Resurrection is commonplace in comics, so it’s unsurprising that Marvel has brought its most popular Netflix TV series back from the dead.
A revival that’s also an act of franchise integration, Daredevil: Born Again officially welcomes the Man with No Fear into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fold, even as it generally continues what his third season started.
That means it’s a grim, tormented affair elevated by a strong Charlie Cox performance as the defender of Hell’s Kitchen, and undone by lethargic, unfocused, and drawn-out plotting whose torpor is compounded by the decision to largely refrain from depicting the hero in costume and action.
Too often draggy and predictable, this Disney+ endeavor, premiering March 4, appears to have learned little from its prior missteps.
The best thing about Daredevil: Born Again is its swift elimination of an insufferable primary character, which occurs as super-sense-powered blind lawyer Matt Murdock (Cox) and colleagues and best pals Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy (Elden Henson) celebrate at a NYC bar.
Their evening is ruined by the appearance of Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter (Wilson Bethel)—aka sharpshooting assassin Bullseye, although no one refers to him as such—who takes aim at Murdoch and his friends, killing one of them. This instigates a prototypically bruising Daredevil fight in a stairwell and hallways, with the do-gooder taking as much punishment as he dishes out, and at the conclusion of it, he throws Dex off the roof of the establishment in an effort to kill him. Giving in to the murderous impulses he’s long sought to suppress, Daredevil crosses the line. While Poindexter survives, Matt responds by hanging up his devil-horned mask and baton.
A year after this tragedy, Matt is in business with former assistant DA Kirsten (Nikki M. James) and his favorite cop Cherry (Clark Johnson), who knows his secret identity. He additionally strikes up a romance with therapist Heather (Margarita Levieva), who just so happens to be thinking about writing a book about vigilantes. Matt’s good fortune, however, doesn’t last long, as he soon learns that his nemesis Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), otherwise known as Kingpin, is back in the Big Apple and interested in running for mayor.
A sit-down between the two at a diner establishes an uneasy détente, with both professing to the other that they’ve turned over a new leaf, leaving behind their outside-the-law ways and vowing to affect meaningful change for their hometown through the system. Yet neither really believes these claims, and audiences will feel likewise, since there’s literally no series here if both Daredevil and Kingpin stay on the straight-and-narrow.
Nonetheless, for the majority of Daredevil: Born Again’s nine episodes, Matt avoids being his alter ego. Following the premiere’s introductory showdown, there’s scant mayhem until the season’s second half. In its place is a whole lot of lawyering, as Matt takes on the case of a man named Hector (Kamar de los Reyes) who saved a pedestrian from a subway assault, only to discover that the assailants—one of whom accidentally died during the melee—were cops.
It turns out that Hector is the crime-fighting White Tiger, drawing further public attention to the issue of vigilantism, which Fisk is determined to stamp out. Once he wins the election, Fisk makes that cause his central platform, all as he tries to initiate a Red Hook port redevelopment project, takes sycophantic staffer Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) under his wing, and mends fences with estranged wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), who ran his criminal empire while he was gone.
Daredevil: Born Again juggles multiple subplots but virtually all of them are Daredevil-lite and dull, not to mention semi-connected; there’s a herky-jerky quality to the material that seems like a result of the series being overhauled mid-production. An episode in which Matt deals with a bank robbery alongside Ms. Marvel’s dad Yusuf Khan (Mohan Kapur) is both a stand-alone season padder and a lame pseudo-crossover event.
Similar cursory shout-outs include references to Spider-Man, a go-nowhere cameo by Jack Duquesne’s Swordsman, and an appearance by Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, i.e. The Punisher, who doesn’t truly factor into the proceedings until the climax. Frank’s vengeful rage is precisely what Matt wants to squash in himself, and as a Catholic New Yorker, he intermittently prays about it. Like so many storylines, his mopey brooding is a bore and proves what one citizen says about the city’s heroes: they’re “whiny.”
Interview clips from blogger BB’s (Genneya Walton) news program provide man-on-the-street context about the Five Borough’s crime and corruption woes, but the series’ mixture of on-location and green screen effects never captures an authentic sense of the metropolis. More frustrating is Matt’s constant wrestling with guilt, shame, doubt, and self-loathing, given that it stymies the show from providing the actual Daredevil goods.
Despite Cox’s attempts to interject his protagonist with humor and levity, Matt is a downer, and D’Onofrio’s Fisk (with whom he’s endlessly parallelled) isn’t much more engaging. Intent on saving his union with Vanessa—including via marriage counseling with, you guessed it, Heather—and constantly pretending that he’s put the past behind him, he’s a one-note godfather whose villainy is never in doubt, making much of his screen time in an exercise in obviousness.
Daredevil: Born Again wants to be a more earthbound MCU entry, yet it leans so heavily away from superheroics that it loses sight of its entire purpose. Though a bit of courtroom drama is in keeping with Daredevil’s origins, Matt’s legal prowess is of secondary interest, and that goes triple for his sparks-free relationship with Heather and professional rapport with Kirstein and Cherry.
It’s not until its final episode that the series hits its stride, having its main players embrace their true natures and get down to the very sort of grungy, gruesome business that is their calling card. Alas, by that juncture, it’s too late to effectively salvage this venture, whose intermittent high points—most of them involving the red-clad Daredevil dispatching enemies with tortured viciousness—are overshadowed by a tidal wave of banal concerns.
Even a cliffhanger that teases a more fulfilling battle to come fails to excite—and is certainly not worth sitting through the nine hours that precede it.
