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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Daredevil: The Man Without Any Idea What He Looks Like In That Get-Up

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Matthew Fluxington

03:36 / 14.02.03

over the last few days it's gotten mostly rave advance reviews on the comic and film sites

You trust those folks?

Given the tastes of a lot of the people who write for those kind of things, that'd be enough to make sure that I never pay to see the thing.

05:54 / 14.02.03

Movie is a wreck. It inexplicably goes for the worst choices each time.

I got to see it for free though and it was worth my time to see Collin Farrel. He’s a complete loon in the film and intentionally or not, he made me laugh out loud each time he was onscreen.

One tip that may help my fellow movie goers, whenever there is a fight scene, just imagine you are hearing Scott Joplin music instead of the dreck soundtrack. It’s much more fun that way.

09:54 / 14.02.03

I noticed that shallow soundtrack...

and Affleck's gritted teeth, gawd... what was he inspiring from? Wolverine?

11:00 / 14.02.03

Yeah, that soundtrack is a real turkey and was the first thing I commented on to Mrs H.I.R last night as we walked out of the cinema. Otherwise I found the film pretty ordinary - some decent action, some reasonable touches of humour, but it obviously strives to say something about justice, retribution and all that stuff, but makes a complete hash of it.

12:26 / 14.02.03

Director is threatening with a second part, written by Kevin Smith.

13:01 / 14.02.03

Ebert gives it three stars, though he seems to be tiring of the superhero genre...

I am getting a little worn out describing the origin stories and powers of superheroes, and their relationships to archvillains, gnashing henchmen and brave, muscular female pals. They weep, they grow, they astonish, they overcome, they remain vulnerable, and their enemies spend inordinate time on wardrobe, grooming and props, and behaving as if their milk of human kindness has turned to cottage cheese.

...but he's got nice things to say about the acting...

Affleck is at home in plots of this size, having recently just tried to save Baltimore from nuclear annihilation and the world from "Armageddon," but Garner, Farrell and Duncan are relatively newer to action epics... They play their roles more or less as if they were real, which is a novelty in a movie like this, and Duncan in particular has a presence that makes the camera want to take a step back and protect its groin.

I love Ebert: like Pauline Kael, he's not only got great critical instincts, but quite the way with words.

20:14 / 14.02.03

Loved BULLSEYE...
Disapointed in KINGPIN...
ELEKTRA was okay...
and DAREDEVIL was better than I expected.

film sort of fell apart after BULLSEYE, KINGPIN was underused... music was weak, nice choregraphy...

01:57 / 17.02.03

Saw it today, against my better judgment, but like so many movies, I'd steeled myself for a Batman & Robin, and was fortunately spared that.

I agree, the soundtrack was excessively weak, but the thing that got me was the inconsistencies in his threshold for volume- one minute he's banging on this or that piece of something for the sound waves, and then he's screaming in agony when someone else does the same thing. (Or maybe the theater I was in just had a shitty sound system and I couldn't tell the volume differences.) I know next to nothing about the comic; it seemed fairly ridiculous, but I still thought it was better than Spiderman. Which reminds me: enough with the heroic voice overs.

03:32 / 17.02.03

I liked it. I've never even read a Dare Devil comic in my life (the character never appealed to me) but I saw the movie cause it's a comic book movie and my friends were all going to see it and for what it is (a child's film) it was pretty good. I think the main problem, much like X-men, was that the movie was mostly introduction but now that we've all been introduced to Dare Devil, Bullseye, Elektra, and the Kingpin the second part is gonna be so much better.

And, come on, it's only fucking DD it's not like they got Ben Affleck to play King Mob.

Who else is in DD's rouges gallery?

12:28 / 17.02.03

Daredevil was always a street-level kind of hero, fighting lots of gangsters and thugs. And ninjas, for some reason. His rogue's gallery of costumed types has some of the goofiest "super" cillains ever conceeived...

F'rinstance, there's the Stilt-Man:
[External image]

The Leap-Frog, who had a frog mask and boot-springs:
[External image]

Other lame-Os included the Beetle, who had a mecahnized green-and-purple suit that enable him to fly, and, um, suction-tipped finger extensions: and the Matador, who was, um, a matador.

The one I always liked, though, was the Gladiator—a bad-ass armored in spiky, pseudo-medieval bondage gear, bristling with blades and pointy bits, who had whirling buzz-saws mounted on his wrists!

[External image]

Not very practical at a distance, I suppose, but just thinking about the damage he could do in a hand-to-hand situation used to make me queasy. Very menacing dude, the Gladiator.

12:47 / 17.02.03

yeah i always thought any fight with the gladiator would have to be over pretty quickly. it's not like he'd ever have to hit anyone twice. i'm not going to find a picture but doesn't dd have another terrifying baddie called kangaroo? as said in the recent issues i borrowed from other-runce, 'they always tell you their name'. daredevil the comic is really good at the moment, despite my usual bendis reservations. gladiator is a nice perhaps gay man now who does bodyguard work for matt, and the stilt-man bit in the recent cheapo issue was priceless: 'all the times you've beaten me up and you're gonna sit there and pretend you don't even know me?'

the movie just tried a bit too hard. the bits they nicked from miller weren't as good as the bits they didn't take [ie matt's mum, the length of matt and elektra's relationship].

kingpin was about as scary as my sister but bullseye seemed to really work as a pub-happy irish loony - the bit where he was about to do elektra and she was whimpering through a slashed throat was as horrible as it really should have been.

fight choreography fudged by too-moody lighting as so often the case in western action movies.

really rubbish soundtrack.

but a perfectly good way to spend a couple hours. good xmen trailer too.

19:02 / 17.02.03

What's this Bullseye's near-two-minutes scene after the end credits I read about?

21:16 / 17.02.03

That was great...

Halfway into the credits there's a scene of a high security hospital room. Two armed guards outside the door, inside is a figure in a total body cast with only his eyes watching a fly buzzing about tauntingly. He struggles to reach for a earby needle where we then cut to the outer hall where the guards hear a tray fall and the we hear the Fly's buzzing stop. Back inside we see the fly impaled by the needle now stuck to a wall and hear the patient utter "bullseye." The credits continue...

21:19 / 17.02.03

Nice. And unexpected, so its a plus. It sort of sounds typical of fringe movies.

I read Farrel will not be in a second part. Who'll be the fucking villain then?

00:32 / 18.02.03

The Owl? Mr. Hyde? Copperhead?

14:00 / 18.02.03

Gridley's proposal for Daredevil sequel:

While investigating Kingpin's latest dealings with the Russian mafia, Daredevil is attacked by a fearsome redhead in skintight black leather... the Black Widow. Working for the KGB, she is investigating the same affair. But their attempts for very different types of justice rung in conflict of each other, even as they are falling in bed with each other....

...all this while Matt Murdoch is trying to make things work with a recovering junkie who's life he's saved, a strung out young woman named Karen....

oh, and I'd probably wanna throw Madcap in as Kingpin's latest assassin, but who knows what the studio would make of his outfit...

14:13 / 18.02.03

What, no Elektra? I think a Black Widow-Daredevil-Elektra triangle would be cool.

14:20 / 18.02.03

How well did DD do this weekend at the box office?

14:28 / 18.02.03

I heard $43 million.

14:28 / 18.02.03

I heard $43 million.

Matthew Fluxington

14:28 / 18.02.03

It was number one in the US by quite some distance, making $43.5 million, with the number two film taking in $19 million.

The Return Of Rothkoid

03:10 / 19.02.03

From Mr Cranky's review:

Some actors actually train for
movies like this by studying martial arts for a time, but if the first
confrontation between Daredevil and Elecktra Natchios (Jennifer
Garner) is any indication, Affleck walked straight out of the Betty
Ford Clinic and into his scene. At this point, you realize that
Affleck probably got the part of the blind superhero because he was
the only actor too inebriated to duck when the producers flung objects
at his head. For her part, Garner is Affleck's equal in woodenness.
Affleck fights like he's got a painful boner and Garner fights like
she put a Maxipad on upside-down.

Nuff said.

03:37 / 19.02.03

Me-ow.

Anyway, don't you think the next episode will be about the Hand?

09:49 / 19.02.03

Anal Daredevil Movie Geekboy Observations:

Stan Lee crossing road. (Obviously)

The boxers who took dives to allow Jack Murdock to win fights were named as Millar, Mack and Bendis.

Joe Queseda is a rapist.

Kevin Smiths character was called Kirby.

What did I miss?

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

12:23 / 19.02.03

Romita?

12:47 / 19.02.03

I do agree that the martial arts was the weakest part of the film. It's definitely something they have to work on for the sequel.

14:12 / 19.02.03

Oh, and Frank Millar was apparantly a dead guard (the one with the pencil ;0) )

19:04 / 19.02.03

I eard that Daredevil *kills* criminals in this movie. Is it true?

22:42 / 19.02.03

Yeah, Daredevil kills people. It was actually kinda jarring cause the only comic memory of DD that I have is the Punisher tying him to a gun and sorta forcing him to kill a bad guy and DD nearly pissing himself. The barroom fight gave me a fucking headache and I'm still not too sure what happened. Um, I know he jumped on some fucking ceiling fans.

23:31 / 19.02.03

[A critic dictates to a hapless Orr]

I have no words to express how crashingly poor this film was. Oh hang on, yes I do: "This film was crashingly poor".

Things I like to see in a film - yes even a superhero one - 1)plot 2)character development 3)characters 4)naked lesbians 5)fight sequences, especially when they're meant to be the selling point.

Daredevil failed to deliver on all of the above. Chizz. Especially the naked lesbians (with whips). The only character with any kind of back history was DD himself and his behavior was so riddled with inconsistencies thatI was tempted to believe that his disability was paranoid schizophrenia rather than blindness. The CGI was painfully obvious and Garner would only have come in second in a wet T-shirt competition (and there were multiple opportunities) Spiderman alone showed how this should be done.

[Really folks, she made me post this - dictation ends]

The Natural Way

12:32 / 20.02.03

As my brothrunce, put it:

"It's getting wearisome watching these guys attempt to tell 'The best Daredevil/Batman/Blah' story EVER, whilst simultaneously ramming origin stories down our throats... Oh that, and the fact that King pin IS more effective when he's not Hip-hop."

Haven't seen it, though.

15:16 / 20.02.03

Daredevil... kills... people... Daredevil... kills... people...

Agh. This is so much *not* Daredevil that it just ruined my disposition to watch the movie. Fuckers.

15:31 / 20.02.03

does he ever actually kill anyone? not that I remember. he might fail to save a baddie from a fatal situation, but it's not like he put the guy in that situation.

he just has this attitude of "if you're a criminal, you deserve what happens to you," which admittedly is pretty dark for DD, but I think works in the context if the film.

Jack The Bodiless

22:13 / 20.02.03

Oh, shit. Movie Daredevil kills people. Nooo. How can this be.

It's a movie. Of the comic. Meaning that it's an adaptation of the comic for mainstream Hollywood. The fact that it relates in any way to the comics you loved (or maybe just heard about) as a kid is a minor miracle.

Do you people practice to be this much of a cliched comic book audience, or is it something that comes naturally? You know that Kevin Smith wrote what passes for a plot in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back about you lot, right?

Jesus. It's like talking to cheese.

Matthew Fluxington

22:34 / 20.02.03

Aw, Jack, don't be a jerk. You're essentially right, but it is very questionable for the character to be a murderer, and I think people have a good reason to have concerns about the ethics of the film.

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