'Daredevil' Season 2: An Ambitious Action Saga
The second season of Daredevil starts streaming on Netflix on Friday, and it re-shapes and sharpens the series in new ways. The first seven episodes made available for review introduce two key characters from the Marvel Comics series — the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and Elektra (Elodie Yung) — and tinker with Daredevil Matt Murdock’s law-office relationships.
Here are a couple of things the people behind the show created by Drew Goddard seem to have decided they learned from the first season: That their audience likes lots of martial-arts-based, hand-to-hand combat fight sequences; that viewers will peer through the dark gloom of the show’s recreated New York Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood to pick out the heroes and the villains in the under-lit murk; and they’ll sit through an awful lot of conversations about the nature of good versus evil, morality versus immorality; the sanctity of life versus the satisfactions of bloody revenge.
Thus we get lots of knock-down, drag-out fistfights between Charlie Cox’s Daredevil and Bernthal’s Frank Castle, the emotionally-wounded war vet who becomes known as the Punisher, followed by some awfully long discussions between the two about how ethically vexed it is to engage in knock-down, sometimes murderous fistfights, complete with dialogue such as “I think that the people I kill deserve killing.” It would be an interesting debate if the speeches were as vivid as the fight scenes are.
The third episode contains one of those extended, elaborately choreographed fight scenes between Daredevil and a gang of bad guys that is clearly intended to echo the audience-pleasing one from the second episode of the first season, the one that did a lot to convince fans and many critics that this was a small-screen superhero show that really knew what it was capable of doing. The new one is a good scene, to be sure, but it’s also repetitive, and those repetitions come to define the rhythms of the new season.
When you compare Daredevil to the big-screen Marvel adaptations such as the Avengers epics, you have to give the Netflix production credit for varying the tone, for not being afraid of letting the action halt for long periods, to establish character context. The new season, for example, lets Matt become closer to law-office assistant Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) at a dreamy pace.
This is contrasted with the introduction of one of the Daredevil’s comics’ most fan-fanatical characters, Elektra, who is seen in flashback (lotsa hot ’n’ heavy action in every sense between her and the superhero) and in the show’s present-day, as they team up to take on the Yakuza. (The series enemies are gang-based: first an Irish mob, then a Japanese one.)
How much you enjoy Daredevil depends on how much you’re engaged by florid lines like Elektra’s admiring description of Daredevil as possessing “a glorious darkness inside you,” or by Daredevil’s hard-boiled credo, “If I take a night off, people get hurt.” It’s all a bit much for me, and lacking in humor. (I don’t count Foggy’s flow of wisecracks, which actor Elden Henson tend to deliver in a loud, precisely enunciated manner, as though he was speaking from a theater stage.) I admire the series without being very engaged by it, but I can certainly see why you might get hooked.
The new season of Daredevil starts streaming on Netflix on Friday.
