Ben Affleck’s ‘Daredevil’, 20 Years Later, Is a Refreshing Change From the MCU

Picture it: Ben Affleck, in a tight-fitting superhero suit, a cowl over his head, looming over a dark city peppered with ominous skyscrapers and eerily-lit churches, growling about justice. But this is not one of his appearances as Zack Snyder’s “Batfleck”—it’s Daredevil, and this movie is much better than you remember. 

Let’s go back in time 20 years: before the MCU, before Disney+, before Netflix streaming, to a time when people tried to make calling Hell’s Kitchen “the Kitchen” a thing. 

Few in 2003 considered Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil a masterpiece (and we are certainly not making that argument now), but two decades later my primary reaction rewatching the picture was one of feeling refreshed. Compared to Zack Snyder’s morose and joyless DC movies and the obsessively interconnected stories of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, here is a picture that dares to be one thing. It’s just a movie! And a pretty good one, too. 

It isn’t campy, but it understands its roots as a comic. It has, dare I suggest, a little bit of the Bif! Bam! Pow! playfulness that superhero movies rejected in that watershed year 2008, when Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight asked “what if a propulsive, bleeding-edge cop thriller, just with clowns and bats?” and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man said to Hollywood “I’ve spent half my life in comic book stores, fans are tired of having to apologize for being fans.” That significant reassessment of “comic book properties” in the popular consciousness was the right move then (clearly, as the marketplace doesn’t lie!) but there’s a charming simplicity to Daredevil that makes me nostalgic. You can watch this movie without knowing a damn thing, and you aren’t left feeling like there will ever be a follow-up assignment. (That there was a cheapo quasi-sequel, Elektra, is irrelevant.)

Funny that it was Favreau who directed that first Iron Man. I’d forgotten that he plays Foggy Nelson, a very similar character to the MCU’s jokey aide-de-camp Happy Hogan, also played by Favreau. He’s the sidekick/business partner of Ben Affleck’s “lawyer by day/vigilante by night” Matt Murdock, the man without fear. Given Murdock’s disability (which is also the source of his strength) their bond is even tighter. Murdock, being a justice-loving ass-kicker is certainly self-reliant, but knowing he’s got Foggy by his side when it is necessary is one of the movie’s nicer touches. Even when Foggy is super annoyed with Matt (which is often) he’ll drop all that in an instant if his blind friend needs the aid of someone sighted. 

Also like Batman, Daredevil is one of those superheroes that doesn’t really have “powers.” When young Matt Murdock is blinded, he isn’t also hit with any gamma rays or anything. He takes advantage of the enhancement to his other senses and taps into his inner will to become a vigilante machine. No, in reality no amount of “advanced sense of touch” means one can leap off of buildings like he does in the final act of this movie. But, you know, this is an action movie for kids! And the way some of the fight scenes are visualized using an echolocation effect (something the more recent Daredevil Netflix series used very sparingly) still hold up. Whether it makes realistic sense is another thing, but considering how dated I expected the action to look, I gotta say it’s impressive.

A little more on the dated side are the needle-drops. It’s been a long time since I’ve rocked out to Evanescence. Other bands are in there, too, like Seether and Drowning Pool, but they’ve all got the essence of Evanescence—that crisp symphonic heavy metal that really had a moment in the sun 20 years ago. It’s not a bad sound, just a specific sound. 

Daredevil doesn’t offer much in the way of an original story—did we mention that organized crime murdered Matt Murdock’s sole parent in an alley?—but where it kills it is with its villains. Michael Clarke Duncan exudes badassery as The Kingpin, and Colin Farrell, who may indeed win an Academy Award in a few weeks, is hilarious as the manic, dart-throwing Irish henchman called Bullseye. 

Farrell spends most of his time on screen mugging like Jim Carrey, killing people with paper clips and peanuts. What drives him? We don’t know. He’s just evil, but possesses the power of precision. Oh, if only he channeled his talents into something productive, like brain surgery or needlepoint! It’s a marvelous bit of business.

And Duncan’s presence as a suspenders-wearing musclebound mountain is extraordinary cinema. He conquers the frame, cigar in mouth, gleeful as the central figure of all that is criminal in New York City. He weighed well over 300 lbs at the time, and is everything anyone could ever want in a superhero’s villain. The MCU, with all its accomplishments, still stumbles when crafting its baddies. Here’s a department where Mark Steven Johnson had everybody beat.

A little less successful, but certainly cute, is the relationship between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. Of course, working on this film inspired their off-screen romance (which has since matured into respectful co-parenting, if my reading of People magazine is correct) and you can see them having a good time as they “spar” a bit on a playground, leaping around on see-saws and the like. From a 2023 perspective, though, Affleck’s Murdock is very much over-the-line in his pursuit of Elektra Natchios. She clearly states “leave me alone” and he grabs her wrist because he “just wants to talk.” This wasn’t really cool then, and I don’t think I’m being a woke liberal cuck in saying it’s good that this kind of behavior wouldn’t fly in a mainstream movie aimed at kids and teens today.

(There’s some more cringy sexual politics in there; the whole first act of vigilante justice is some white knight stuff, in which a woman’s rape is used, essentially, as a prop. The woman in question doesn’t even get a line, all she does is cry.)

The big question, of course, is how is Ben? Well, as a now-famous Vulture article argues, Ben Affleck is maybe the most famous actor who has never had a signature role. And Daredevil certainly isn’t it. There’s not a moment where he is bad, but he’s never great. This early in his career, he still has a strange, timorous quality to his voice. He sounds, at times, like the handsome guy who got a part in the school play, but doesn’t quite feel confident enough to act. The action is all good, but you can notice it in the voiceover and the (few) romantic moments. That he’s also doing the difficult task of playing blind doesn’t help much.

Nevertheless, at a time when superhero movies are fraught with so much baggage—give an opinion of one on Twitter at your own peril—Daredevil is basically a delight. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some Evanesence albums to play.  

Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets about Phish and Star Trek at @JHoffman.