always a tiny bit of insight as to how exactly Kingpin turned their hearts that was frightening. The show also gave us a first hand look at that corruption through FBI Agent Nadeem, and while I would normally dislike a major character being introduced in the third season, his journey from resident hero to driving masked killers around was well executed (And then his wife only married him because he’s a good person and blows up about him being blackmailed? Like dude, ouch). 

And, of course, the returning cast returns in spectacular fashion. Everyone is still the pitch perfect version of that character, Foggy finally has the appropriate haircut, Matt has some of the greatest quotes of the series, and Karen… actually, I didn’t like Karen much in this season. It seemed like all she did was walk around in a hoodie and cry, which I wasn’t too jazzed about. I still loved it, but I wish it gave Deborah Ann Woll more to do.

But above all else, the thing I enjoyed most about this season were the iconic quotes and moments. Things that go down in this season rank among the finest scenes in all superherodom and some of the quotes are now ingrained into how I see the characters. Specifically “I’m Daredevil now… not even God can stop that” and the final confrontation against Kingpin. It was so close and personal and raw. It felt like a personal victory for me the viewer, to see Matt finally take this guy down, and the guttural “you will” demands finally gave Matt the power over Kingpin that the series had been building towards. It was fantastic; brutal; emotional; in a word, it was Daredevil. 

If Disney+ wants to reboot/continue Daredevil, well, they had better get it right. While I'll always enjoy seeing Charlie Cox in the role and am hopeful for the "DD" logo to appear, the six-episode format and MCU-isms are potential dealbreakers. There's a level of grit and realism that this series had while nailing the fantastical elements of the costumed crusades that no other MCU property has had, and it's integral to the success of the series. There’s a reason Kingpin’s appearance in Hawkeye was mixed, it’s because he went down after being hit by a car driven by an employee that stood up to him, brushed off an arrow to the chest, and then had an elaborate coin flip explode an arrow near him. It was a far cry from how Daredevil treated his menace - like a legitimate threat.

And no, that's not to say "So dark and gritty! PG-13 Disney will ruin it all with their kid-friendliness!" The fact of the matter is Daredevil was mostly PG-13. Absent any sex or harsh language, it was the sporadic moments of (Never gratuitous) violence that got it to TV-MA. A TV-14 series could and should work, but Disney+/the MCU has thus far proven itself incapable of producing anything close to the gritty realism of Daredevil or even DC's closest counterpart The Batman. 

Daredevil is one of the strongest entries in the superhero genre, joining the ranks of Justice League Unlimited and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes as peak superhero television. Everyone is superbly cast, the atmosphere is thick, the action is gripping, and the villains of the series - specifically Vincent D'Onofrio as Kingpin - are the perfect representations of their comic book counterparts. I understand the hype now, why every new MCU show is compared to Daredevil. It's because it sets the bar and is of such high quality that it essentially becomes Marvel's The Dark Knight. The go-to comparison and possibly their greatest product. 

Overall, I give Daredevil a 10/10. "Bearing pitch-perfect casting, tone, and writing, Daredevil does justice to the Man Without Fear.” 

The ball's in your court, Marvel. Don't screw it up.
Also, why title it "Born Again" when every beat from Born Again was already used in S3?
I'm hyped regardless, but still.