DAREDEVIL: How Do You Kill A Man Without Fear?

Daredevil (2003; Director’s Cut) – Directed by Mark Steven Johnson – Starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jon Favreau, Joe Pantoliano, David Keith, Leland Orser, Erick Avari, Ellen Pompeo, Derrick O’Connor, Jude Ciccolella, Kevin Smith, Frank Miller, and Stan Lee.

If you haven’t seen the Director’s Cut of DAREDEVIL, then you haven’t seen DAREDEVIL, because the Director’s Cut is thisclose to being included among the best of all the Marvel movies.

When the theatrical release hit theaters back in 2003, I went and watched it, and kinda liked it. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t think it was bad, and I didn’t think many of the arrows people were slinging at the film were fair: the costume, the water coffin, the fact that Michael Clarke Duncan is black. I never thought the costume was a major drawback, I thought the water coffin was actually a decent idea, and I’m much more interested in actors getting the spirit of a character than I am concerned with nailing the look.

There were other problems with the theatrical cut, however, as the emphasis on the Elektra (Jennifer Garner) subplot turned DAREDEVIL into a more traditional superhero movie and robbed the film of what made Daredevil unique. I don’t think alteration of source material is, in and of itself, a bad thing, and Daredevil has, at various stages in his comic book life, been portrayed in a more traditionally superheroic sense, so it’s not the portrayal itself that bothers me, but that in doing so, it put DAREDEVIL in the company of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2, and in comparison to those films, Mark Steven Johnson’s theatrical take on the Man Without Fear fell short.

The Director’s Cut, however, offers a darker, more serious, more unique superhero story, and is much better for it. We’ve become so accustomed to movie studios slapping “Director’s Cut” on DVDs and Blu-rays where the movie isn’t noticeably different than the theatrical cut that we’ve almost become inoculated to the idea that the Director’s Cut could be something significantly different, and DAREDEVIL’s Director’s Cut is a definite and significant improvement. Because the film had a lukewarm reception on its release, the film has slipped through the cracks a bit, and the release of the Director’s Cut hasn’t fully impacted the cultural perception of this movie, and as a result I am pretty comfortable in saying that the Director’s Cut of DAREDEVIL currently stands as the most under-appreciated superhero movie ever made.

I love DAREDEVIL, and the reasons why it falls just short of the very best superhero movies is the execution of the idea in several spots, and not the idea, itself.

How could DAREDEVIL has been just that little bit better? Ben Affleck could be who he is now, as an actor, instead of who he was then. Colin Farrell could have toned down Bullseye’s kewl and been more the driven killer that he is in the second half of the movie. Mark Steven Johnson could have had his movie shot with a little more grit and a little less slick. And Jennifer Garner …

I am not a totally unkind person, and if doing this movie is where Affleck and Garner fell in love … well, if the trade off for love is a bad performance, then that is a small price to pay. But it doesn’t alter my belief that Garner’s performance here is simply not very good, and the de-emphasis of her character in the longer Director’s Cut helps to make DAREDEVIL a better film.

DAREDEVIL opens in the present, with a busted up Daredevil clinging to the cross on top of a church. He lowers himself in and the cathedral’s priest (Derrick O’Connor) offers him some comfort before we drop into an extended flashback that gives us Matt Murdock’s origin as a child. As anyone who’s been reading these reviews knows, I’m not overly fond of origin stories, yet the presentation here is exceedingly well done. What helps is that the story of young Matt (Scott Terra) is a self-contained story about a boy, his dad, and a fateful decision by the father to buck the mob. David Keith is excellent as Jack Murdock, a down on his luck fighter that’s been working for the mob as an enforcer. When Matt catches him roughing someone up, he runs away and gets blinded by radioactive chemicals. Father and son make a bond with each other to start attacking life, and this thread ends with Jack refusing to throw a fight, which gets him killed.

It’s a concisely told, effectively rendered short story at the beginning of the film, and it does an excellent job setting not only the violent tone for what follows, but also demonstrates there’s a real consequence to people’s actions.

Cut to the near present where the bulk of the film takes place. We don’t return to the moment in the church that we left and the film doesn’t end on that moment, either. Now, that’s not a huge break in chronology, but it helps to give DAREDEVIL a little something extra in the presentation of the narrative.

The primary difference between the Director’s Cut and the theatrical cut is the inclusion of a subplot that features Coolio and Jude Ciccolella. While it doesn’t dramatically alter the film because of how it enhances the scenes that made the theatrical cut, it adds to the overall tone of the film by having an honest-to-goodness legal subplot. No longer is Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson bit players in Daredevil’s film, but they’re actual characters in the larger story. It’s important to see the Matt persona at work, as it increases the tension between what he does as a member of the Court and what he does as a vigilante. With all of these extra legal scenes put into the narrative, we get a much greater sense of Matt’s frustrations with the legal system.

There’s a fantastic scene between Matt and Officer McKensie where Matt loses it. He uses his increased sense of hearing to help determine if people are lying by listening to their heartbeat, and he’s frustrated at how both his client (Coolio) and the main witness against him (Ciccolella) are telling different versions of the same story, yet both appear to be telling the truth. Matt goes after McKensie, but as Matt and not Daredevil. The officer is obviously confused about being roughed up by the blind attorney, but after Matt bangs up his car and rips open McKensie’s shirt, he sees a scar that tells him the cop has a pacemaker, and thus his heartbeat wouldn’t be affected by lying.

It’s good stuff and it shows the failing of a superpower, something that’s not often done unless it’s a total breakdown in powers. This isn’t that; instead, Matt’s powers are in full effect, but they fail him because he’s become over-reliant on them. It’s a small touch but it adds a nice sense of pathos to the film without taking control of the narrative.

At a coffee shop one morning, Matt and Foggy (Jon Favreau) are having their morning jolt, arguing about the alleged veracity of Daredevil and giant alligators in the sewers of New York. There’s great chemistry between Favreau and Affleck, and one of the film’s better touches is how Foggy will try to lie and trick Matt by using Matt’s blindness against him, suck as when he tricks Matt into dumping mustard into his coffee. The trick is on Foggy, of course, as Matt is fully aware of what his friend is trying to pull, and when the opportunity presents itself in the arrival of Elektra Natchios (Garner), Matt switches their cups so Foggy gets the mustard blend.

Matt decides to try his hand at flirting with Elektra, who’s not having any of it. Matt pursues her down the street, where they engage in some painful banter and then do a much more effective form of banter when they start punching and kicking each other over a kid’s playground. On the whole, the scene doesn’t work for me, but what does work is that it’s nice to see that Matt has a life outside of being Daredevil. And yeah, he’s not good at personal relationships, but there’s a genuine spark of life when he goes after Elektra. He’s not doing this as cover, but because he likes chasing after a pretty lady.

Good for him, and good for including that in this film. Mark Steven Johnson doesn’t appear to have any delusions of grandeur here, nor any shame in directing a superhero movie; he’s just trying to tell the very best Daredevil story he can tell.

Matt’s life is interrupted when the Kingpin (Duncan) hires Irish assassin Bullseye (Farrell) to kill Elektra’s dad, who wants out of the criminal business. Bullseye kills Elektra’s dad with Daredevil’s billy club/walking stick/grappling hook, which gets Elektra to think that Daredevil is to blame. With her father dead, Elektra does what every daughter would do in this situation: she goes home, puts on some tight leather, sets up some sandbags, arms herself with a pair of sais, cuts open the sandbags as she’s twirling and kicking around the room, and then goes after Daredevil.

DD, of course, doesn’t want to fight her, but that doesn’t stop Elektra from jamming a sai through his left shoulder, which causes Daredevil to do one of those slow slides down the wall. Matt decides now is the time to pull off his mask (because doing it before would have been silly), and Elektra instantly realizes that Daredevil couldn’t possibly be responsible because … because they made out? … and then Bullseye shows up and kills her. We get a really nice scene of Daredevil and Elektra crawling towards each other as the police move up through the building, and it’s one of the few scenes between them that really works.

The action sequences in the film are solid without being exceptional, though I really like how the film depicts Matt’s radar sense (though I would have gone with a dark red echo effect instead of blue to better fit the film’s color scheme). I do like how Johnson takes advantage of his locations – there’s a fight on the rooftops and another inside a church – but he’s not very adept at showing people punching and kicking each other. The film uses some special effects to make the three principals jump higher and stuff and it looks really silly. Daredevil, Elektra, and Bullseye don’t need to be able to jump to a rooftop no one else can get to in order to be awesome. They’re already/always awesome.

Matt defeats Bullseye in the church fight and then goes after the Kingpin. Duncan is really good as the Kingpin; maybe it’s not the pure Wilson Fisk we’ve seen in the comics, but I love that he’s standing over this film, casting a huge shadow before entering the film as a real physical force in the final act. His dismissive line to his assistant that, “I was raised in the Bronx. This is something you wouldn’t understand,” as he readies himself for Daredevil’s arrival tells us more about the character than all the posturing ever could, just as Matt’s conflict over his Catholicism tells us he feels guilty about his actions as Daredevil much more effectively than him weakly telling a scared kid that, “I’m not the bad guy” ever could.

I really love the Director’s Cut of DAREDEVIL. While just short of that ultimate tier of Marvel films, this is an exceptionally good movie. It’s still a little too slick and the acting isn’t what it needs to be, but this darker DAREDEVIL is an under-appreciated and important superhero movie.

GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE: Trading One Demon for Another

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) – Directed by Neveldine/Taylor – Starring Nicolas Cage, Ciarán Hinds, Violante Placido, Johnny Whitworth, Christopher Lambert, Idris Elba, and Anthony Head.

Odin help me, I kind of dig GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE.

Oh, yeah, large swaths of it are a mess, Nic Cage has hit a point where he’s often doing a self-parody of a self-parody and the film feels like nothing more than a fill-in issue of a regular Ghost Rider run with really pretty art and passable writing, and what it does more than anything is illustrate how much an Idris Elba-starring Black Panther film would rock, but there’s some real energy here that was completely lacking in the first GHOST RIDER film.

Much like Wrath of the Titans, it’s nice to see that a sequel has learned from the mistakes of the first film. I bring Wrath up because the first Sam Worthington-starring Clash of the Titans was a mixed bag of serious actors like Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes playing their roles like they were making a fun B-movie and younger actors like Worthington who were treating the material like it was the most somber story ever told. Wrath was able to bring both sides of that divide together and the result was a much more cohesive vision.

SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has learned the same lesson, and instead of a disjointed, confused origin story, we get a streamlined, straightforward action film. It’s fitting that the directing duo of Neveldine/Taylor has been brought in because VENGEANCE has more in common with their Crank series than it does with the original GHOST RIDER.

It’s important that superhero movies show diversity and as silly as it may be to say it, I really believe that the continued existence of superhero films needs movies like SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE every bit as much as it needs The Dark Knight. Nolan can stake his claim at the literary end by delving into deep philosophical discussions, but a film like VENGEANCE just wants to entertain the heck out of you for 95 minutes and for the most part, I think it succeeds.

A very non-traditional French priest named Moreau (Idris Elba) is trying to protect Nadya (Violante Placido) and her son Danny (Fergus Riordan) from some thugs with guns who’ve been hired by Roarke (Ciaran Hinds), who’s actually the devil, to bring her in because it’s his kid and he wants to put his soul in the kid’s body because it’s more powerful than his. This opening sequence takes place in a monastery and there’s monks (including Anthony Head) and guns and Idris Elba and it sets the tone for what follows – this is going to be a good looking, (relatively) low budget action movie.

When Nadya and Danny escape the thugs and Moreau escapes death, the priest goes to find Johnny Blaze (Cage) to offer him a deal – if Blaze brings Danny in, Moreau’s fellow priests will pull the demon out of Blaze and he can go back to having a normal life.

And, yeah, I hate stories like this. I’m sure being the Ghost Rider isn’t the coolest superhero identity to have (it prevents a relationship with Eva Mendes at the end of the first film, after all), but isn’t being the Ghost Rider a cooler gig than jumping cars at a carnival? Wouldn’t you rather be out seeing the world on the back of a flaming chopper than sharing your front lawn with a a Snow Cone machine?) At least we’re dealing with a real demon here, so I can understand Blaze wanting him out, and at least the story spends more time with Blaze trying to rescue the kid than it does with him whining about not wanting to be who he is.

Once Moreau and Blaze make this deal, the rest of the film is primarily a chase film followed by a raid film. It’s not great but I didn’t hit the pause button, and I didn’t spend time checking Twitter or answering text messages. I just laid on the couch and watched a decent action film starring a guy who turns into a flaming skeleton.

And that’s really where VENGEANCE succeeds for me – it has a vision and it’s consistently deployed from start to finish. Neveldine/Taylor don’t screw around and let Cage get all wacky, either. In the first film, it’s like Cage changed his approach to the character every day, but Neveldine/Taylor only let him have a few scenes where he’s all Crazy Nic Cage. For the most part, they get a consistent performance from their leading man, and when he gets to indulge his acting chops, it comes in a admittedly bizarre scene between him and Danny in a diner while they’re on the run.

The content of the scene isn’t bizarre. The content is solid – Danny is looking for a father figure and Johnny feels a need to fill that role – but they’re on the run from the agents of the devil and here they are munching on fries and having a surrogate family moment. They try to cover it by saying that Nadya is off getting gas, but there’s no urgency to what they’re doing. Johnny even says they have to keep moving, but he says it like you might say, “We need to get to the beach sometime this summer. Maybe. If we can find a day that’s not too hot. And I’m not feeling bloated that day.”

Johnny does deliver Danny to some weird monks with writing on their face led by Christopher Lambert and Moreau does keep his promise to get the demon out of him. I love that Danny is p*ssed at Johnny for going through with the exorcism (that they both have a piece of Hell inside them gave them something to bond over), and there’s a great payoff later when Danny spits hellfire into Johnny to return the Spirit of Vengeance back into him.

This isn’t the greatest CGI work ever laid into a film, but it’s hard to make Ghost Rider look lame. They try – there’s a new transformation process that allows Cage to make weird faces – but for the most part, the Rider looks bad ass and if you’re actively choosing to watch a Ghost Rider film, you want that. The film also uses some comic book-inspired vignettes to explain things and they mostly work. They’re a bit of different and again, I’m big on superhero films not all looking and acting alike, so I applaud the effort.

SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE had a very modest budget of $57 million and you can see where they’ve cut some financial corners but it doesn’t prevent this movie from being a satisfying ride. (Get it? Gene Shalit would be so proud.) It’s world’s better than the first GHOST RIDER film, and even if it does feel a bit like a fill-in issue, it delivers. At the end of the film, the demon inside Johnny has reverted back to its original angelic form, and we get a blue-flamed Ghost Rider replacing the red-flamed version, which allows the movie to end on an up note – Blaze hasn’t disconnected himself from the demon, but he has made peace with it.

Sooner rather than later, SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE is going to find it’s way to the bargain bin, and when it does, I’ll be picking up a copy. It’s a slick, stylistic action movie starring a dude with a flaming skull.

Works for me.

MAN OF STEEL Teaser Trailers Channel Terrence Malick, and Why I’m Not a Superman Fan

Man of Steel (2013) – First U.S. and International Teaser Trailer (2012) – Movie Directed by Zack Snyder – Trailers Starring Henry Cavill, Kevin Costner, and Russell Crowe.

I’m not a huge Superman fan, but for as much grief as I like to give Superman fans (especially when it comes to him being killed in the mainstream DC by a Hulk knock-off), I don’t hate the character. He’s just not that interesting to me to read about on an ongoing basis, and I’ve argued long and hard that there’s not a single superhero who does less good with more powers than Superman, but then, the whole point of Superman isn’t about sacrifice or justice as much as it is a grand mythology about the realization of the American Dream. What Superman represents is the idea that yes, you can have it all without many complications – one great career, one great love (or two, perhaps, one for the adolescent and one for the adult), perfect parents, small town values, making it in the big city, and you get to play dress up and save the world, too. Superman often represents the kind of “pat yourself on the back liberalism” that allows you to make a small difference in the world and not feel guilty about your gorgeous downtown apartment, or your second, vacation home in the, er, Arctic. (Or wherever the Fortress of Solitude is being kept this year.)

If I was in charge of writing Superman for DC, I’d focus on that disconnect between what you want and what you can do. I’d focus on the idea that here’s a man that can do practically anything, so where do the boundaries lie? What’s acceptable and what isn’t? When do the heroic actions of one man begin to annoy the people he’s protecting? How much does nationalism play in his decisions? Can he act in a certain way inside Metropolis that he can’t outside of the city limits?

I would make him very thoughtful and I would make him feel every action he takes before, during, and after he makes it. I would make him very alien, very anachronistic, and very god-like, and these qualities would make him isolated, and he would feel less alone when he was alone in the Fortress of Solitude than when he was surrounded by people in Metropolis. I would make Lois his conduit to humanity for the important stuff, and Jimmy his conduit to the silly stuff, and they would know that Superman is Clark Kent is Kal-El because secret identities among close friends are ponderous to write about.

He would be in love with Lois, but reticent to admit these feelings, and she would intrigued by him, first as a story and then as her own feelings grew, she would be conflicted over whether she was in love with Superman or Clark Kent or Kal-El.

He would not be simply a ponderous, existential being, however. He would love humanity and would love to explore it. To overcome his guilt at not being able to stop every crime everywhere because of the importance of allowing humanity to find his own way (something he would have learned from both sets of parents), he would be the kind of man who, on a whim after watching a particularly good movie, would fly to Turkey to try shawarma, which would lead to flying to Nigeria the next night to try that nation’s version, and then to the Philippines, Israel, Mexico, wherever … he would revel in meeting new people and cultures. In short, anything he needs to learn from experience instead of from a book or documentary or Kryptonian computer.

He would work as a newspaper journalist, but he wouldn’t be covering the hard-hitting stories that Lois covers. No, he’d be the “man about town,” writing stories about the every day Metropolitan and what their life was like: unrest in the Armenian community one day, a shiny new Little League field the next.

His stories would have a consistent theme: one man or one woman or one child or one abandoned dog can make a difference.

None of this would work on a monthly basis inside the DC Universe, of course, unless you found a way to work it around having punch fights with colorful villains, and that wouldn’t be all that interesting to me, and not just because, of every major hero at Marvel and DC, Superman has, by far, the worst Rogues’ Gallery. (Of course, since I’ve only dabbled in Superman stories the past 10-15 years, maybe someone’s already done it and I’m missing out on good stuff. The only Superman stuff I’ve made a point to read in that time was the Kurt Busiek-penned material, and while I liked it, I just didn’t find Superman an interesting enough character to keep reading.)

It does partly explain, however, why I’m so taken with the first teaser trailers for next year’s MAN OF STEEL cinematic reboot from Zack Snyder. First and foremost, I’m more interested in MAN OF STEEL because it’s a Zack Snyder film than because it’s a Superman film. Whatever flaws Snyder’s films have, I love watching them because he’s a guy who – overused term alert – is a visionary filmmaker. No one else makes films like him, and because Superman is such a mythically entrenched character, I think turning him over to a visionary artist who understands comic books is the right way to go.

During Comic Con last week, DC showed the first teaser trailer, now they’ve made them available for wide release. There are two versions, an American version where the voice over is done by Kevin Costner (who will play Jonathan Kent in the film) and an international version voiced by Russell Crowe (who will play Jor-El).

They’re completely fantastic. Both of them strike a powerful, thoughtful tone, and Snyder (or the teasers, at least) are delivered in way that they remind me strongly of Terrence Malick’s best film, The Thin Red Line, with the camera’s contemplative focus on the natural world, an off-center framing of people, and the beauty of ordinary human events. (Thin Red Line also used clothes drying on a line to represent home.) They plug into the idea that one man can make a difference, yet with differing tones. Jonathan’s words of advice are more open-hearted, allowing Clark to choose his own path, while Jor-El’s are more forceful and direct, insisting that Kal-El will lead humanity into a brighter future. While neither Jonathan nor Jor-El says, “With great power comes great responsibility,” I’m pretty sure both men would recognize the wisdom in Uncle Ben’s advice to his nephew, though they would differ on the application of those words.

It is a good idea to not make too much hay about a teaser trailer, but almost everything here works. The only part of either trailer that fails for me is the one part that clearly depicts Superman. There’s just no way for me to look at that and not think, “That shot is cooler in every single trailer Iron Man has been in.” Much better is the POV of Superman flying over the cloud-covered city, which strikes a beautiful tone to match a beautiful image. I doubt Warner Brothers would let Snyder bring a Malick-like approach to the entirety of MAN OF STEEL, but maybe I’m wrong. Whatever the film turns out to be, I am more interested now that I’ve seen the teasers than I was before.

Believe me, I have two short stories and a review of X-Men: Wolverine to write, and today is the day Atomic Anxiety’s Superhero Month turns its attention to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, and writing about Batman Begins will encompass a lot more than the film after the tragic shootings in Aurora, Colorado. I hadn’t intended to spend an hour pondering Superman, but I’m so taken with these teasers that I felt compelled to write about a character that I neither hate nor love.

First up, the United States teaser for MAN OF STEEL:

And now the international teaser: