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| Tookey's Review |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2003 |
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| Genre: |
ACTION
COMIC STRIP
ADVENTURE
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
0 |
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The perpetually uninteresting Ben Affleck (pictured) lumbers through Daredevil as the hero, blinded as a teenager by some kind of acid that has heightened his other senses and, for some unexplained reason, his athleticism.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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It has left him with - guess what? - a determination to right injustice. By night a vigilante, by day a lawyer, DD falls for a beautiful heiress (Jennifer Garner) who is as fond of martial arts and form-fitting latex as he is. His enemy? The dreaded crime boss Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan plus cigar) and his vicious henchman Bullseye (the diminutive Colin Farrell plus darts).
It's hard to take seriously any superhero whose taste in plum-coloured bodysuits is horribly reminiscent of Tony Blair on holiday. Daredevil's weakness is his sensitivity to noise, but I wish he could have asked the projectionist to turn the hard rock soundtrack down whenever he has a fight or embarks on a chase.
With breathtaking hypocrisy, the film preaches an anti-vengeance message while ensuring that all but one of the bad guys have terrible damage wrought upon them. Much of the violence is spectacularly brutal and some of it easily imitated. It well deserves its 15 certificate.
For me, writer-director Mark Steven Johnson's movie is much too heavily reliant on tried and tested ingredients, such as Batman-type design and Matrix-style fighting, but this is well-crafted junk that's just different enough to keep a mass audience from lynching the producers.
All the same, it can be only be a matter of a year or two before the public tires of this kind of hi-tech, wham-bam caper, just as they tired of the Schwarzenegger-Stallone style of muscle-bound machismo before it.
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