In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we’re looking at Daredevil, Favreau’s first brush with the mucky-mucks over at Marvel Comics.
It’s always fun when you can pinpoint the exact moment a film was released. In this case I don’t actually have to guess, because I was there, but sometimes you can just feel a moment in your bones. Released on Valentine’s Day 2003, Daredevil perfectly captures a moment in time when the culture at large couldn’t get enough of three things: Superheroes, Ben Affleck, and nu-metal. Mash those things together and you’ve got a recipe for one of the most painfully dated comic book movies of the pre-MCU era.
“Couldn’t get enough” may be a bit of a stretch in Affleck’s case. He’d been one of the biggest names in Hollywood for a few years at this point, and headlined more than a few stinkers (*ahem* Pearl Harbor *ahem*). So the shine was coming off that particular apple, and coupled with his then-recent romance with Jennifer Lopez, Affleck was quickly becoming one of America’s favorite punching bags. But he was also, apparently, one of the bigger Daredevil fans in Hollywood. He lobbied for it, even got his buddy Kevin Smith in on it, and when Vin Diesel passed on the role in favor of his own pet project The Chronicles of Riddick (true fact), Affleck was ready and waiting.
You know the drill: A New York City kid stricken blind by toxic waste learns to uses his other senses to become supernaturally good at acrobatics, punching, and sonar detection. After his boxer dad (David Keith, legally distinct from Keith David) is killed by the mob for not throwing a fight, the kid takes it upon himself to become a lawyer and protect the innocent by any means necessary. This opening prologue actually turns out to be the best part of the movie. It’s hokey and silly, kinda biting more than a little bit from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man playbook, but it’s also a lot of fun, which I kinda feel like is key in any superhero film. You want your audiences to enjoy watching the silly shenanigans, not groaning in embarrassment at the grimdark shenanigans masquerading as fun. That, unfortunately, comes later.
We then meet adult Matt Murdock (Ben Affleck), attorney at law, who uses his heightened senses to tell when a defendant is lying under oath. And when a particular defendant gets acquitted, in this case a rapist, Matt suits up in his blood red leather tracksuit and hunts the perp down to exact justice. While Matt’s partner, Foggy Nelson (Jon Favreau) is none the wiser to this, New York Post writer Ben Urich (Bad Boys‘s Joe Pantoliano) is on the trail of this masked vigilante, the so-called Daredevil.
There’s no real plot to speak of in this movie. It’s more a series of character introductions where we’re asked to accept that all of these people kind of hate each other and have a natural inclination to fight about it. For instance, crime kingpin Wilson Fisk (The Island‘s Michael Clarke Duncan) is introduced already plotting to take out a man planning to snitch on him to the authorities. This turns out to be Nikolas Natchios (Erick Avari), whose daughter Elektra (Nine Lives‘ Jennifer Garner) has just met Matt Murdock and playfully flirts with him in a dance/fight sequence in a crowded playground. Fisk calls in an Irish stereotype named Bullseye (Colin Farrell) to kill Natchios. Daredevil steps in to stop Bullseye, Bullseye steals one of Daredevil’s clubs in the ensuing fight and uses it to kill Natchios, implicating Daredevil in the process. So now Elektra is pissed at Matt and tries to fight him for real now.
I labored over how to get into talking about this plot for a while, but it really is just a series of greetings followed by a series of fight scenes. The film colors in the margins about the world of Matt Murdock and Hell’s Kitchen, but the actual plot is hilariously nonexistent. I blame this less on writer/director Mark Steven Johnson, who apparently based a lot of the beats in this film off the Daredevil comics of Frank Miller1. Instead I’m choosing to lay the blame squarely on the producers (among whom include Toy Biz honcho Avi Arad and a young Kevin Feige), who seem more interested in putting forth a visual tableau of what Daredevil is all about rather than telling an actual story with him. We get it: He protects a shitty neighborhood from the mob, eats percocet like candy, and has a massive amount of Catholic guilt over his chosen profession. I could tell you all sorts of little details, but nothing that amounts to an actual A-to-B story involving these characters.
One complaint I see levied at a lot of the action movies of the early aughts is how floaty and weightless a lot of the CGI can be. Daredevil seems to have the opposite problem. In wide shots, whenever we see Daredevil scale a building using his walking stick grappling hook doodads, he looks like he weighs a ton, slowly hoisting himself up onto a ledge, or dropping down onto the street. Then we cut to a shot of a flesh-and-blood Ben Affleck jogging across a rooftop at the top speed of an injured linebacker. He looks pokey, like he just chowed down at a seafood buffet and is now hoofing it to the nearest toilet. It always looks silly and it brings me no end of delight.
In the movie’s defense, the actors who really know what movie they’re in are having an absolute hoot. Colin Farrell and Michael Clarke Duncan are particularly good. Farrell plays Bullseye like a kill-happy toddler, turning anything he can get his hands on into a weapon, and not wasting a second of precious screen time on things like ‘good taste’. His introduction into the film alone—where he throws five perfect darts in a row, and then kills his rival with a handful of straightened paper clips to the throat while House of Pain is blasting from a jukebox (see above)—is one of the great villain entrances of its era. And for his part, Duncan makes a very imposing figure. Really wish we’d gotten a good heel turn out of him after this, because the villain role really suits him well. He lets that big, booming voice of his do all his dirty work. Some accused him of going too far over the top, but I figure if there’s any villain who should go over the top, maybe it’s the comically large bald man.
One of my favorite details in the entire movie is when Kingpin asks Bullseye to kill Elektra and Daredevil, Bullseye agrees on one condition: “I want a bloody costume!” The next time we see Bullseye, he’s wearing the exact same leather duster jacket he was wearing before, only now he has a brand new t-shirt underneath. Spared no expense, this Kingpin guy!
I alluded to it earlier, but Daredevil brings the 2003 vibes harder than you’d think. If Bad Boys II‘s disregard for good taste and due process signaled to us that we were firmly rooted in the George Dubya era of American politics, Daredevil did the same thing for the music of the time. The soundtrack album is a murderer’s row of also-ran nu-metal talent. Fuel, Saliva, Seether, Nickelback, Drowning Pool, Chevelle, Hoobastank, Finger Eleven… If any of those names mean anything to you, then congratulations, you were probably in high school when this album dropped, and I’m sure you or someone you knew had a scratched copy of it stashed under the passenger seat of a dirty Honda Civic.
One name I didn’t mention, however, is Evanescence, and that’s because Evanescence deserves their own paragraph in this review. Both of the band’s most recognizable hits feature prominently in the film, and are no doubt the reason the album became a top ten hit in the US. “My Immortal” underscores the funeral of Elektra’s father, and then later we see her training to seek revenge while “Bring Me To Life” blasts from the speakers. Both of these songs would become huge hits, defining the sound of early aughts rock radio. And they both found their way onto the Daredevil soundtrack a full month before the band’s debut album even hit stores. That kind of thing simply doesn’t happen anymore.
For that matter, movies like Daredevil don’t happen anymore either. As rough and frankly kind of embarrassing as the movie is, it’s refreshing to see a superhero movie from an era when we didn’t need everything to reference something else, or to tease the next big thing. To have a movie about a guy fighting crime and letting that be that? I miss those days. And to have someone as obviously miscast as Ben Affleck put on the cowl? The whole thing just exudes studio hubris all the way down. I feel a weird sense of nostalgia for Daredevil, but I fully recognize what a bumbling, stumbling goof of a movie this is2.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Favreau plays Foggy Nelson as Matt’s hokey comic relief, but it’s truly a thankless role. Foggy desperately wants to represent legal clients who can actually pay their legal expenses (read: literal criminals. Foggy is super cool representing criminals for money). There’s a scene at a fancy ball where Nelson and Murdock meet Wilson Fisk and are immediately intercepted by Fisk’s assistant Wesley (Very Bad Things‘ Leland Orser), and it only serves to illustrate the gulf between Foggy and Matt in a really hamfisted bit of dialogue.
Favs doesn’t get a whole lot to do in the movie, but you can tell he’s having the time of his life hamming it up in a big budget comic book. And clearly, doing this gave him the itch to get back in there, as Favreau struck up a friendship with producer Avi Arad on the set. His ability to schmooze and charm the people in charge once again will prove to be the leg up he needs to direct for Marvel when they finally come calling. We’ll talk more about that later down the road.
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of five). S’not great.
NEXT TIME: Christmas comes for us all.
- And various visual elements lifted from the “Guardian Devil” arc, illustrated by Joe Quesada (and incidentally written by Kevin Smith, who shows up in the movie playing a character named “Jack Kirby”).
↩︎ - The 2004 Director’s Cut is the better movie, but I didn’t have time to revisit it for this piece. From what I recall, it clocks in a full 20 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, featuring a whole extra subplot about a drug addict played by Coolio. ↩︎
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