So this film could have been Spider-Man meets Mean Streets. But for all the boldness of Johnson's concept, he doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off. Despite the location shooting, the film is almost completely bereft of the gritty New York atmosphere that the comic, at its best, was steeped in. And while Daredevil is in many respects the darkest superhero saga to make it to the big screen, it's too often compromised by touches that scream “Hollywood,” the most unforgivable being the way Murdock and his future love Elektra meet cute by having a martial-arts battle in a children's playground.

How's Affleck? Good, really—only smirks once, and it's apropos. Garner, whose Alias television character has only ever irritated me, is extremely winning as a butt-kicking would-be avenger. Farrell's highly nasty villain Bullseye seems to be finding the whole enterprise a hoot, while Michael Clarke Duncan's Kingpin is a woefully underdeveloped baddie. Maybe we'll see his backstory in the inevitable sequel.

—Glenn Kenny

PREVIEW (posted 2/10/03)

Ben Affleck leaps into his first superhero role as Daredevil, the Marvel Comics character who's a blind lawyer by day and a masked avenger by night. Jennifer Garner plays his lethal love interest Electra, and Colin Farrell and Michael Clarke Duncan make nifty bad guys.

The Bottom Line: Spider-Man upped the ante in the genre. But Daredevil, with its cool darkness and knockout stars, should also be out of sight. (Twentieth Century Fox and Regency)

FROM THE SET (posted 10/15/02)

On a windy rooftop in downtown Los Angeles (which is doubling for New York City's Hell's Kitchen), Ben Affleck is having a hard time acting super. Sure, he looks the part, with his jutting jaw and newly acquired muscles. But while practicing his moves as the vigilante comic book hero Daredevil, Affleck can't quite complete a tricky sequence that calls on him to flip and catch his trademark baton after a low karate kick. Making matters worse, his white underwear is hanging out from the back of his gray sweatpants, which droop dangerously low.

But just when it seems he's taking this flawed-hero concept too far, Affleck nails the sequence. Marvel Studios CEO and Daredevil producer Avi Arad, who also executive-produced Columbia Pictures' Spider-Man, applauds-until Fox Filmed Entertainment cochairman Tom Rothman notices the web-slinger emblazoned on Arad's back. "You're wearing a Spider-Man jacket on this set?" Rothman booms. "If he eats anything or drinks our water," he says to no one in particular, "bill Sony."

Daredevil and Spidey may be spun from the same comic company, but they're very different characters. Daredevil is a bit edgier and angrier: His special powers result from his having been sprayed by chemical waste that fell from a passing truck-an accident that's left him blind, but with his other four senses preternaturally heightened. His alter ego, Matt Murdock, doesn't share Peter Parker's puckish charm; he's tortured by dark, violent desires to avenge innocent crime victims. A lawyer by day, Murdock takes out his frustrations at night, donning a blood-red leather outfit (complete with horned hood) and brandishing a souped-up billy club to fight his enemies, who include mob boss Kingpin (Clarke Duncan) and assassin-for-hire Bullseye (played by Irish actor Farrell, who describes his character as a guy who "just has a fookin' good time killing people with miscellaneous objects").

"Daredevil is so different than other comic franchises," says writer-director Johnson (Simon Birch-"also about a disabled protagonist," he says), who has championed this project for five years. "It's about the real-life consequences of being a superhero. After a night out, you see him wincing, and his back is covered with scars. He's constantly popping Demerol and Percocet to deal with the pain."

Even love hurts for the handicapped hero, who ends up going mano a mano with his own girlfriend, Elektra (Garner, of TV's Alias), a fellow martial-arts master who at one point mistakenly believes that Daredevil killed her father. "The character I play on TV is an optimist," Garner says. "So it's been fun to go take off the rose- colored glasses and go to the dark side."

Although it remains to be seen if Daredevil can compete with Spider-Man's record-breaking box office success, Johnson believes that his masked avenger has one up on the wall-crawler, at least in terms of realism. "Ben is almost six four and 200 pounds," says Johnson. "I respect Tobey (Maguire), but if a guy is going to go out and fight every night, he would have to look like Ben, or else he wouldn't last very long."

-Tim Swanson