Time to give the ’devil his due: Season One of the Marvel/Netflix Daredevilseries was the best live-action superhero adaptation since Tim Burton’s firstBatman movie in 1989. In Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, Rosario Dawson, Vondie Curtis Hall, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ayelet Zurer, Toby Leonard Moore, and (eventually) Elden Henson, it boasted the strongest cast of any Marvel project; The company’s actors are virtually always charismatic, but rarely are they called on to deliver the shading and subtlety these people were capable of. D’Onofrio in particular just slew it as Wilson Fisk, his pause-laden pressured speech and overgrown-baby bulk as far from a cookie-cutter villain as the genre has ever risked going. The cinematography enhanced the more restrained and refined mood created by the performances, lighting their faces like some DiBlasio-era Rembrandt.
The story, too, zoomed past the traditional good guy vs. bad guy set-up to tell the tale of two surrogate familes formed in the New York City crucible — one centered on Matt Murdock and his crime-fighting alter ego, the other on magnate/philanthropist/crime boss Wilson Fisk. Like any circle of friends, both groups truly cared about the city, and about each other. It’s just that for the latter crew, that love was ultimately selfish, toxic, and lethal. Their conflict was ultimately expressed in fight scenes that featured the finest choreography in any superhero film or TV show ever, hands down. Like all great fight scenes, they made spatial sense, took advantage of their unique environments, and served as physical metaphors for emotional turmoil. Put it all together and you have one of the vanishingly few superhero projects outside of comics that feel, to quote Boogie Nights, like “a real film, Jack.”
So yeah, you could say I’m a fan.
