DAREDEVIL and The Death Of American Cinema

I really wish they’d spent more than $150 of that on the script. Because it stinks. Every character is a cypher ; shallow, empty, painted with the broadest, bluntest brush strokes, and designed solely to move the plot forward to the next setpiece, the next piece of badly-engineered CGI. You can’t care about a cartoon.

“Daredevil” is everything that’s wrong with movies today. Slick, empty photography. Fast jumpcutting between scenes or shots. Eight frames. Twelve frames. If you’re lucky, forty eight frames per shot. A blur, a haemorrhage of images - travelling too fast for the mind to process, for us to understand what’s going on. It’s all smoke and mirrors, all style, no substance.

And quite how normal humans can leap hundreds of feet between buildings without snapping their ankles in half, I have no idea. Must be those new Nike DareDevil sneakers they only give to superheroes and supervillans.

Oh look, bullet-time. Yawn. This isn’t a film : this is an MTV promo with a plot thinner than a supermodel. It was probably directed by that talentless cunt McG, the one who always raises style over substance, and can’t spell his own name. I’ve written emails with better plots and more character development than “DareDevil”.

Stupid sidekick? Gotcha. Bullet-time shots? Check. Bad, appalling CGI that looks like it was done on a PlayStation 1? Check. A face off with a bad guy deciding to dispense with all his heavies for an ‘honourable’ piece of man-to-man combat? Yawn. Coincidental love-interest-daughter-of-bad-guy-revenge-motive scene? Snooze. Dialogue that even George Lucas would reject? Definitely. Overuse of a dull bit of FX work? Guilty. Stan Lee cameo? Tick. Crap pointless fight scene between two people to ensure they ‘bond? Well, I’ve seen They Live, and this is no better. Dammit. This isn’t a film. It’s a formula. It’s a receipe. And a stale one at that.

The problem with a movie like this is that it’s a zombie. Brainless, devouring the intelligence of others. And it’s got no heart. No Soul. It’s aimed at a market : not the market that you might expect, not the market of people with brains, and ideas, who are looking forward to a decent Superhero movie rising from a pile of undifferentiated stupid dross. It’s aimed at the pocket money market. With the lowest common denominator everything sinks to the bottom.

High Concept? Stinks to high heaven more like. If you want to enjoy “DareDevil” switch your brain off, don’t think, just feel the popcorn candy porno explosion of bangs and crashes and whizzes and wake up in an hour and a half thinking you had an, well, an alright dream.

It’s popcorn. It’s a steaming pile of dull, formulaic shit. It’s a complete waste of time. Hollywood, hang your head in shame. With this money, with this time, you could’ve made a good film. You could’ve made something interesting : you could’ve explored the hero genre, the dilemmas facing an ordinary man possessing an extraordinary talent. You could’ve given us the best Superhero movie ever made. Instead you treat your punters as product : shovel them in and out as quickly as possible. Take the money and run.

It’s all bad. The movie does have it’s high points. But my favourite? When it ends. DareDevil? DumbDrivel more like.