Marvel’s Daredevil isn’t a conventional superhero. Blinded as a boy in a freak accident which involved nuclear chemicals, Matt Murdock doesn’t have fantastic abilities — he is human, but with a heightened sense of things around him — he can listen to heartbeats, to conversations that happen across a wide radius and can sense movement better than people with vision do. After his boxer father becomes a victim of gang violence, the young, orphaned Matt, is picked up by a mysterious old man called Stick, who teaches him how to fight. After Stick decides that there’s nothing left to teach him, Matt goes on to study law. Matt Murdock, defence attorney by day, becomes Daredevil, vigilante crime fighter by night.
Netflix’s production of one of the most intriguing, and human superheroes is very dark, sometimes literally (there are very few scenes which involve daylight, and even those have a constant gloom that pervades Daredevil’s New York City). The show does not mince violence either; the fight scenes are beautifully choreographed.
In the first season of Daredevil , we saw Matt (played by Charlie Cox), getting comfortable with his role as protector of Hell’s Kitchen, the area in New York where he was born and raised. Hell’s Kitchen is infested with gang violence, and the more Matt tries to smoothen things out, the more he realises that it isn’t a molehill which can be removed, but a veritable mountain that has been put into place by a gang boss who goes by the name Kingpin. Being an undercover hero trying to uncover a city’s dark secret is tough work, and the challenges it poses are best represented by Matt’s friendship with a nurse, Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), who works a night shift at the General Hospital. It isn’t long before Matt’s day job as a defence lawyer is affected. He must do all he can to ensure that his best friend and partner, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) doesn’t get wind of his newfound hobby.
Usually, in superhero shows, one sees very clear demarcations between good and bad. We have the hero, he is a good man, sometimes a wronged man, but most definitely a man with a gift, who must put it to use protecting people, and we have the bad man, an unappealing person who thinks about nothing but evil.
The makers ensure that the audience doesn’t spend too much time wondering whom to root for. Daredevil though, takes on a different path. The evil, awful villain and Kingpin, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) is given a love story, and a rather tender one at that. Matt, on the other hand, is made to question himself multiple times about his own intentions with respect to protecting his city. After all, he constantly advises people to believe in letting the legal system take its course, while wearing uncomfortable spandex and beating people up at night, making his own moral system a murky shade of grey.
Daredevil is a series about a vigilante hero who is flawed. It proves that you don’t need incredible super powers to be interesting. You only have to be human.
(Marvel’s Daredevil is presently on Netflix.)
