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alibi_shop(I watched a lot of Netflix shows recently. Here's the first.)
I liked season 2 and its ninja hijinks pretty well, but I think it was a good idea to get back to basics with Daredevil as a low-budget vigilante in an improvised costume (part of which is now, hilariously, made out of a wimple stolen from a convent).
As usual, none of the stuff about "normal" people, or New York City in general, is at all convincing (even though they've stopped trying so hard to pretend that midtown Manhattan has tons of street crime)—it wouldn't have been too hard to make the subplots about law enforcement and politics make more sense than this, so I assume it just wasn't a priority.
What Daredevil is best at is emotion. Deborah Ann Woll gets some of her best material here as her character goes through a lot of shit (after the writers finally remember that she killed someone in season 1); Jay Ali takes a fairly boring FBI agent character and makes him compelling as his situation becomes more and more unbearable; Vincent D'Onofrio continues to be both silly and great as the angriest gangster in the world; and the season really starts to click when its new bad guy arrives, the most unstable and miserable of them all. This unremarkable-looking dude (they wisely decided that his enjoyably goofy look in the comic wouldn't work on screen) is ridiculously dangerous, he can kill you from 20 paces with a fork, but he's also fairly believable as an ordinary sociopath who badly needs a friend. When we first see him use his skill and also learn how mentally broken he is, it's a very odd sequence with an odd premise, blatantly theatrical, extremely creepy, and also kind of sad—a real high point of the series. The actor is very good, and so are the actors who play him at younger ages.
Charlie Cox as Daredevil might be one of my top two or three superhero actors ever. It's easy to believe that he's both a very intelligent and a very violent person, and he's great at representing Daredevil's weird superpower (he can't see, but he can see) purely through movement and facial expressions. He also seems to do a fair amount of good basic stunt work, before his double steps in for the serious fighting and bouncing around. (The fights are, as usual, really well done; the big single-take prison brawl is quite something, but I'm partial to Daredevil's first encounter with his new nemesis, because it shows us two people who each have one thing they're much better at than the other—so there's a meta-fight about trying to control what kind of fight it is.)
I like the rest of the cast too, especially Joanne Whalley as the nun whose wimple that might have been, and also whoever played the terrified henchperson at the end of episode 9. Even though it still drags things out way too long, this continues to be a solidly entertaining show with flashes of greatness—the best attempt I've seen so far to do dark comic-book melodrama on TV.
I liked season 2 and its ninja hijinks pretty well, but I think it was a good idea to get back to basics with Daredevil as a low-budget vigilante in an improvised costume (part of which is now, hilariously, made out of a wimple stolen from a convent).
As usual, none of the stuff about "normal" people, or New York City in general, is at all convincing (even though they've stopped trying so hard to pretend that midtown Manhattan has tons of street crime)—it wouldn't have been too hard to make the subplots about law enforcement and politics make more sense than this, so I assume it just wasn't a priority.
What Daredevil is best at is emotion. Deborah Ann Woll gets some of her best material here as her character goes through a lot of shit (after the writers finally remember that she killed someone in season 1); Jay Ali takes a fairly boring FBI agent character and makes him compelling as his situation becomes more and more unbearable; Vincent D'Onofrio continues to be both silly and great as the angriest gangster in the world; and the season really starts to click when its new bad guy arrives, the most unstable and miserable of them all. This unremarkable-looking dude (they wisely decided that his enjoyably goofy look in the comic wouldn't work on screen) is ridiculously dangerous, he can kill you from 20 paces with a fork, but he's also fairly believable as an ordinary sociopath who badly needs a friend. When we first see him use his skill and also learn how mentally broken he is, it's a very odd sequence with an odd premise, blatantly theatrical, extremely creepy, and also kind of sad—a real high point of the series. The actor is very good, and so are the actors who play him at younger ages.
Charlie Cox as Daredevil might be one of my top two or three superhero actors ever. It's easy to believe that he's both a very intelligent and a very violent person, and he's great at representing Daredevil's weird superpower (he can't see, but he can see) purely through movement and facial expressions. He also seems to do a fair amount of good basic stunt work, before his double steps in for the serious fighting and bouncing around. (The fights are, as usual, really well done; the big single-take prison brawl is quite something, but I'm partial to Daredevil's first encounter with his new nemesis, because it shows us two people who each have one thing they're much better at than the other—so there's a meta-fight about trying to control what kind of fight it is.)
I like the rest of the cast too, especially Joanne Whalley as the nun whose wimple that might have been, and also whoever played the terrified henchperson at the end of episode 9. Even though it still drags things out way too long, this continues to be a solidly entertaining show with flashes of greatness—the best attempt I've seen so far to do dark comic-book melodrama on TV.
