Review: Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix is intense, moody and captivating

With Daredevil and the upcoming additional TV shows on Netflix, Marvel is attempting to bring a “dark and gritty” edginess to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). As the expansive narrative matures, consequences and darker corners of its world are a valuable way of deepening the story, and it is to Marvel’s credit that they manage it so successfully here.

Daredevil is a serious origin story like Batman Begins, but it’s also fun like any other Marvel movie, and it also fits very neatly into the overall universe, comfortably existing in the same world as The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Agents of SHIELD. Of course, like many of the other stories, you can definitely watch this without having seen anything else from Marvel — you might just get a little more out of it if you have seen the films though.

I haven’t ever watched the Daredevil film starring Ben Affleck that arrived before superheroes became the next big thing. If it was on my radar at the time I probably would’ve checked it out, though, because even the basic details for this character are compelling. Matthew Murdoch (here played brilliantly by Charlie Cox) is a lawyer by day and a vigilante by night. Blinded in a chemical accident when he was young, he has been gifted with heightened senses and trained to access a range of abilities and pull off some badass martial arts moves. He runs his new legal practice in Hell’s Kitchen, New York with his friend from law school Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson). They find themselves discovering a lot about the city’s corrupt underbelly and the man at the centre of it, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) aka Kingpin.

In so many ways, this might be one of the best things in the MCU so far. It’s not weighed down by so much expectation or responsibility to set up something else, and that truly allows it to breathe life into a group of characters and take the time to explore them as people. This is what long-form television narratives can provide, and it’s why this show can take the time to build and develop so many of the characters in more ancillary positions to the driving force of the story.

And there are loads of great supporting characters. Within the 13 episodes of the season, we meet Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), the secretary at Nelson and Murdoch; Claire (Rosario Dawson), a nurse who fixes up Murdoch when he’s particularly beaten up; Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore), Fisk’s loyal right-hand man, and Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall), a reporter driven to find out what’s really going on in Hell’s Kitchen.

There are a lot of flashbacks too, and these help us to understand Daredevil as a hero in more depth by showing his relationship to his father (John Patrick Hayden) and to the man who trained him, Stick (Scott Glenn). It’s not just Murdoch who gets the flashback treatment too, just like showrunner Steven DeKnight’s previous show, Spartacus, this series takes its villains seriously and devotes a lot of screentime to Fisk — who is portrayed magnificently by D’Onofrio — and he even gets his own flashback origin story in the eighth episode of the show.

Daredevil has a dark aesthetic, but it’s not drenched in blackness. It’s really beautifully shot and put together, with many of the defining moments as much feats of cinematography as they are anything else. Some of the most convincing stuff comes early on, with a brutal one-shot hallway fight scene in the second hour being one of the most memorable, along with Murdoch’s perfectly delivered courtroom speech in the next instalment and Fisk’s outsized reaction to a colleague’s lack of respect in episode four. These moments hook you, and then the show just continues to deliver really consistently.

There are loads of great ideas here, such as how the destruction from the battle of New York in The Avengers opened up more opportunities for criminal activity and how Daredevil is needed because there are certain things the law can’t help with when corruption has spread so far. Daredevil may be about a more brutal corner of the MCU (and you can see that just through how graphically violent it occasionally is) but it still fits in really well and tells a gripping story. This show is designed for the weekend binge, and it’s a binge you won’t regret.

All of Daredevil Season 1 is on Netflix now