23 Jan Daredevil (2003)

Vision

All of a sudden, Hollywood films have discovered that making a visually smart movie could be good business. The second “Harry Potter” film was notable with its architectural eye. Cost a tiny bit extra to get some good people on the case, but a trivial expense overall. “Mothman” had a very studied presentation that conveyed the attention-deficit vision and paranoid imagination behind the story. Risky but effective. “Crouching Tiger” was only superficially a Hong Kong fight picture, instead was about the choreographed camera.

And now, after “Spider-man” wasted its chance to have a swooping camera, we have “Daredevil”. The story on this movie is that it was a B-movie with second-raters. After it was shot, “Spider-man” made money so they went back and added new art direction (“Mystery Men” meets “Fast and Furious”) and completely re-edited it for snazz. Now it has an eye that itself is fearless, that itself jumps and swoops and cavorts even more than the combatants. The echolocation-sight was effective too, but only in comparison to how bad it might have been — remember “Predator”?

All else is secondary. Sure the actors portraying the heroes are bad, sure the villians are more talented and encouraged to overact. Sure, the story is fractured (victim to the re-editing). No matter. They literally don’t matter. This is a film about alternative sight, and they mean it. Now, just maybe a few of the upcoming blockbusters will have similarly intelligent eyes: “Hunk” “Alexander” “Matrix 2” and we’ll all be better off.

Posted in 2003

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB