They say that justice is blind, and in 2003 countless movie-goers probably wished that they were too after sitting through director Mark Steven Johnson’s theatrical cut of Daredevil. While the movie was a financial success (pulling in half its budget on its opening weekend and clearing over $178 million worldwide), it was almost universally panned by critics and fans alike. But what a lot of people didn’t know, was that what we saw in theaters wasn’t the film that Johnson planned for us to see.
Several years after Daredevil had been released for home viewing, Twentieth Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios, a Disney subsidiary) decided to release the true version of the film by giving fans Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil: Directors Cut. What we got was a heavily altered film with 40 minutes (give or take) of new footage and an entirely new subplot that had been previously dropped from the original film.
Daredevil isn’t a super complicated character. All you need to know is that Matt Murdock is a lawyer from Hell’s Kitchen who was blinded in an accident involving a chemical spill as a small child. Though the chemicals cost him his eyesight, he gained various superpowers including strength, agility, and a ‘radar-sense’ that allowed him to see without actually seeing. Not long after his accident, his father, boxer Jack “The Devil” Murdock, was murdered after refusing the throw a fight. Matt vowed that he would spend the rest of his life fighting for justice in one way or another and to defend those that were unable to defend themselves.
Now let me start by saying that I’m a huge fan of the Daredevil character in comics. He’s always been one of my favorites. So when this movie released, I was happy we got a Daredevil movie at all! After a subsequent viewing of the Director’s Cut of the film, I tried to sit back and take note of what worked, what didn’t, and ultimately why people seem to dislike the film.
As a film, Daredevil mostly suffers from trying too hard to emulate the comic while also trying to satisfy a wide audience. With a B-list character like Daredevil, the studio probably should have just aimed towards the established fan base and hoped for the best. What we ended up with was a movie that was filled with a veritable cornucopia of iconic imagery from 40+ years of comics with next to no context as to why these visuals are important – all squeezed into about two hours.
The telling of Matt’s origin story is well done and updates the timeline of the story nicely (remember, the original version was published back in the 1960s). After we get back to the present, things start snowballing downhill. Where do I even begin? First and foremost, this movie suffers from a terrible bout of miscasting. Many of the film’s leads feel almost laughably miscast.
That said, say what you will about anyone else in this film, but Michael Clarke Duncan was excellently cast as Kingpin. He did a great job with the script he was given, and to me, he really was a great version of the character. Everyone aside from him though? Let’s take a look.
It’s funny, but I generally love Ben Affleck in most movies. I don’t even think he’s a bad choice for Matt Murdock/Daredevil and actually kind of love the idea of this casting. I can see what they were going for there. But for some reason, in almost every scene, he seems to be hamming it up and just having way too much fun with it. Most of the time when we see Matt Murdock, he’s smirking or smiling as if he is just way too excited to be in the room.
Matt Murdock is supposed to be a tortured soul, and he isn’t exactly a character one would expect to see smiling almost all the time. I like Affleck. He could have been great, but he let his own inner fanboy ruin the role for him. He seems to have learned his lesson from this though as his take on Batman a decade later was much better received.
Pulling no punches, actress Jennifer Garner is just a flat out bad choice for Elektra. Likely having been cast just because she was popular at the time and was known for some martial arts on her at-the-time-hit-show ‘Alias’, Garner brings absolutely nothing to the role aside from a physical body to fill out a tight leather jumpsuit (which unfortunately doesn’t look anything like an outfit the character actually wears).
Don’t even get me started on how badly the film butchered iconic Daredevil villain Bullseye as a character or the long list of reasons why Colin Farrell was an awful choice to play him. That said, at least Farrell obviously had a lot of fun with the role as it was written.
Our supporting cast is a little less terrible, with Jon Favreau (best known for directing Iron Man and The Mandalorian) as Matt’s best friend and law partner Foggy Nelson and David Keith as Matt’s father, but even among the supporting characters, we have more miscasting with Joe Pantoliano as reporter Ben Urich. As an avid reader of the Daredevil comics, this is another one of those “why would they do this” moments. I actually like Pantoliano in most movies, but wow, this guy is not Ben Urich. It gets me thinking… if the film had been cast a bit better, would it have been so poorly received?
Even in the Director’s Cut, there is still a lot to complain about once you get past the casting. There are a number of things that just don’t seem plausible in any scenario even if you aren’t a Daredevil fan going in. For example, before Murdock ‘suits up’ and we get a montage of him flipping his billy club around and flexing and showing off some crazy moves. While it could be written off as ‘warming up’, it still kind of begs the question “does he do this every night before he goes out? Who is a blind guy showing off to in his secret room all alone?”
Then we get the infamous ‘flaming double D’, which is damn near impossible for a person with perfect vision to get done without error, yet we’re to believe a blind guy did it. Oh, and while it takes a fan to really catch this one… Daredevil kills a guy?
After Murdock fails to take a criminal down in court, he proceeds to hunt him down, cause a massive bar fight (which causes massive amounts of collateral damage that could have been avoided if he just waited outside for the guy and caught him alone), and then straight up murders him by leaving him on some train tracks and mocking him just before he gets run over when he could have easily saved him. To me, this is arguably the most inexcusable part of the movie, and easily the most disappointing part. Yes, Daredevil seeks justice, but does he just go around murdering people? No. He’s a lawyer, and he knows better.
We also get the random insanity that is Elektra and Murdock fighting in a playground. Why does this scene happen? Is it even remotely believable? Why are all these people just watching and cheering? There is clearly either a woman beating up a blind guy or even simpler, some random man trying to beat up a young woman; neither end result sounds like a positive. But yes, rather than just talk like most people, Murdock and Elektra have an all-out martial arts battle on a playground in their civvies. Because that is a thing that people do.
Looking past the muddled and overly complicated story, the filmmakers managed to squeeze a few bright spots into this cinematic blunder that at least let the fans know that they got some parts right.
Take the Daredevil costume itself for example. While a lot of people have been complaining for years about how it looks more like Catwoman than Daredevil, I disagree. I think that the costume used for the film is pretty close to being a comic-accurate costume. There really isn’t a way to do his costume in the traditional sense using spandex without having it look pretty terrible, so red-leather seems like a solid alternative choice for the time period (the more recent television adaptation of Daredevil features a tactical armor costume more in line with modern-day superhero costume designs). Unfortunately, other characters like Bullseye and Elektra weren’t so lucky, and their costumes were scrapped entirely in favor of what looks like tight leather civilian clothes.
The film also deserves some credit for showing just how much of a toll being a superhero can have on a person. Thanks to his powers, Murdock is forced to sleep in a sensory-deprivation tank in order to block out all of the noise in the world that he picks up on. His body is completely riddled with scars from all the fights he has been in, and we even see him just rip a tooth right out after a hard night’s work before downing a handful of painkillers. Being a superhero is hard work, and Daredevil does an excellent job of expressing that in a way that few other superhero adaptations have done.
The Director’s Cut here also adds in a major subplot that shows Murdock utilizing his superpowers in his day to day life as a lawyer, which in my opinion was always one of the best parts of the comics that was noticeably missing from the original Theatrical Cut. Even though this subplot brings rapper Coolio into the film as the defendant in question, it still makes the movie that much more enjoyable and at least a little bit truer to the source material.
At the end of the day, while Daredevil: Director’s Cut is in no way the best comic book adaptation you’ll ever sit through. It’s certainly not the worst and is notably better than the theatrical cut of the film. The Blu-ray version of the film looks great in HD, and while some of the CG effects don’t quite hold up, the film has never looked better. Yes, we have since had a much better adaptation of the character in live-action in the Netflix series, but there is still something fun about this movie.
If you were sorely disappointed in Daredevil when you saw it the first time around, give the director’s cut a go. It very well might surprise you!
If you liked this Rewind Review, be sure to check out the whole series as we take a look back at some of our favorite corners of popular culture from years past!
