Hack-Man Movie Ratings

Last updated 8 August 2003

coverDaredevil (2003)buy
Genre: Action / Thriller
Tagline: He is the man without fear
Plot Outline: A man blinded by toxic waste which also enhanced his remaining senses fights crime as an acrobatic martial arts superhero.

Hoo-boy... Three DVDs arrived in today's mail. Guess I won't get anything useful done for the rest of the day.

I'll preface this review by saying that I never saw any of the Daredevil comic books, so I only have a very limited knowledge of what this movie will be about.

I expect it to be better than The Hulk movie, but not as good as Spider-Man or Batman (both of which were very good, despite some problems I had with them) or either of the X-Men movies.

Having the DVD menus in braille was kinda funny; luckily it was easy enough to figure out what was what without having to go find a translation online.

They also had the opening credits appear in braille (from the lights being on or off in sky scrapers at night) which then dissolved into the names in "English". I wonder how many in-jokes they put in other windows.

Sifting through the IMDB trivia for the film, it was noted that "In the comics, the Kingpin is white, but in the movie he is played by an African-American, Michael Clarke Duncan. The studio was convinced to use Duncan after several white wrestlers gave poor screen tests." I seem to recall a few threads in RSPW last year about which wrestlers had tried out for the part (or maybe it was a thread on which wrestlers should have tried out for the part). Anyone remember who screen tested?

Other trivia for the film states that "The film was originally envisioned as an R-rated film with nudity and hard violence." I'm guessing with the success of Spider-Man, they decided to increase the budget (originally only $50,000,000) and cut out all the nudity to bring in a larger audience. Too bad they didn't put both versions on the DVD.

One of the audio choices on the DVD was for the visually impaired. I didn't check it out, but WTF would that be? Someone explaining what is happening in each scene?

I don't think I've seen Ben Affleck in anything before. All I know about him is that he was engaged to J-Lo and made fun of on South Park for being the offspring of two people from Wisconsin with butts for faces. Oh wait. Now that I check his resume, I see that he was in Reindeer Games (which I hated, but not necessarily for his acting) and Armageddon (which was so-so, could have been a lot better, but again didn't seem to be the fault of the actors).

I had to smile at the requisite Stan Lee cameo as the guy who was about to walk into traffic.

I liked the idea of a guy who works as a lawyer (or whatever) and then at night gets revenge for any person he feels is guilty but was able to get off scott free anyway.

First mistake I noticed was when the "DD" fire in the subway was reflected in someone's glasses it wasn't mirrored. Sigh...

The message his girlfriend left on his answering machine sounded way too scripted for a "spontaneous message". It made me cringe as it felt like it was written by a bad soap opera writer and rehearsed a few hundred times. I fault both the writers (for the dialog), the actress (for the delivery), and the director (for not insisting that they either reshoot it or get a better actress).

They didn't explain how he got enough money to have all the secret compartments in his home, but I suppose it could either be from his lawyer salary or if he got a huge payout from the company that caused his blindness with the barrels of toxic chemicals.

If they had cast Sabu in the title role they wouldn't have had to spend any money on makeup to create fake scars all over his body.

I assume he sleeps in a metal tank to drown out the various noise sources. I couldn't figure out why he would want it filled with water (unless that would dampen even more noise). Still seems like it would be more dangerous than it'd be worth. Noise would get in anyway, since he'd have to have air holes in his "coffin".

I've never been a huge fan of religious imagery in movies (or at least the overuse of it). It worked well in The Omen (and its sequels) and in The Exorcist, but here it didn't seem to be needed.

And aren't the confession boxes supposed to be made so that the priest can't see the confessor? It looked like it was made out of a screen door (and no, they weren't just showing what it would be like for a blind man).

Oh, and the priest (played by Derrick O'Connor) looked like Leonard Nimoy with an Irish accent.

When they had the woman (Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner) beating up the blind guy, I figured this movie wouldn't be allowed on Canadian television. ;-)

Personally, I would have cast someone like Alyssa Milano or Angelina Jolie as Elektra (Jolene Blalock and Neve Campbell were both considered for the role) but their choice (I don't think I've seen Jennifer Garner in anything previously) worked all right, too.

It was refreshing for once to see the one person who figured out the superhero's secret identity (National Enquirer reporter Ben Urich) not try to spill the beans to the whole world. I'm sure Mr McGee wouldn't have the same restraint if he ever made the Banner/Hulk connection.

Do people in New York city really hang their wash to dry on the roofs of tall buildings?

It was interesting to have "the girl falls for the secret identity but hates the superhero, mistakenly thinking he killed her father" instead of the "girl falls for the superhero but won't give the secret identity the time of day" (Batman, Superman, etc).

It was stupid for them to kill of Elektra and Bullseye, the only two interesting non-title characters.

Geez... but the end of the movie pretty much everyone knew his secret identity (though most of the people who knew ended up dead). As far as I could tell, the only people alive at the end who still knew were Kingpin, the priest, and the reporter.

Do all reporters have laptop computers with a "print" key and a "delete" key in the middle of the keyboard? And the function of the "delete" key is to slowly delete the entire text backwards?

Wait a second... was that Bullseye they showed alive at the end (all bandaged up) in the middle of the closing credits? If so, that's a 4th person alive who knows his identity, and kudos to them for not killing off a character with some depth.

You can usually tell by the length of my reviews that I either really liked a movie or really disliked it when I have a lot to say about it. In this case, I thought it was very well done. I don't think I'd particularly like to read the DareDevil comic books, but I wouldn't mind a few sequels made of this movie.
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