The Unbearable Tedium of Netflix's Daredevil
Damn you Christopher Nolan!!
Like everyone else, I am pretty much burnt out on the whole “Marvel Universe” idea. I think I watched the first season of Loki, just because I really like Tom Hiddleston, but that was the last thing I watched in that vein.
That is, until recently. I have a habit of watching clips on YouTube that come up in my feed (blessings be upon the algorithm), and recently, I have become obsessed with this, which is just awesome:
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This is from Daredevil, a Netflix series based on the comic book of the same name. Now, I really don’t care anything about the Daredevil comics but this scene sparks joy for me. Frank Castle, the guy on the witness stand, is “The Punisher,” a former army vet turned vigilante, who starts killing criminals after his family is murdered. In the scene his lawyer, Matt Murdock, is trying keep him out of jail by claiming his killing spree was due to mental incompetence. The kicker is that Matt Murdock is Daredevil, the titular superhero. The scene is so great because Castle, played by the wonderful Jon Bernthal, rather than going along with this, submarines the whole thing by copping to the murders, screaming “I am the Punisher!” The fuck you energy in this scene is ginormous. I must have watched it a thousand times already I love it so much.
On the basis of this, I decided to see if maybe Daredevil (and the spin off with Bernthal as The Punisher) were any good. I had read somewhere a few years ago that Murdock’s character is played as a conflicted Catholic who regularly visits a priest in the series, so the show also had some papist solidarity going for it as well. I had some hopes, in other words
Well, I made it through to the last episode of season 1 of Daredevil before giving up and throwing in the towel after the first five minutes of it. My God, was it tedious! What made this so disappointing for me is that the show is actually very well made overall but was submarined by both the writing and the overall concept of the series.
First off, let me say the actors were excellent. I say this because I didn’t really care about any of the characters for the most part but found their performances engaging anyway. Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays the villain “Kingpin,” was splendid, even though I could not take his character seriously (more on that anon).
Also, the series is very sharp visually speaking. There are a ton of scenes with two people talking in a room, but the directors kept things interesting by varying their shots, emphasizing different aspects of what was going on, so that it didn’t feel stale. I thought at first the show might be kind of drab (and parts of it are, for good reasons) but it makes great use of color and lighting to emphasize different locations, characters. Whatever its faults, Daredevil looks and feels like actual cinema.
But oh, what about the writing? The writing. There’s a larger problem here, but let me start by saying that the first ten or so episodes felt like they were fifty percent flashback scenes. That’s probably an exaggeration but they did lard the backstory in that way from the start. I have only ever finished one screenplay and taken a couple of classes, but my recollection is that flashbacks are frowned upon for a reason. Before I even felt a connection to his character, they were loading the audience up with backstory that you really didn’t care about that much, because you haven’t bonded with the character. They did this later on with Kingpin and it was even less effective, for reasons I’ll get to.
The problem is that I never took to any of the characters, especially Murdock and Fisk (i.e. Kingpin). The problem with Murdock is that he spends the bulk of his time on screen whinging about whether he was doing the right thing by becoming a vigilante. I get they want the audience to understand he is not just a straight up murderer like the guys he is trying to stop, but the show makes that amply clear. The entire city is bought and sold by Fisk and people try to murder Murdock constantly. There was no need to have him bare his soul to every single character every episode when you have the priest for that. Again, that’s an exaggeration but it felt like he spent more time agonizing over whether or not it was morally right to beat up or kill violent murderers than he did stopping them.
Then there is kingpin. Kingpin, whose flashbacks produced the one and only real payoff I can recall in the first season, I found utterly ridiculous. Kingpin is a crimelord who literally has no emotional self-control, particularly when it comes to the women in his life. (Nota bene: spoilers from here on out).
Fisk murdered his father when he was a kid because he beat the shit out of his mother. This apparently explains his impulse control problem: when a Russian mobster he is working with interrupts a date with his love interest, Fisk decapitates him by slamming his head between a SUV door repeatedly. Later, he murders a journalist who visited his mother in a nursing home, and throws his accountant down an elevator shaft when he finds out he tried to kill his girlfriend. (The accountant had the crazy idea that his girlfriend was making him sloppy on the business end. Don’t know where he got that idea from!)
I guess this is supposed make him seem dangerous but it only made him seem risible to me. Once any one with a brain figured out his weakness, Kingpin would be doomed. You could literally send him into a stupefying rage just by making “yo momma” jokes about his mother. It is impossible to take a “villain” seriously who acts like a gigantic man-baby.
The only character I felt was interesting in the slightest was Karen (ironic, I know), a client of Murdock’s who is victimized in the first episode but grows as a character throughout the first season. She even takes out one of the bad guys in a shocking but believable scene, which I thought was the best in the whole season.
I am guessing that the main characters are probably written with comic book fans in mind, but I still couldn’t take them seriously. This leads me to my last point. Perhaps these types of characters are more believable in a comic book setting, where these things aren’t so noticeable. But when you are trying to make a gritty, realistic version of this world (which Daredevil was clearly intended to be) I don’t think it translates well to a naturalistic medium like film.
Murdock is supposed to have gotten his powers (superhearing, reflexes) from getting toxic waste in his eyes as a child. Does this make sense when you are trying to make a Death Wish style series? Murdock’s father was killed by mobsters when he threw a fight when Murdock is a kid, but it hardly seems like his actual motivation. Actually, I’m not sure motivaton matter that much for characters like Murdock or Castle since they are not real characters; they are archetypes.
Somone once said that a character like Superman is a child’s power fantasy (“You can’t make me go to bed—I’ve got superpowers!”) and there is an element of that in all comic book heroes. We don’t watch Daredevil or Batman because we are interested in their complex personalities but because they provide us the catharsis of beatning up bad guys who never get what they deserve in real life. You can give them some more depth I suppose, but if you don’t give us that basic payoff, their personalities don’t matter. And if they are boring, then they also put you to sleep.
Some of this I blame on my bete noire, Christopher Nolan. As much as I enjoyed his Batman trilogy, it seems like every single comic book movie tries to be “dark” and “realistic” for no real reason. Again, some of this can justified by the source material, but I can’t help thinking Daredevil would have been much more enjoyable if he’d spent more time kicking the shit out of people and less debating morality. If I want to attend an ethics seminar, I’ll audit one at the local university.
Needless to say, I won’t be watching The Punisher either, even though the clips on Youtube make it look pretty awesome. It is made the same people, so I don’t think it is worth the effort at this point. Naturally, Marvel Studios is planning on a reboot of both characters for a new series, so if you did like the original, more is on the way. I, however, have to pass on that one.