Now that I've had time to sit and really digest it, I can say without a doubt that the Daredevil Netflix series was pretty amazing. I'm a huge fan of the crime drama procedural and that is what this show is. Don't come in thinking it's your typical super hero fare. This show is about as gritty as they come. What really helps (and I'll talk about it later) is that it LOOKS gritty. I mean, you can say that some shows have a hard time living up to that label, but this show does not.
This is definitely not a show you should let your kids see. You know, unless you're a terrible parent. It is adults only. Not so much for language, but for the brutality of it's violence. It does not pull punches. Literally. The way some people get dispatched in this show is down right nasty. To their credit they don't always show all of it, but it's still heavily implied.
I could go into what I thought about how accurate a portrayal it is compared to the comic books, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to discuss this as a TV show and do my best to leave my comic book bias behind. Just pretend that I am a film critic.
I'm going to start with casting. I think all across the board, this was a really solid cast. I think Charlie Cox was a fantastic Matt Murdock/Daredevil. He went a long way to helping us forget about Ben Affleck previously playing this character. I'm still not a fan of actors having to put on their best dark vigilante voice in these shows, but that's to be expected at this point. It's just so silly in the grand scheme of things. I took special care to see if he at least seemed like a believable blind person. You know, not playing a caricature of one who overly moves his head back and forth while he talks. That would have been distracting. He also does a good job of showing what a tortured soul he is. He's a lawyer, who's also a vigilante AND who's also a tortured Catholic. These three things met at a crossroads many times during the show and I liked that they got to explore that.
Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson was probably the most perfect casting. I spent the entire run of these series trying to guess where I saw him before. I just did a quick look on IMDB and he appeared in my favorite episode of the TV show, Psych. Whew, mystery solved. Anyways, he was the right amount of comic relief. He has a lot of good zingers, but he also has his own arc that he goes on and as Matt's best friend, he gets a lot to play with. I think he and Cox had remarkable chemistry and you could believe they were best friends. He arguably went through the most swings in emotions on this show and they were all very well done.
Since this is already getting long, I'll finally touch on Vincent D'Onofrio as the Kingpin. When I first heard he was cast, I thought it was an odd choice. Watching him in this show, I think he delivers. He looked the part and he had a quiet intensity about him. His cadence tended to bother me at times and I always felt like he was whispering too much. However, he did a good job of making the Kingpin a sympathetic character. He's the right kind of villain in that he has the conviction to think that what he is doing is for the greater good. No matter how warped it may be, he feels he is doing the right thing for people. At times I felt like the Kingpin wasn't written strong enough. All his associates turn on him pretty quickly. I kept thinking, "Man, you're going to let them talk to you like that?!" As the show went on though, he did not let anyone get away with anything.
I'll move on from the other actors, but I just want to say this. I heart Rosario Dawson.
So the show itself, I want to touch on the amazing fight choreography that was in this show. The fight scenes with Daredevil were nothing short of amazing. Sometimes I got a little bothered by the excessive flipping and parkour antics at times, but overall, the action was brutal. This show had it's hooks in me after episode two. There is an amazing long shot fight scene with Matt Murdock and some other bad guys. The fight goes on so long he starts to get tired and we start to feel tired too. The music even rises and falls with the action, which I really thought was a nice touch. Seriously, the fighting is really good on this show. Spoiler warning, Daredevil and the Kingpin will fight. That fight is also brutal as you get to see the clash in styles between the two.
I mentioned how gritty this show looked and I don't think we should shy from that. For all intents and purposes, this is a TV show. It is shot so well though. The city is appropriately grimy. I'm sure there were some sets, but this felt like they filmed all of this in the city on location. There's nothing pristine and clean about this show. Compare this to a show like Powers (that's another topic for another day), that looks so cheap like it was shot on someone's go-pro. I even liked the way they film Matt using his powers. They didn't abuse it. They will have one shot of how he sees the world (as if it's on fire) or how he hears sound. They lower all the audio and amp up the ambient sound, so we can hear it the way Matt does when he's focusing. Those were really nice touches.
Finally, I will briefly touch on the story, if you have stuck with me this far. I like that this show played out like a serial. This was a long, thirteen part story that continued to build and build. You see the rise of the Kingpin and Matt's fight to reach him. Everyone slowly moves their chess pieces as the story moves. There are some truly edge of the seat moments towards the back half of the season. I am a fan of the slow burn and I like the way it does it in this show. Thankfully, other than how Matt gets his comic book costume, this show did not start feeling too comic booky. Other than Daredevil's powers, (which to be honest, are pretty ridiculous), this show felt very grounded. Heroes are only as good as their villains and the Kingpin served as a great foil to Daredevil.
Apparently this show did extremely well and is already picked up for a second season. That makes me happy and I'm glad to see the first show in this Marvel/Netflix experiment was an unmitigated success.
If you like gritty crime dramas, do yourself a favor and check out this show.
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