Oh DAREDEVIL, where do I begin? I'd ask you to show me the way, but then we'd have a blind leading the blind situation.
I suppose the best and most appropriate way to start this review would be by saying I LIKE superheroes. And who doesn't? Superheroes, in whatever form, be it print or digital media, are almost always a fun time, and though that seems a simple analysis, it's the core reason superheroes are dominating the box office right now. Not everybody is looking for the answers to this week's existential crisis neatly packaged into an hour and forty-five minutes of hard stares, subtext, and timely orchestration. Some people just want to have a good time; some people just want to watch chaos from the safety of their couch cushions.
So noted, I cannot say I LOVE superhero movies/TV. I love SOME of them, and like many others, but case by case, superhero entertainment can be done "wrong" too easily for me to ever dismiss my reservations about the genre. Its tropes--defined moral codes, sidekicks, secret identities, et cetera--have made Superheroes what they are, and are much of the reason these stories remain so beloved, but they also have become a detriment to the genre in this age where Marvel programming clogs the summer blockbuster list, and supplements its silver screen offerings with a half-dozen TV "originals" to keep us tuning in between Avengers installations (not to mention the surging D.C. coming on strong from behind, about to make this a true superhero arms race). The temptation now, to use superhero tropes lazily, as story filler between action sequences, has never been higher, and though the Marvel juggernaut will never admit it, their product's potency is dipping, from genetically altered spider bite to Kale Smoothie.
It's because of this quantity over quality Marvel mission statement that movies like the most recent FANTASTIC FOUR flop get made, or TV shows like AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., which I've heard described as "criminally boring" for 80% of its first season. I've only watched one episode. Wasn't a fan--the pilot was riddled with the aforementioned lazy applications of tropery which so displease me. But though Marvel is a monster, it is not unfeeling--all this programming offers just as many opportunities to get it "right" as it does to muck things up, provided they can learn from their mistakes.
So where does that leave us with DAREDEVIL?
DAREDEVIL, it strikes me, is an entity struggling against its own handicaps, fighting to rise above them. Apt, no? I'm not calling superhero tropes an inherent burden, but if we're being honest, they can only be applied two ways--they can be done WELL, handled with freshness and appropriate to the story's context, or they can be used as a crutch. There is no neutral application, and you won't find one in DAREDEVIL Season 1, though you will find a confusing mix of both positive and negative uses.
DD Season 1 is, at its best, riveting and startling in its uniqueness. Perhaps its most blatant separation from the Marvel status quo can be found in Season 1's body count--this show is VIOLENT, and unlike the vast majority of the Marvel canon, DD doesn't defeat its own violence by turning it cartoonish, or shy from its partner in realism, Death. GAME OF THRONES would have trouble matching DD blow for blow, and for someone like me, frustrated with the Marvel Cinematic Universe's perpetually fake stakes, stemming from their utter disregard for anything like mortal consequence (how many times has Loki "died" now? Three? Four?), this iteration of "the devil of Hell's Kitchen" is refreshing, dynamic, and arresting.
The credit here should probably be given to the freedoms allowed by cable outlaw Netflix, but also to Season 1's showrunner, Steven S. DeKnight. As a writer, DeKnight is a man of many talents, and his shows are never better than when he's letting those talents cause gorey, destructive havoc all over television screens. Being a devotee to DeKnight's SPARTACUS series, I could see his bloody figure prints all over this season (the Yakuza leader, Nobu, even said "shit and piss" at one point, which made my week), and though DeKnight reportedly won't be back for Season 2, I hope whoever takes the helm will follow his example. Please.
Maybe I'm asking too much for such attempts at realism and consequence from the rest of my superhero media, but DAREDEVIL seems to do it with ease, and the show is that much better for it. The Russian mob subplot stands out as a highlight of the season, in this respect. The story here was gruesome, emotionally raw and genuinely dramatic. It also had moments of such grit and darkness, I was almost fooled into thinking I was watching a DARK KNIGHT spin-off, and who wouldn't want one of those, amirite?
Speaking of the DARK KNIGHT Trilogy... the superhero shows which I always find most compelling are those which aspire to more than "a story about a superhero." Does that make sense? GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY worked because it was an action comedy WITH superheros. Nolan's DARK KNIGHT series worked because the movies excelled not just as superhero tales, but as riveting thrillers layered with moral complexities and villains who were more than masks with doomsday devices (although they were also that... but they weren't JUST that, and that's my point).
In this respect I found DAREDEVIL less than successful, though I wouldn't call it a failure either. For all of the show's uniqueness, it fell back into its genre's tropey tendencies much too often, like a dieter ordering pizza because they just don't have the energy to whip up that vegetarian lasagna they'd found on Pintrest earlier.
DD's sidekick, "Foggy" Nelson, is saddled with possibly the worst of this laziness, and it quickly takes the character from charming and quirky to a distinctly unfunny caricature of an over-eager buffoon. Even when he's trying to be serious, Foggy comes across as buffoonish and melodramatic (read: way too butthurt about something that's really none of his business *SPOILER ALERT* Daredevil's secret identity *END SPOILER ALERT*). I'm not sure what actor Elden Henson could have done to lessen that part's stink, but whatever that something is, his portrayal of Foggy didn't have it. The result was that I found myself hoping for less and less of him and his painful puns as the season went on. Maybe they can fix him for the next season, but my hopes aren't high.
The season's villain, "Kingpin" a.k.a. Wilson Fisk, was another sore point for me. Here I feel the show struggled with it's own identity most, flip-flopping spasmodically between what it wanted to be and what the show needed. It NEEDED a villain; it WANTED a complex, conflicted and sympathetic antihero. Fisk was by turns endearing, then frightening, sincere, then manipulative, conflicted, then resolute. An obviously anxious introvert who cast himself, almost inexplicably, into the public eye, not as a politician, but just as somebody who was rather vaguely promising to "clean up" Hell's Kitchen. A man who gave impassioned speeches about how much he cared for his neighbors, which no one ever really bought, except for his late lackey, Wesley "corporate baddy stereotype extraordinaire," because Fisk never seemed to do much of anything to actually help the city, and in fact willingly funded much of the crime that held it back. His deals with the Russian mob, the Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza weren't some long con to double cross his criminal partners and wipe crime from the streets of Hell's Kitchen (though they were examples of more lazily conceived bad guy cliché). These deals were, by Fisk's own admission, long-standing, mutually beneficial partnerships. Fisk is called out on this cognitive dissonance by one of his partners, the Triad leader, Gao, but though the show's creators seemed to acknowledge Fisk's internal conflict as intentional, I don't think they realized just how much it undermined the character.
Fisk eventually rights his own cross-ways ship with his Bad Samaritan moment of realization, but only with about 20 minutes left to go in the season, and by then all he was good for was a few bone-chilling, Walter White-esque lines ("I am the one who knocks!... I mean, the ill intent!") and one final boss battle. But if only he'd come to grips with his ill intentions before the series began! What makes a villain a villain, rather than an antihero, is foremost his resolute nature. To be a villain, one MUST believe in the bad one's doing--either that, or like doing it very much. Fisk was sometimes bad compulsively, sometimes deliberately, sometimes reluctantly. The show essentially cast a conflicted antihero in a villainous role, and it spawned a Big Bad that no one could quite figure out.
I will say, however, that at times Vincent D'Onofrio was utterly breath-taking in his menace, when he wasn't spouting whiney garbage about rebuilding "his" city. The rest of the acting performances, Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock/Daredevil included, were varying shades of "pretty good," by turns enhanced and undercut by the fluctuating quality of the scripts.
DAREDEVIL Season 1 had both much to like, and much to moan at, but overall I enjoyed it, and that gets me back to my first point, which is superheroes are fun. So I suppose I'm being a smidge nit-picky when I attack these trope-laden cash cows, but after all, to whom much is given, much is expected, right Spider Man? Superhero movies and TV don't HAVE to be thoughtless enterprises rollicking in bloodless, PG violence and pinned up by A-list mugshots. They don't have to be THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, either; they can strike a balance, between fun and fresh, between light and heavy, between fleeting and lasting...
...between the heroes we want, and the heroes we need.
Okay, I'll stop. You get it. Clichés=bad. Tropes=tricky. Demand more from your superheroes. Great, cool. I'm out.
TG
woah
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