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DAREDEVIL by Tom McCurrie
I dig comic books. After all, I'm probably one of the few people on earth who has every issue of ROM: SPACEKNIGHT (Hail, Galador!). But as movies, comic books are more problematic. DAREDEVIL is a prime example.
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)
To my surprise, DAREDEVIL has a lot going for it, at least more going for it than I initially expected from writer Mark Steven Johnson, scribe of GRUMPY OLD MEN. (I had nightmares of Daredevil and Bullseye as senile codgers swapping fart jokes and wet-dreaming about Ann-Margret.)
Strikingly stylized direction (also by Johnson) and better-than-average performances are two of those things. Colin Farrell is especially kick-ass as Bullseye, a cross between a skinhead and the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Farrell is usually as flat as the American accents he tries to mimic. But DAREDEVIL allows him to rap in his own Irish brogue, so he seems more relaxed, so much so that he delivers a performance with all the charisma those "Next Big Thing" articles promised.
But best of all (and fortunate of all, since this is a screenwriter's newsletter) are the daring plot twists. The most shocking of the bunch is the death of Elektra, Daredevil's superbabe love-interest. You don't see the death of the gal-pal too often in major-studio releases, so enjoy the freshness while you can. I love the moment where Daredevil uses his sonar to see the heart of his beloved beating to a halt. An unbearably tragic touch.
(It must be said that Fox has struck a deal with Jennifer Garner to reprise the Elektra role in a spin-off -- so it looks like they found a way to bring her back from that great big Comic Rack in the sky.)
Another twist has Daredevil refusing to kill Kingpin, the man who wasted his father. This is a refreshing change from the usual action flick, where the hero almost always whacks the bad guy instead of throwing him in jail. By not sending Kingpin to the hereafter, Daredevil completes a strong internal arc that moves him from revenge to justice. (Earlier in the picture, Daredevil iced a rapist without the bat of a blind eye.) So not only is this twist fresh, it makes the protagonist more three-dimensional, and thus more compelling.
Now for the debits. First of all, Daredevil is too much like Spiderman for his own good. Being a blind superhero is a cool hook, but it isn't enough when he wears a red suit and swings across the concrete canyons like our favorite Web Slinger.
Another problem: The villain's plan isn't very high-stakes. Kingpin kills an associate (Elektra's father) who wants to bail on his criminal empire. How riveting. I know we don't want our villains taking over the world all the time (paging Dr. Evil), but couldn't Johnson come up with something more threatening than this? Without a way to demonstrate his badness, Kingpin fails to be a memorably hissible heavy. (We do discover Kingpin murdered DD's pop, but that backstory comes way too late in the movie to have any impact.)
Of course, there are the usual plotholes. When Elektra discovers Daredevil is her squeeze Matt Murdock, she swallows his story that he didn't kill her father way too quickly. And how do to the police know Fisk is Kingpin at the end? Bullseye is obviously too incapacitated to tell them, being at one with a car windshield and all. And why should they believe Daredevil, the man the city considers a menacing vigilante?
However, the biggest problem with DAREDEVIL is the problem most superhero scripts have. Their protagonists are too reactive. They don't embark on a quest, they wait for the villain (and his quest) to come to them. Like BATMAN and SUPERMAN, DAREDEVIL defends the city, or more specifically, he defends the status quo. He only springs into action when that status quo is threatened. When the villain is defeated, DD returns to his lair, waiting for the status quo to be threatened again. In other words, Daredevil isn't on a quest to accomplish anything new; he's on a quest to keep things exactly the same. Over the short length of a comic book, this isn't an issue, but over the much longer length of a feature, it is very much so. That's because visually and emotionally we feel like we're running in place. There's no outer journey to match the power of the inner one.
That's why I prefer action-adventures with more physical journeys, like THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. The external quest to destroy the Ring (a quest that literally takes us from the Shire to Mordor) parallels Frodo's inner quest towards personal responsibility. Each journey echoes, and strengthens, the other.
As long as there are comic books, there will be comic-book movies. The trick is to make both inner and outer quests equally strong. Let's hope THE HULK does that this summer.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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