Date Night: Daredevil

In which I review a movie that's streamable on Netflix.

So it might have taken a few weeks more to finish up than I originally thought, but I've finally put Marvel's Daredevil to bed.  Marvel's been struggling to "go small" for a few years now, and I think that it's safe to say that with this series they've put to rest any lingering doubts that they're playing second fiddle to DC's television universe.

In the wake of the Battle of New York, two local boys return to Hell's Kitchen to open up a well-intentioned law firm.  Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson want to meaningfully help the people that they grew up with using the law.  Sometimes, however, the law simply isn't enough.  And when that increasingly proves to be the case, Matt Murdock will willingly give into the devil in his heart to save his city.

Daredevil is the rare kind of series that seems to get everything right out of the gate.  While it was always a given that Charlie Cox would at least be good, Elden Henson, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Deborah Ann Woll, Bob Gunton and Toby Leonard Moore were all far better actors than their roles deserved.

How a thirteen episode Netflix series managed to land a heavy-weight like Vincent D'Onofrio I'll never know.  His is hands down the greatest Kingpin in the history of the character.  He takes a pretty conventional antagonist and transforms him into a surprisingly sympathetic tragic figure.  The episode explaining his back story was downright haunting: watching him claw his way out of sleep, while desperately turning toward "Rabbit in a Snowstorm" gives us not merely the villain of the piece, but a fully developed character who's just as interesting and compelling as any of the heroes.

It would be a supreme waste of the character to relegate him solely to the small screen.  Kingpin is as much a Spider-Man villain as he is a Daredevil one, and I for one would love to see him square off against Peter Parker in The Spectacular Spider-Man.  We already know that the plot's going to revolve around Spider-Man's attempts to become an Avenger (and Stark's resistance to the idea), but there still has to be a criminal element to tie everything together.  Why not a local crime lord who so often employed, deployed and created the story's on-the-ground villains?

When you get right down to it, Daredevil is basically a Marvel-branded, working class version of Arrow.  Anybody who likes one of these shows will invariably like the other as well.  At the same time, however, the absence of the melodramatic "lifestyles of the rich and famous" sub plots that so often weighed Arrow down are inherently absent Daredevil.  Furthermore, the Marvel show's characters are far more interesting to watch and its virtual half-season ensures that it gets to the point without having to stretch itself too thin along the way.

I'm also happy to report that when we actually do see Murdock's iconic costume in action, it actually looks a lot better than it did in the set photos that were floating around before the series' premiere.  I'm sure that a lot of that is because of how often the character flips around while fighting, but it really isn't that bad of a costume.  And when you consider that they'll probably revamp it before season two - probably even before The Defenders - you realize that we don't have to deal with it for all that long anyway.

If this is the kind of quality that we can hope to see from the other Marvel Netflix series - Iron Fist, Luke Cage and A.K.A. Jessica Jones - then Marvel has truly come into its own with television.  The company's eye for talent an willingness to let each property be its own thing - the very things that made their movies so great in the first place - continue to prove themselves to be the rule here.  This is a definite must-see.

Rating:  9.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes.  I'm even willing to say that it's worth subscribing to Netflix for a month by itself.

So what did you think of the new Daredevil series?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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