Plot points throughout Daredevil, currently streaming in its entirety on Netflix, discussed below.
I remain convinced that the most important line in all of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight films is the following, uttered by Heath Ledger's Joker after Batman has foiled his attempt to blow up a pair of ferries: "You didn't think I'd risk losing the battle for the soul of Gotham in a fist fight with you?"
In one line, Nolan and his fellow screenwriters exposed the absurdity of the superhero genre. If you build up a conflict between a hero and a villain and have it end with a mere physical confrontation, well, who cares? The Dark Knight endures because it's about the battle for the soul of Gotham, not a contest of strength between the Joker and the Batman.*
You get the sense that Drew Goddard, the showrunner for Daredevil, understood that fact for the first 12 episodes or so of Marvel's first series for Netflix. The contest between Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) and Matthew Murdock (Charlie Cox) is, at heart, a contest between competing visions for the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in New York City. Fisk sees gleaming towers and new growth, financing such improvements via his work as the Kingpin, a vicious criminal mastermind. Murdock, meanwhile, values stasis and justice, enforcing both via his work as Daredevil, a masked vigilante.
As I note today at the Washington Post, the show could've done a better job explaining the benefits of Fisk's efforts, if only to increase the dramatic tension (I don't, y'know, expect the show to actually back the Kingpin). But the conflict is clear. And it's compelling! With gentrification a burning issue in many major metropolitan areas—just as the war on terror was a burning issue at the time of The Dark Knight's release—there was much to play with.
So how did Daredevil's first season end? Well, Kingpin lost the soul of Gotham in a fist fight with Daredevil.
Seriously: For the first 12 episodes or so, Daredevil was good, but not great. It had a few fantastic sequences—the single-take fight in the hallway in episode two, the vicious battle between Daredevil and Nobu in episode nine, basically the whole episode with Stick—and Fisk is an interesting, flawed, human villain. There was a lot to work with!
And then, in the season finale, everything goes to hell. We see Matthew Murdock finally don his Daredevil costume ... and it looks ridiculous:
Still images don't really do it justice: you have to watch his movements, absorb the way the camera frames him. The whole climactic sequences is filled with shots from below, looking up on Daredevil, framing him in iconic, heroic poses ripped from a comic book panel:
I really just cannot emphasize enough how silly all of this is. Doubly so since the final fight between Daredevil and Kingpin is a contest between a ninja with super-powered senses and an obese man who can barely move. Yes, yes, I know my comic book history: In theory, Kingpin is 400 pounds of muscle and lithe like a cat, an expert sumo-style fighter. In reality, he's played by Vincent D'Onofrio, who is, well, none of those things. A great actor, yes! He brings much pathos to the role of Wilson Fisk. But he's simply not a match for Daredevil, phsyically. And the director clearly understands this limitation, filming the fight in a herky-jerky sort of way that minimizes the amount of actual moving around that D'Onofrio needs to do.
I'll give season two a shot, I guess. But man. What a let down.
*This is a lesson the Marvel Cinematic Universe would do well to learn. I am so sick and tired of Marvel movies culminating in a big shoot-em-up, punch-em-out battle royale. Sound and fury, etc.