Daredevil (2003)

By the time Daredevil arrived in cinemas in February 2003, Marvel's relationship with Hollywood was at a curious crossroads. Blade had proved in 1998 that Marvel properties could draw a crowd without A-list names, and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man had become a genuine cultural event just the year before. The studios were, not unreasonably, eager to mine the back catalogue. Daredevil, the blind Hell's Kitchen lawyer and night-time vigilante created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett back in 1964, had long been considered a darker, more street-level proposition than most of Marvel's roster, a character whose Catholic conscience and physical vulnerability made him feel, on paper at least, like rich material for a serious treatment. The film was produced by Marvel Enterprises and New Regency Pictures, and it landed at a moment when the genre was still working out whether it wanted to be respectable drama or Saturday-matinee fun. It had not yet decided, and neither, as it turned out, had this film.

Mark Steven Johnson, who had previously written the screenplay for Grumpy Old Men and directed the Jack Nicholson comedy Heartbreakers, was given the keys to this particular corner of Hell's Kitchen. His enthusiasm for the source material was not in question; he had lobbied for the job and clearly approached it with genuine affection for Frank Miller's grittier comics run. Whether that affection translated into confident filmmaking is another matter. In the title role, Ben Affleck was at an interesting and, for many critics at the time, contentious point in his career. Fresh from the kind of mid-tier blockbuster fare he had appeared in throughout the late nineties and early 2000s (you can get a sense of that era from my reviews of Armageddon and Good Will Hunting), he was a polarising casting choice, one that the press of the day never quite let go of. Alongside him, Jennifer Garner plays Elektra Natchios, Colin Farrell takes on the assassin Bullseye with considerable theatrical energy, and Michael Clarke Duncan fills the role of the Kingpin, Wilson Fisk. Jon Favreau, later to become a significant figure in the Marvel universe as the director of Iron Man, appears here in a supporting comic-relief role as Murdock's law partner Foggy Nelson. It is, on paper, a polished but unremarkable ensemble, brought together for a film that clearly had ambitions beyond its station.

The 103-minute runtime keeps things reasonably brisk, and the film carries a tagline, "When the streets have gone to Hell, have faith in the devil," that does a fair job of advertising the brooding, morally freighted tone Johnson was aiming for. Whether the finished product lives up to that promise is precisely what the review below addresses.

Daredevil (2003) is the kind of early-2000s superhero film that tries hard (maybe too hard) to be gritty, operatic, and mythic all at once, but ends up feeling more like a confused costume drama with intermittent fisticuffs. Starring Ben Affleck as the blind lawyer-by-day, vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock, the film leans heavily into Catholic guilt, noir voiceover, and rain-soaked alleyways, but rarely connects these elements into something coherent or compelling. The action scenes are passable (choreographed with some flair, especially the hallway fight) but they’re buried under clunky dialogue, overwrought monologues, and a tone that can’t decide if it’s serious tragedy or comic-book camp. It’s “turn your brain off” cinema, sure, but even by those standards, it stumbles. Colin Farrell’s Bullseye is cartoonish to the point of parody (though he seems to be having fun and is probably the highlight), Jennifer Garner’s Elektra feels underdeveloped, and the script lurches between melodrama and silliness without landing either. Director Mark Steven Johnson clearly loves the source material, but his reverence doesn’t translate into strong storytelling. Instead, we get slow-motion crucifixions, rooftop confessions to priests, and a soundtrack that swells at every emotional beat like it’s afraid we’ll miss the point. What’s frustrating isn’t that Daredevil is offensively bad (it’s not) but that it’s simply below average. It lacks the charm of Spider-Man (2002), the swagger of later Marvel films, or even the pulpy energy of Blade. It’s well-intentioned but misfired, like a demo reel for a better movie that never got made. Watch it once for nostalgia or curiosity, but don’t expect much beyond hammy performances and a hero who spends more time brooding in the rain than actually fighting crime. It’s not the worst superhero film ever made, but it’s firmly on the wrong side of “meh.”

I keep coming back to that nagging sense of wasted potential, because the bones of a genuinely interesting film are in there somewhere, buried under the leather suit and the overwrought score. For me, the comparison to Spider-Man is the one that stings most on Daredevil's behalf; both were products of the same cultural moment, both were working with source material that had emotional weight behind it, and yet one found its footing and the other never quite did. If you are curious about how the superhero genre was finding its feet in those early years, or you simply want to see what Ben Affleck was doing before his later, more considered work (my thoughts on Gone Girl offer a useful contrast), then Daredevil is worth an afternoon. Just keep your expectations sensibly low. Some films age into cult classics. This one has mostly just aged.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2003  | Watched: 2026-04-29

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Trailer

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