With the first episode out of the way and the basic world of blind vigilante, Matt Murdock, laid out before us, Netflix’s Daredevil has already managed to catch our attention with a gritty style and a brutal edge that already has made the 2003 movie look increasingly mawkish in comparison. However, whether the man without fear realises it or not, he stands on a precipice that his heightened senses may not actually help him navigate; and by this I mean the way most TV shows traditionally handle superheroes.
Not to put the boot into superhero shows from times past, but some of them routinely fell into becoming villain of the week shows that seemed to rely heavily on melodrama and filler to carry them through their hefty, 22 episode runs while simultaneously missing the point of what the original character was supposed to represent, which often led to me becoming consistently frustrated at the seasons trundled on to desperately fill their episode count. How could Daredevil avoid this pit trap and stay innovative while sticking to a greatly expanded story? I’ll sum it up for you in two words – hallway fight.
In an effort to smoke out the mysterious, masked vigilante that’s been putting a noticable dent in their human trafficking business, the Ranskahov Brothers have resorted to rather extreme methods and have ordered a random child to be taken off the street and kidnapped as bait. However, as we join the action already in progress, we find that Matt Murdock has already wandered into an ambush and is slowly succumbing to his many wounds as he lays lifeless in a dumpster. However, as the man who will eventually be known as Daredevil is nothing if not economical with his time, he takes this down period to flashback to the time his boxer father was murdered by the Irish mob for not throwing the fight that was finally going to be his ticket to the big leagues. By this time, a young Matt had already lost his eyesight while his hypersensitive other senses are getting ever stronger, but after hearing the shot from his apartment, he runs yo his father’s side as he expires.
However, someone who isn’t likely to be expiring after all is Murdock himself who is rescued from his prospective dumpster tomb by nurse Claire Temple who gambles on the odds that a seriously wounded, black clad masked man who blatantly is blind has more chance of being a good guy than some sort of lunatic. However, as she treats his wounds, the men who put him in this condition are still searching for him and Matt has to get his head back in the game if he’s going to save Claire, the kidnapped boy and himself from the forces that conspire against them.
Menwhile, blissfully ignorant of their colleague’s plight, Foggy and Karen spend a night on the town in order to help Karen try to move past the immence amount of trauma she’s recently been through after being framed for murder and almost killed herself – but as they drink cheap booze and sharpen their banter, Matt is about to unleash hell in a way that only the devil can.
If the first episode of Daredevil was all about extablishing the world of Matt Murdock, I guess that the second is striving to give us more insight into the currently unnamed alter ego he becomes when he heads out at night to throw bloodied knuckles at lawbreakers with reckless abandon. While you may not innitially notice it at first, it’s something of a bold move to separate Matt from Foggy and Karen so utterly on only the second episode, but in doing so the show manages to show just how compartmentalised the life of a superhero has to be. It also does this by giving us the most Daredevil style beginning we could possibly hope for as we start with the Ranskahov’s trap already having been sprung, leaving our lead going into the episode utterly fucked up and bleeding – which is so perfectly indicative of superhero noir, even the 2003 movie started with Murdock near death.
Of course, while Charlie Cox reclines awkwardly within a dumpster, we get to go over more of his origin story after have covered he freak accident last time and giving us a more detailed retelling of his father’s murder adds to the tragedy that fuels around 78% of Marvel’s heavily traumatised do gooders. To be fair, it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before (again, the Ben Affleck movie covered it pretty comprehensively), but it’s still nice to wallow in the tragic nature of what forged Matt to be who he feels he needs to become. Plus, we not only get to spend time with Battlin’ Jack Murdock (not to mention a nifty Crusher Creel name drop), but we get a bit of mystery concerning Matt’s mother too which will no doubt spin out beyond this episode.
However, while the two big selling points of The Cut Man proves to be the introduction of Rosario Dawson Claire (aka. the Night Nurse from the comics who tends to patch up Marvel’s more battered street level heroes) and a fight scene which helped change the face of action sequences virtually overnight, it’s also worth mentioning how good a stealth plot point keeping Matt separated from his friends truly is. For the entire episode, both Deborah Anne Woll and Elden Henson essentially play a two hander as their characters get drunk, bond and essentially cement their friendship while the third number of their party is out bleeding from multiple holes he didn’t have before the night started. It might feel a little like a rudimentary trick, but when it comes to aggressively laying down the barrier that Matt’s double life creates, it does it almost subconsciously without having to spell it out – expecially when they swing by his apartment to invite him out while being utterly unaware that he could possibly be dying.
It also helps that Matt now has diffrent allies depending on which mode he’s currently in and the introduction of Claire essentially gives us a guide to lead us through a speed through lesson of Daredevil 101 in which we get a run down of his abilities, how far he’s willing to go to take down criminals (torture and hospitalisation is fine, apparently) and how he treats possible allies to his cause no matter how unwilling. As a story telling tactic, the episode is something of a masterclass of showing, not telling as we see what an average night for Matt consists of while his friends are out simply living their lives and it’s a truly fascinating experience.
However, the biggest takeaway from this episode is the final hallway brawl that somehow went in to set the standard of cinematic fight fights going forward. Essentially stealing the one shot extended fight scene from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and finessing, John Wick style, it into an exhausting encounter that sees Matt brutalise a gang of thugs in a corridor in one, seemingly “unbroken” shot, it populized the set piece in such a way that it feels that everyone needed to get a bad ass hallway scene at some point. Fuck, even Darth Vader got one in Rogue One and since then, absurdly complex fight sequences that seemingly happen in one, fabricated take, have now become the norm.
Even though Matt spends the majority of the episode nearly dying of blood loss, it seems that Daredevil is effortlessly going from strength to strength thanks to some incredibly savvy story telling and a fight sequence that makes you feel fucking exhausted just by watching it. The man without fear shows no sign of stopping.
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