'Daredevil': A Ready-to-Rock Superhero

Daredevil is a superhero TV show that benefits from the simplicity of its concept. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is a lawyer and he’s blind, his senses heightened to the point that they become superpowers for him. He wants the area in which he lives, New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, to be rid of crime, and does it by tying a black bandana around his head and punching and kicking a lot of bad guys.

There you have it. Everything else about the show, which is officially called Marvel’s Daredevil and whose 13 episodes will premiere on Netflix starting Friday, is constructed to streamline this premise. Daredevil Matt is starting up a law practice with his old friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and they hire an assistant, Karen Page (True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll). In all this, the show, overseen by producer Drew Goddard (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The Cabin in the Woods) sticks pretty closely to the Marvel comics character first introduced in the 1960s and refined in what many consider its best storylines a couple decades later, by writer-artist Frank Miller. It even employs a key villain from the comics: the Kingpin, the rotund crime boss Wilson Fisk, played with murmuring menace by Vincent D’Onofrio.

The storytelling pace in the first few episodes is leisurely to the point of slow — boy, can Foggy and Karen gas on and on about their hopes and dreams and problems. I guess I should add, however, that this pacing is not nearly as dawdling as the shaggy-dog tales they’re telling over on the Batman-light Gotham. That last phrase is also significant about what’s good in Daredevil: While we get an origin story (Matt’s prizefighter-dad as his inspiration; the chemical-spill accident that both blinded and gifted our young Daredevil), it’s not drawn out, and right from the start, Murdock is fighting crime.

And the fighting is particularly well-staged. Producer Steven S. DeKnight (Spartacus) has a flair for bone-crunching, and there’s an action scene in the second episode, featuring a lot of finely choreographed, close-in, elbows-and-palm-strike contact that gives Daredevil real snap.

The dialogue, however, could use some of that snap. The exchanges between Matt, Foggy, and Karen aim for the sort of brisk funniness that was a hallmark of shows these producers have worked on, including Buffy and Angel, but it’s mostly strained stuff. Actually, the purely plot-driven lines are more amusing. So far my favorite is this casual observation by Rosario Dawson, who appears as a nurse and Daredevil helper: “You can smell a man on the third floor?”

Related: See ‘Daredevil’ Season 1 Photos

As good as D’Onofrio is at playing self-important windbags, his ponderous musings about making the city a “better place” — “I’m just a man with a dream” — is limp stuff. Daredevil needs to get away from woozy reveries such as “The past, it can never be erased; it lingers, like the scent of burning wood.”
Or the smell of stinky exposition. Maybe Daredevil’s problem is that the producers only have so much story to tell, and with a 13-episode order, they have to stretch things out. I mean, D’Onofrio’s Fisk doesn’t even put in a chrome-dome appearance until the final seconds of the third hour. In the fourth, he spends a lot of time in an art gallery. Talking about art. And chatting up a woman who works there. Why, he doesn’t establish his bad-guy bona fides by smashing some numbskull’s skull until the end of that hour.

I’ll be glad when Daredevil finally gets into his signature red costume (an image of which was recently released after apparently leaking accidentally on Netflix) and gladder still when no one refers to him as a “masked vigilante” again. TV is overrun with superheroes waiting to be fully formed and recognized as such; the best promise of Daredevil is that its hero seems to be anxious to get on with becoming the tough protagonist we know from the comics.

Marvel’s Daredevil begins streaming Friday on Netflix.