Daredevil: Born Again review – could Marvel's new series go one better than The Penguin?
For those of you who like to keep count, Daredevil: Born Again is the 13th small-screen series under the aegis of the Marvel Television team (Agatha All Along last year was the 11th, and the 12th, the animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, launched a few weeks ago). For those of you who like to go more by what it feels like, it is number 872.
So what do we have here? Well, it's a revival/reboot/continuation of the Daredevil series that ran on Netflix for three seasons from 2015-2018. There were rumours that it began life as a comedy but was reshot to bring it more in line with fans' expectations for a series about one of the MCU's grittier characters. Let the online historians debate it all in a multiverse of furious threads while the rest of us get on with watching the actual show.
We open with a bravura set piece involving most of the people you'd expect. Lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) AKA the vigilante superhero (Murdock was blinded in a childhood accident and developed heightened senses as a result) Daredevil is attending the retirement party of NYPD cop Cherry (Clark Johnson – revered for ever by those of us who remember his woefully underacknowledged performance as Det Meldrick Lewis in Homicide: Life on the Street) with his friends Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll). And, it suddenly turns out, his non-arch nemesis Benjamin 'Dex' Poindexter, whose experimental spinal surgery at the end of the original series has rendered him literally fighting fit once more. After a brutal fight, a fall (or push) and a death, we cut to a year later to introduce the rest of the cast and start the devilry proper.
Wilson Fisk (the returning Vincent D'Onofrio in an uncharacteristically unmannered performance as the crime lord, known as Kingpin, and most-arch nemesis of Daredevil) is back in town after a long absence. During this time, his wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), has run his empire with ever-greater efficiency and profit. She is not best pleased when her husband decides that now is the time to go legit and start accruing power instead of merely money. He runs for mayor of New York City and despite being a renowned wrong 'un, he knows how to command a camera and whip up a media storm. People warm to his straight-talking ways and the simple solutions he seems to offer to all the city's problems and ignore the various problematic aspects of his temperament and career and elect him. Imagine! I do sometimes wonder if Donald Trump isn't a crisis actor deployed by desperate screenwriters to make even the most basic villain now seem a precision-tooled response to Our Troubled Times. This creeping suspicion is not helped by the many scenes of an internet reporter played by Genneya Walton vox-popping people on the street and them espousing polarised opinions on whether Fisk's hardline anti-vigilantism message is good or bad for the city/America.
Meanwhile, Murdock is having a crisis of conscience – are vigilantes good for the city/America? Or bad? – and trying to keep to the day job as a defence lawyer, with Cherry as his private investigator and much work for the common good to do. But the lines between heroic attorney work and vigilante violence begin to blur as Murdock must first find then save the sole witness to a bad cop beatdown of an informant. In the meantime, Kingpin is gathering kompromat on the commissioner of police to smooth his passage to power and, goodness me, isn't keeping right from wrong difficult, whatever part of a multiverse you're in?
Murdock and Fisk – or Cox and D'Onofrio if you prefer – are great in key scenes together, the former fleet and dancing, the latter giving off a dark, heavy energy that has you backing away from the screen as you watch. This, the action sequences and the distribution of such superficially stirring lines as 'I was raised to believe in grace and retribution' will certainly be enough to keep viewers happy, as will – surely – the return of Jon Bernthal as Frank 'The Punisher' Castle. Whether the MCU team has done enough to take the comic adaptation crown from its current holder, DC's dark, clever, critically acclaimed ratings smash The Penguin, however, remains to be seen. And, of course, the wider question of how much IP exploitation a franchise can manage without collapsing under the weight of its own lore and Sacred Timeline becomes ever more pressing.
Daredevil: Born Again is on Disney+ now
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