Hulk (2003)

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Marvel Comics writer/editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby collaborated on a number of monsters with silly names. But when the success of the Fantastic Four got their attention, they dropped the monster routine and began reviving the long-dormant superhero genre in what has been dubbed "the Silver Age of Comics." The early '60s saw Lee and Kirby (or Lee and Steve Ditko) churn out dozens of superheroes that are now regarded as classics, from the Avengers to the X-Men.

But in May 1962, Lee and Kirby collaborated on one final monster that seamlessly bridged the gap from monster to superhero: the Incredible Hulk. A version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a dash of Frankenstein's Monster and a comic book spin, Hulk's sales weren't exactly huge. Marvel actually cancelled his comic after six issues in order to clear out some space on the publishing schedule, but after Lee and Kirby discovered that the Hulk had gained popularity among college students, they kept him alive via guest appearances in other comics along with making him a charter member of the Avengers.

Hulk soon found himself as a major supporting character in Marvel's long-running Tales To Astonish, during which Hulk's popularity soon grew so large that Marvel renamed Tales To Astonish to the more relevant The Incredible Hulk. The character went on to inspire the popular live action '70s television show and TV-movies starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, and can even say he had a hand in giving Hulk Hogan his stage name. After the Bixby/Ferrigno show and movies, several cartoons, a handful of video games, various toy lines, all kinds of memorabilia, and even his own roller coaster at Universal Studios Florida, the Hulk finally got his own feature-length theatrical movie in the summer of 2003. Is the movie befitting of the Hulk's status as a pop culture icon, or is it in dire need of a little "Hulk Smash"?

Our story begins at a military base in the California desert circa 1966, where we are introduced to a scientist named David Banner (Paul Kersey). Attempting to instill stronger immune systems and regenerative abilities in his test subjects, he moves from aquatic life to lizards to monkeys, finding progress but no real success. He goes to his superior, General Thaddius "Thunderbolt" Ross (Todd Tesen), and asks for permission to begin testing on human subjects. Ross denies him, and David decides to use himself as a subject instead.

Soon thereafter, his wife Edith (Cara Buono) gives birth to a son, Bruce. David wonders if his experiments have had any effect on Bruce, while his wife is blissfully unaware of what he's done. Four years pass, and General Ross finally discovers David's work on humans. He throws David off the project, prompting David to wreck his lab and trigger the self-destruct system on his equipment. Edith huddles under a table with her son, but the returning David drags her into a bedroom, slamming the door behind them. Young Bruce plays with his stuffed dinosaur, staring at the bedroom door as the voices of his parents rise. The door swings open and we cut to black.

We flash forward to the present day. A brilliant scientist working at UC-Berkeley's biotechnology center, the now-adult Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) has repressed much of his early childhood while being raised by adoptive parents. With the help of his on-again/off-again girlfriend Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) and funding from the local military-industrial complex, Bruce is working with nanobots and gamma radiation to regenerate living tissue. Unfortunately, all Bruce and Betty are able to accomplish is an expensive way to make frogs explode. They could save a lot of money and time by just wrapping the frogs in a roll of tinfoil and throwing them a microwave, but I guess spending government money to do it with far-out technology is more fun. Enter Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas), an executive with ties to Betty's father, the aforementioned General Ross (now played by Sam Elliott).

Talbot runs a defense corporation and is quite interested in Bruce and Betty's research, making it clear that if he can't hire them away, he'll acquire their technology by some other means. Man, if I knew blowing up frogs was such big business, I'd have been doing that long ago. Anyway, Bruce and Betty's assistant Harper (Kevin Rankin) makes adjustments on a gamma radiation generator inside a sealed chamber in preparation for an experiment. Harper ends up running into some trouble, and Bruce enters the chamber to help just as Harper crosses some wires and sets the generator into motion. Bruce orders Harper to get out of the chamber, but he's too scared to move, cowering directly in the path of the generator. Bruce jumps in front of Harper as the generator fires, taking a full dose of gamma radiation.

Bruce wakes up in the hospital a few days later, amazingly in perfect health. Betty can't figure out why he's still alive, but Bruce doesn't seem too fazed. What he doesn't realize is that the radiation has awakened something deep inside of him, the existence of which he could have never foreseen. One night, Bruce wakes up to see a man with three dogs sitting in his hospital room. Bruce recognizes the man as the lab's creepy new janitor, who reveals himself to be none other than David Banner (now played by Nick Nolte). David tells Bruce who he is and reveals that he's been in military custody for the last thirty years, but Bruce refuses to believe him. Bruce believes his parents had died, so the janitor can't be his father. You know, it doesn't quite have the same effect as it did in The Empire Strikes Back, but what can you do?

Bruce soon finds himself having terrible nightmares over the next few days, flashbacks to an incident at his childhood home. He goes to the lab one night to do some work on the project, when he has another flashback. Bruce realizes that David was telling his truth, and combined with the stressful past few days, it is enough to bring out what was buried inside him. He transforms into what we know as the Incredible Hulk, a gigantic green-skinned brute that goes on an absolute rampage and tears the entire lab to shreds. He rips the gamma radiation generator in half and throws it through the side of the building, where it crushes a police car responding to the ruckus. As he starts to calm down, the Hulk turns and sees a fascinated David watching, peeking from behind a door. David cautiously touches the Hulk's face, whispering, "My Bruce." The Hulk, enraged, jumps through the roof and runs away.

Bruce wakes up the next day, and tells Betty about a very vivid dream he'd had the night before. When Betty asks if he was at the laboratory the night before, he says no, believing that his destruction of the place was a dream. Meanwhile, news of the incident has reached General Ross, who accompanies a team of soldiers to Bruce's house. He orders Betty to leave, then gruffly interrogates Bruce about what happened. Turns out they found Bruce's watch at the lab, and they think he had something to do with it. When Bruce claims innocence, Ross tells Bruce that he had his father locked away and won't hesitate to do it to Bruce if he doesn't cooperate. He asks Bruce about the incident we saw earlier, and Bruce says he doesn't remember a thing about it. General Ross is convinced that Bruce is just as messed up in the head as his father, so he puts him under house arrest, with military-type guys guarding the house from across the street. He also orders Bruce to stay away from Betsy, or else.

Bruce gets a call from his father that night, who reveals that he's performed a very interesting experiment on his three dogs, and has sent them after Betty. As Bruce begins to leave, an angry Talbot arrives and forces his way past the guards. Upset over the destruction of the laboratory, he starts throwing Bruce around. Bruce gets angry and hulks up, throwing Talbot (and his couch) through the front wall. He takes out the guards like it's no big deal, then leaps into the air on his way to Betty's cabin in the woods.

At the cabin, Betty investigates a strange noise that she discovers is the Hulk. Frightened at first, she quickly realizes who he is just as David's Hulk-ified dogs arrive. He places Betty into her car, and the trio of dogs attack. A huge brawl ensues in the forest surrounding Betty's cabin, with the Hulk eventually killing the dogs. He sees his reflection in a puddle, and realizing that he's probably scaring Betty, he calms him down long enough to turn back into Bruce Banner. Betty helps him into the cabin, where he deduces that the gamma radiation triggered something in his DNA that made him the Hulk. Betty asks if he can remember anything, and he just said it felt like a dream in which he was free.

Desperate to get Bruce some help, Betty calls her father the following morning and tells them where they are. Bruce wakes up and steps out on the cabin porch, only to get shot with a tranquilizer dart as General Ross's men move in. He's taken to a high-tech underground military facility and put under surveillance. Betty wants him released, Talbot and General Ross debate on whether he should be killed or cultivated, and David wants something more.

About that same time, David visits the laboratory that the Hulk smashed, putting what's left of the gamma radiation generator back together. He fires it on himself, after which he discovers that he can intermingle with (and assume the properties of) anything he touches. Our narrative leads us from the California desert to San Francisco to another military base, where we learn what happened on that fateful day in the film's prologue and David's true intentions: to use Bruce's power to get revenge on the military that tried to throw a wet blanket on his scientific ambitions.

Like the comic book that inspired it, the movie owes more to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein than its cinematic brethren (Spider-Man, X-Men, et al). There's even overtones of King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. The movie tries to give us a deeper tone, but packages it into a palpable summer action blockbuster. I don't know if one could classify it as a blockbuster because of its financial disappointment (experiencing a seventy percent drop in its box office numbers in its second week of release, the second largest drop ever recorded for a movie that topped the box office charts in its opening weekend), but the thought was there.

The script by John Turman, Michael France, James Schamus isn't too bad at all, though I guess they decided to save some time and combine two villains. Hulk doesn't have any archenemies that the casual fan would recognize, so they simply combined elements of the Absorbing Man and Zzzax into one brand-new villain. It makes sense to me, since I can't think of one Hulk villain at all. I actually hadn't heard of the Absorbing Man and Zzzax until I started doing research for this review.

The duality of Bruce Banner and the Hulk that Turman, France, and Schamus add to the script is intriguing. Bruce is an insignificant wimp, repressing his rage and anger under a façade of just being a simple geek. However, when you uncork that bottled-up rage, he's transformed into a big green earthquake on two legs. We the viewer are able to project a little bit of ourselves onto the Hulk; all of us have just wanted to snap at least once, but won't or can't. Whether it's because of an inferiority complex or simply not wanting to make a scene, we've all been there.

The Freudian nature of the character's dual personality is actually handled well in the movie, a handling that is enhanced by the acting of Eric Bana. An Australian standup comedian with only one earlier American movie on his résumé (Black Hawk Down, for all you trivia fans), Bana brings a certain charm to the role that makes you want to like him, yet want to avoid making him mad. I also really liked Jennifer Connelly as Betty Ross. She gives off a warm, soothing vibe that the character so desperately needed for the Beauty and the Beast aspect to be believable, and Connelly is just so charismatic that you can't help but like her. I also thought Sam Elliott and Nick Nolte did commendable jobs as well, with a special thumbs-up for Nolte's performance during his anti-military rant at the end of the movie. Good stuff, the cast is.

I liked director Ang Lee's rather novel approach to framing and scene transitions, along with the occasional paneling to show the action from multiple angles. That kind of filmmaking really gave the movie a charming comic-y look, quite a stretch from his prior work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee also makes frequent use of the color green, ranging from subtle uses (like the set design, green murky water in a mop bucket, characters with green eyes) to a simple green tint in some scenes. It starts out subtle, but as the movie progresses, it feels like they're trying to beat the viewer over the head with it. Okay, so the Hulk is green! I get it! They didn't have to put that color all over the movie. Daredevil and Elektra wear red, and you didn't see people sticking red all over their movies. But the movie has an enjoyable sci-fi B-movie energy, which I thought was helped by Danny Elfman's engaging score. His music adds to the sci-fi ambiance, while hearkening back to Bernard Hermann's work with Alfred Hitchcock at the same time.

My only real worries with the movie are with the CGI and the movie's darkness. The CGI gets a lot of crap from a lot of critics, but is it really that bad? I actually thought the CGI looked adequate, but my main complaint is that it just doesn't look like it could exist in real life. It's like the animated characters from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where it looks really good, but you just don't believe it's a real person. I'm just not convinced that the Hulk was really there. If the whole movie had been animated, I wouldn't see a problem. I think I'll be able to live with the CGI Hulk, but I'm not sure about those Hulk-Dogs. What's with those? While I understand and appreciate that they were included just to give Hulk something to fight in the second act, I didn't think they were pulled off all that well. Your mileage may vary, however.

And I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like a few of the movie's action sequences were just too dark to decipher. I had to turn the brightness on my television all the way up to make out what was going on. Why would they have big action sequences if they were going to be hidden in shadows? What were the filmmakers trying to hide? The questionable CGI? The fact that the ending was totally nonsensical, even by comic book standards? It could be either or neither, but in any event, I didn't like all that darkness. I want to see what's happening in the movie, not listen to sound effects. If I wanted to use my imagination, I'd listen to old radio dramas.

While almost everything about the movie is sound, my feelings regarding it are mixed. I enjoyed parts of it, but I felt that as a whole, the movie simply cruised along with the bare minimum of effort. It didn't leave me looking forward to a sequel, if that's what it was supposed to do.

Perhaps the best things to come out of the movie are those ultra-cool Hulk Hands toys. I dare you to find me one person who doesn't enjoy Hulk Hands even a little. They're so nice, they had to make them twice (as evidenced by the "Thing Hands" that were made after Fantastic Four came out). I wasn't exactly disappointed in the movie, but I wasn't exactly all that enthused watching it either. But I think I'll be giving Hulk two and a half stars. Perfectly acceptable chaos, Hulk is.

Final Rating: **½

Catwoman (2004)

Of all the villains in Batman's rogues gallery, one of the most famous and intriguing is Catwoman. Created in 1940 by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, she was originally a catsuit-wearing jewel thief named Selina Kyle, whose sex appeal and ambiguous nature to make her a foe, ally, and and occasional romantic foil of the Dark Knight. As her character evolved, Catwoman often injected shades of gray into the black-and-white world of Batman.

Catwoman's mystique has made one of the more popular members of Batman's rogues gallery, which has also made her all the more ripe for numerous live action translations. Besides her appearances on the classic '60s Batman television show (where she was played by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriweither, and Eartha Kitt), Catwoman was also portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer in Tim Burton's Batman Returns and had a very brief cameo in the pilot episode of the WB Network's short-lived series Birds of Prey.

But perhaps the most controversial depiction of Catwoman came in 2004, when Warner Brothers released the first feature-length film dedicated solely to Batman's feline fatale. However, Batman is nowhere to be seen here. Even Selina Kyle is missing in action. While this Catwoman makes efforts to retains the sexiness of her comic book inspiration, it's an all-new character, one that we probably could have done without.

The movie begins as we are introduced not to Selina Kyle, but to Patience Phillips (Halle Berry), a meek, bashful woman completely devoid of anything resembling self-confidence. What she lacks in aplomb, she makes up for in artistic ability. She's a talented painter working in the art department of H&H, a cosmetics company operated by the dictatorial husband-and-wife team of George (Lambert Wilson) and Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone). George and Laurel obviously hate each other, which isn't helped by the fact that Laurel is being forced to relinquish her position as H&H's top model to a new, younger, more attractive model that George just so happens to be sleeping around with. Laurel doesn't even bother to mask her hatred for her husband either, going as far as to make awkward, unfunny jokes about her husband's infidelity at a press conference to announce their new facial cream "Beauline."

Meanwhile, Patience has finished up a design for the Beauline ad campaign, but George rejects it for the simple reason that he doesn't like the particular shade of red Patience used. He gives her a second crack at it, telling her to have her new ad done by midnight the next day. She timidly apologizes for her "hideous" work, agreeing to get it right the next time.

That night, a raucous party at the building across the alley keeps Patience awake. Who's still partying at 4:00 in the morning? Mötley Crüe? Kiefer Sutherland's gang of vampires from The Lost Boys? Insomniacs with nothing better to do? She sticks her head out the window and yells at them to turn their music down, but they ignore her and keep partying. Just as she pulls her head back inside, she notices a mysterious gray cat staring at her from the alley below, perched on a motorcycle.

The next morning, Patience is painting when she notices the same cat on her windowsill. She goes out to rescue him, and ends up crawling out onto a shaky air conditioning unit. A man driving by sees her and runs up to her apartment, believing she's going to jump. He arrives at her window just as the air conditioner falls out from under her, snatching her and pulling her back inside. The man introduces himself as Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt), a homicide detective with the local police department. They don't get to talk long, as Patience gets a look at the clock and realizes that she's insanely late for work. She dashes out the door, accidentally leaving her wallet on the ground for Tom to find. He shows up at H&H to return her wallet, and the two decide to go out for coffee sometime.

Patience arrives at the company factory that night to deliver her new ad idea to George. She lets herself in after being unable to find a security guard to help her out, but thanks to her unfamiliarity with the building, she ends up stumbling across a research lab. Inside, we see Laurel arguing with Dr. Slavicky (Peter Wingfield), an H&H chemist who explains to her that Beauline has some unexpected side effects. Aside from being highly addictive, its use has some nasty consequences. Stop using it, and your face melts away; keep using it, and your skin becomes as hard as a rock. Despite Slavicky's protests, Laurel intends to release it anyway and make some money.

Patience backs away and ends up knocking over some equipment, the sound of which prompts Laurel to send a pair of security guards after her. The guards chase her down into the bowels of a building, where she ends up trapped in a huge pipe in the waste treatment section of the factory. One push of a button later, and a huge wall of water flushes Patience out of the pipe, killing her in the process. Patience's lifeless body surfaces on a riverbed nearby, covered in mud and surrounded by at least a dozen cats. The one we saw sitting on the motorcycle and windowsill earlier is among them, and it climbs onto her chest. The cat opens its mouth and a white fog comes out, breathing new life into her. Her eyes snap open, alive but different.

Patience awakens in her apartment the following morning to discover that not only does she have absolutely no memory of the night before, but that cat is still following her. She checks the cat's collar, finding that it belongs to someone named Ophelia Powers (Frances Conroy). Patience arrives at Ophelia's old-style house in the middle of the city, and is invited in. She enters despite an initial hesitation, and finds that the woman already owns a whole menagerie of cats.

Ophelia sits Patience down for a cup of tea, introducing her feline stalker as "Midnight." We also learn that Midnight is a one of a rare breed of Egyptian Maus, but before Ophelia can get into how cats relate into Egyptian culture, Patience decides it's time to leave. Before she can let herself out, Ophelia tosses a ball of catnip to Patience, who catches it, sniffs it, and starts rubbing it all over her face. Very weird.

When she finally arrives at work, Patience ends up getting chewed out by George, who ends up firing her after she insults him to his face. This sparks a series of events that sees Patience hissing at some dogs, eating eight cans of raw tuna, beating Tom in a game of basketball to apologize for missing their date for coffee, and crashing another all-night party across the alley. And by "crashing," I mean kicking down the door, short-circuiting the stereo speakers with beer, and smacking the party host with the tap to the keg. I want to crash a party like that someday. Anyway, after crashing the party, Patience goes back to her apartment and opens up a box full of sexy leather clothes given to her by some coworkers. She puts on her new leather outfit, gives herself a sassy new haircut, and hops on the party host's motorcycle to enjoy a night out on the town.

She rides down to a jewelry store nearby, and notices that the place is being robbed. She sneaks inside and, in a moment that visually looks like it was taken directly from Catwoman: The Video Game, Patience beats the snot out of the jewel thieves. She packs up most of the stolen jewelry into a brown paper bag with a note simply reading "sorry," and leaves it in the lobby of the store for the police to find. A day or two later, Patience gets online and does a little searching for cats. She discovers various websites about how cats were worshipped as gods in ancient Egypt, and discovers a picture of Midnight circa 1940. Patience returns to Ophelia's house, and Ophelia merely responds that she knew Patience would return when she was ready. She explains to Patience about the role of cats in ancient Egypt, before taking her upstairs to explain that Midnight selected her to become the next in a long line of "catwomen."

Patience is naturally skeptical, but begins to realize what's going on when Ophelia pushes her off a balcony and she hits the ground on all fours like a cat. Ophelia tosses a bunch of pictures of various catwomen to her (including one of Michelle Pfeiffer circa Batman Returns), and gives her a feline-themed mask. She explains that Patience is still Patience, but is now much more... she's Catwoman. Blessed with extra-sharp reflexes, senses heightened to superhuman levels, and an unnatural knack for jumping great distances, Patience begins to recover her lost memories, determined to find her killer and stop Beauline before it can be unleashed on the general public.

While she balances the line between good and evil and is enthralled with the newfound freedom her new persona gives her, a series of murders are eventually pinned on Catwoman, bringing Patience into direct conflict with the man that's caught her fancy. Patience finds herself trying to avoid a murder rap and get revenge on those that killed her at the same time.

Catwoman has been one of the hardest reviews for me to write, simply because I had so much trouble paying attention to the movie. It wasn't for being distracted, it's because the movie is uninteresting and just plain boring. And the movie's not very good, at that. I really can't think of one good thing about the movie. Yeah, Halle Berry is usually nice to look at, but the short hair and dominatrix outfit don't flatter her at all. She's one of the most gorgeous women on the planet, so why anyone would want to put her in a costume that makes her look like that is beyond me. And while the movie's biggest selling point is its lead actress in skimpy clothing, you could just skip Catwoman and go rent Swordfish or Monster's Ball instead.

Bad outfit aside, the movie also suffers from bad direction, bad writing, and bad performances. I don't blame the cast, since they have to earn a living somehow. If I had to be in this movie, I wouldn't have bothered giving a good performance either. The script by John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and John Rogers (from a story by Brancato, Ferris, and Theresa Rebeck) features dialogue so poorly written, it makes me want to cry. "Sorry isn't good enough? Let me try the remix." "Game over? Guess what, it's overtime." What the hell is that? Anybody who talks like that in real life should be beaten into unconsciousness. You don't sound cool, you sound like a jackass.

And the character of Ophelia serves absolutely no purpose beyond providing exposition early in the movie. You'd figure that she could serve as some kind of mentor to Patience, like a cat-hoarding Yoda; or she could at least be a little more helpful than just handing Patience an ugly mask. It's such a waste of what I felt could have been a promising character. And how about Pitof's direction? He must have had both the attention span of a hummingbird and an addiction to some new hybrid of speed and cocaine when he was in the editing booth, because the cuts during the action sequences average maybe less than a second at most. It's not hip or exciting, it's migraine inducing. As it turns out, "Pitof" is a pseudonym used by French film director Jean-Christopher Comar. I don't blame him for using a assumed name, because I wouldn't want my real name attached to this hunk of crap either.

With all the disposable music throughout the movie and ugly outfits on attractive women, it feels like I'm watching a badly edited Britney Spears music video that's been stretched out to 104 minutes. And the CGI is so unrealistic and so prominent that they should have just made the movie a cartoon. Whatever happened to using trained cats or doing stunts with wirework? And is it just me, or did that whip look like it was CGI too? Come on, Halle; learn how to use a real whip! Michelle Pfeiffer did!

Not only is the CGI bad, everything else is bad too. The camerawork is too shaky during the action sequences, and combined with the light-speed editing, it just gave me a headache. And what's with all the shaky camerawork in movies nowadays? Just because they did it in The Blair Witch Project doesn't mean that every movie since then should. So here's some advice for you aspiring young directors and cinematographers: go back to film school, you jokers.

Klaus Badelt's score is acceptable, but it's largely forgettable and would be better suited for listening in The Gap or Banana Republic. And how about that acting? Every performance is hollow and uninvolved, and there is absolutely no chemistry between Berry and Benjamin Bratt at all. Berry seems to be having fun in the role, but it's so badly written that any credibility she had gained from Monster's Ball suffered a pretty nasty beating. I'd be willing to bet that she's just a bad WB sitcom away from completely flushing her career down the toilet. It's the quickest plummet of an Oscar winner since Mira Sorvino fell off the face of the earth after winning the Best Actress Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite.

Meanwhile, Bratt is just there, and Sharon Stone plays the role like she's not only unhappy to be there, but like her role as a middle-aged woman clinging to past beauty hit too close to home. She may have been an "It Girl" thanks to Basic Instinct, but thirteen years later, a world full of Halle Berrys and Jennifer Anistons and Angelina Jolies has caused her to fade into obscurity. And with flops like Catwoman, Cold Creek Manor, and Basic Instinct 2, I wouldn't be surprised if she sank back into obscurity again.

The ironic thing is that Catwoman, one of the worst comic book adaptations ever made, was released during the same summer that saw the release of Spider-Man 2, one of the best ever made. Given that the movie is lacking in thrilling stunts or memorable one-liners, I'm not exactly shocked that the movie is a total waste of time. And I'm sure that the fact that neither Selina Kyle nor Bruce Wayne appear will cause fans to draw the line right there.

Perhaps the only real connection to Catwoman as fans know her is the scene in which she snatches a few diamonds from a jewelry store. The scene contributed nothing to the movie outside of a way for Catwoman to acquire her claws, and probably wasn't needed. There's no purpose for it outside of showing her as a "bad girl," and there's more than likely a better way to show it.

If it were me, I'd have made the movie about Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman from day one, and I'd have done everything humanly possible to make sure Pfeiffer reprised the role. And I would have dropped that whole cat goddess thing too. I have nothing against those of you who worship cats, but that bit just seemed hackneyed and tacked on. I personally found Catwoman to be the "girl power" version of Batman & Robin. It actually makes Superman IV and Roger Corman's Fantastic Four look good by comparison.

I also have yet to figure out why it's so hard for Hollywood to make a woman-led comic book adaptation that's actually good. I mean, look at what's out there: Supergirl, Barb Wire, Tank Girl, Catwoman, and Elektra. Nothing really good to choose from, and none of them really rate beyond mediocre at best. I'd like to think that that a good female-driven superhero movie can be made... but only if Hollywood is willing.

Final Rating: *

Elektra (2005)

Kung fu was all the rage in the 1970s. Bruce Lee was a huge star, David Carradine's television show Kung Fu was making waves, and action figures soon became marketed with "kung fu grip" in order to capitalize on the newfound popularity of kung fu. Kung fu soon found its way into comic books, with heroes such as Iron Fist and the Master of Kung Fu debuting.

As the '70s progressed into the '80s and '90s, kung fu diminished in recognition as bad girls became more and more popular. Pulp comic sexpot Vampirella's cult following grew, and along with frequent doses of sex appeal from Batman villains Catwoman and Poison Ivy. One of the last examples of a kung fu comic star and one of the earliest members of the bad girl trend is Marvel's one and only Elektra.

Making her first appearance in 1981 in the pages of Daredevil #168, cartoonist Frank Miller created her to be a hired assassin out to kill Daredevil, but with a twist. As it turns out, Elektra was at one time the college sweetheart of Daredevil's secret identity, Matt Murdock. But a lot of emotional baggage and martial arts training later, Elektra had become one of the world's most dangerous and deadly assassins.

Since her debut, she's gone on to star in several miniseries and graphic novels, and even had her own title on two separate occasions. Elektra has become such an important part of the Daredevil mythos that when the "Man Without Fear" appeared in his first movie in 2003, the sai-wielding Greek assassin was right there by his side. Although the Daredevil movie's success was rather modest and the reactions among critics and fans were decidedly mixed, Twentieth Century Fox felt that Elektra was such an intriguing character that they decided to give her a spin-off movie of her own.

Our story begins with a brief monologue, introducing us to the universe we will become a part of during the film. Since the beginning of time, good and evil have waged a war hidden in shadow. In modern times, the force of evil has become represented by "The Hand," a criminal organization that secretly engages in the dark arts. The good follow a form of martial arts called "kimagure," the masters of which are granted a form of clairvoyance and, in some rare cases, the ability to raise the dead. Somewhere in the history of this war is something called "The Treasure," a story of a motherless daughter that is destined to become a powerful woman warrior and tip the scales between good and evil, the final weapon in an ancient war.

It is from here that we segue into our introduction to Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner), who was shown very much dead at the end of Daredevil. So if this isn't a prequel, what is she doing alive? In the time since we last saw her, blind kimagure master Stick (Terence Stamp) used his powers to resurrect Elektra for the purpose of continuing the martial arts training that was briefly alluded to in Daredevil. Emotionally scarred by watching the death of her mother and fueled by an intense inner rage, Elektra soon finds herself expelled from Stick's dojo, and she fine-tunes her abilities into a career as an accomplished hired assassin. Using her death to her advantage, she has become an urban legend in the underworld, with opinions ranging from her being a ghost to simply not existing.

And in order to maintain appearances, she's developed an obsessive compulsive disorder, incessantly cleaning her house in order to remove all DNA evidence of her existence. It's kinda like Men In Black, but with cleaning solvents instead of alien technology. Anyway, after accomplishing one job, her manager McCabe (Colin Cunningham) arrives to inform her of her next assignment, where she's to set up shop in a secluded cottage on an island off the coast of Washington and await further instructions. This doesn't sit too well with Elektra, who doesn't like playing the waiting game, but she goes anyway.

At the cottage, we learn a few things. One of them is that Elektra's obsessive compulsive disorder stretches far beyond scrubbing floors. She also counts her footsteps and has a very specific way that she organizes things. It's not as extreme as it could be, but it's still creepy. I have to agree with Roger Ebert's review; I want to see a superhero with a full-blown case of extreme OCD, to the point that they count their steps when they walk. Wouldn't that be different?

Okay, back to the story. While waiting for information on her targets, Elektra is befriended by her neighbors, Mark Miller (Goran Visnjic) and his rebellious 13-year-old daughter Abby (Kristen Prout). The cold, distant Elektra slowly begins to take a liking to her neighbors, but the new friendship takes an unexpected turn when she learns that her targets are none other than Mark and Abby. She makes an attempt, but her conscience finally gets to her and she can't bring herself to kill them.

Elektra calls McCabe and tells him she can't carry out the contract, which ends up unloading a whole heap of trouble. Y'see, it turns out that the unnamed party that hired Elektra to kill the Millers is the Hand, led by Master Roshi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). The Hand's been chasing the Millers because they've determined that Abby is the aforementioned Treasure, and after some prodding from his son Kirigi (Will Yun Lee), Roshi has decided that if Abby won't join the Hand, she won't get the opportunity to oppose them either.

Elektra wipes out an entire team of ninjas in defense of the Millers, and the trio soon find themselves on the run from the Hand and Kirigi's three goons: Stone (Bob Sapp), who is incredibly strong and has rock-hard skin; Tattoo (Chris Ackerson), whose intricate animal tattoos can peel right off his torso and attack; and Typhoid Mary (Natassia Malthe), who can cause any living thing to wither and die. Their evasion of the Hand soon leads them to Stick's dojo, where Elektra learns that if she wishes to start a new life, she must defeat the Hand and come face-to-face with the ghosts of her past.

Elektra is an oddity. Though a spinoff of Daredevil, it has only the loosest of connections to that film. Elektra is shown getting killed at the end of Daredevil (though the scene is cleverly structured to avoid having to pay royalties to Colin Farrell or Ben Affleck), and that's it. If anything can be said about the movie, it's that it definitely tries to forge its own identity. The promotional materials didn't even mention it was related to Daredevil until shortly before the movie's release, instead choosing to ride the coattails of the X-Men movies instead. Even the poster says that the movie is "from the forces that brought you X-Men." However, Daredevil ties or not, Elektra is very much an example of not much style over even less substance.

This is most evident in the lead character herself, who brings very little to the movie. Despite being one of the better parts of Daredevil, the Elektra depicted here is such a hard character to connect to, it hurts the movie. When you boil comic book heroes down to their barest of skeletons, you can find why people relate to them. Spider-Man is a nerdy little wiener with problems like everyone else. The X-Men have extraordinary gifts yet are social outcasts. The Hulk is a man whose bad temper gets him in a crapload of trouble. Batman and the Punisher are out to avenge the murders of their families by punishing the wicked.

But it's hard to connect to Elektra. It's hard to even like her. She's a cold-blooded killer that's completely devoid of a sense of humor or any other kind of emotion. The Punisher may be a killer, but at least you can understand the means to his madness. Elektra's make less sense. So she's a hitman because she saw her mother die and her father was a strict swimming coach? Color me underwhelmed. Besides, didn't she see her father get murdered too? I could have sworn it was an important plot point in Daredevil. Why isn't she all raw over that? Is it because Bullseye isn't in this movie?

The script, penned by Zak Penn, Stuart Zicherman, and Raven Metzner, leaves a lot to be desired. There is little to no character progression at all, and not only is Elektra a one-dimensional character, but that one dimension is that she's a total bitch for most of the movie. She spends a lot of time being grouchy and telling people to leave her alone, and she even makes a veiled threat to cut off Abby's hands after she steals Elektra's lucky necklace. She just has so little charisma that when she actually starts to open up, we don't care. Why would someone want to make the heroine both antisocial and emotionally detached? Combine that with her line of work, and I'm willing to bet that Elektra's a total sociopath.

Her obsessive-compulsive disorder also seems to fall into a plot hole halfway through the movie, ceasing to exist once it becomes inconvenient for the movie. If you're just gonna drop it, why put it in there to begin with? And the apparently budding romantic relationship between Elektra and Mark felt exactly like the love scene from Daredevil: tacked on because the studio wanted some romantic tension, despite a lack of chemistry between the two actors.

It also seems like Joss Whedon had a hand in writing the script, because every villain poofs into a cloud of dust immediately after being killed, akin to Whedon's "Buffyverse" vampires. Why? I don't know, and I doubt the writers know either. It probably has something to do with that "dark arts" thing, I guess. I'm not a regular comics reader, so I'm absolutely clueless regarding that. I also don't get Kirigi. He's supposed to be the movie's Big Bad, but he's not exactly intimidating until he goes all Bruce Lee near the end. Plus there's the fact that his connection to Elektra is insanely weak, and that the character is so hollow that you could cut his head off, yell down his neck, and hear an echo.

Where I will give the movie credit is in Rob Bowman's direction and Christophe Beck's score. Beck's score was quite good, holding a very Asian feel that went with the kung fu tone of the movie. And if anything, Bowman made a movie that at least looked good. The movie seems more like a tribute to Hong Kong wuxiá movies than it does American superheroes, but unfortunately, the film's look is almost as if the producers were aiming to do the American version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That scene with the sheets flapping around everywhere seems like a fight that Zhang Yimou would choreograph, only less interesting.

I also have a beef with the cast. Personally, I don't buy Jennifer Garner as a leading lady in an action movie. She was fine in the two fight scenes she had in Daredevil, but I didn't think she was all that great here. She's always seemed to me like she was better off in romantic comedies or dramas, but I've never seen Alias, so what do I know. The rest of the cast all gave rather wooden performances, though I did like Kristin Prout and Terence Stamp. I found Prout's "yeah, whatever" demeanor to be quite welcome, and I enjoyed Stamp, although Stick isn't half as cool as General Zod from Superman II. My only complaint with Stamp's performance is that Stick is supposed to be blind, and very rarely did I get the impression that he actually was. If it were me, I'd have given him some special contact lenses or glued his eyelids shut. He'd act like he was blind then.

People talk about Daredevil being bad, but I don't think Elektra does much to be any better. It's like Catwoman with better fights, acting, and special effects. The characters are flat, the acting is bleh, the action is uninspiring, and the direction is derivative. I said before that the fight scenes weren't very interesting, but the catch is that the whole movie isn't. Elektra is just so incredibly boring that even the cool fight scenes seem tedious. However, the movie can be enjoyed on some level, if you like seeing an attractive female ninja in a red corset kicking the crap out of everybody in sight. And despite being a disposable karate movie with forgettable characters and a waste of acting talent, the movie is an okay addition to the Marvel stable. It's certainly better than Catwoman. I'll give Elektra two stars and leave it at that.

Final Rating: **

X2 (2003)

Thanks to Marvel Comics, superheroes experienced a renaissance in the 1960s now referred to as the "Silver Age." New superhero comics were appearing right and left, many of them staying popular to this day. One of these comics was centered around a team of mutants known as the X-Men. Born of the civil rights movement, the X-Men teetered on the brink of cancellation before finally gaining an audience and becoming one of the most popular and influential titles in the genre.

Eventually, the comic was adapted into a movie that started its own renaissance for superhero movies. When X-Men was released in 2000, it sparked a revival in the genre and helped change the perception that all movies based on Marvel properties were poorly made filler for video store shelves. And where do you go when you have a successful movie based on successful source material? A sequel, of course! Loosely based on the 1982 X-Men story "God Loves, Man Kills," the simplistically-named X2 surpassed its predecessor in both critical acclaim and box office returns, and was hailed as one of the best superhero movies ever made. But does it live up to the hype?

Our story starts shortly after the previous movie, with humans still fearful of mutantkind. Are they the next step in human evolution? Are they a new species put on Earth to replace non-mutated people? And what of the ones who can walk through walls, or use mind control? What kind of threat would they pose? Such questions have only served to push the inevitable war between humans and mutants even further to realization. The movie's opening scene starts quickly enough, as a blue-skinned mutant with a prehensile tail invades the White House. He lays waste to an army of guards and Secret Service agents, who can't seem to get a shot at him, thanks to his ability to disappear into a cloud of smoke and reappear somewhere else. Teleportation, gotta love it.

The mutant soon infiltrates the Oval Office, where he takes out the last of the Secret Service and tackles the President (Cotter Smith). He pulls a knife on the President, but before he can cause any kind of harm, a half-conscious Secret Service agent shoots the mutant in the arm. He teleports to safety, leaving behind the knife jabbed into a desk with a small note reading "Mutant Freedom Now."

The scene shifts to New York, where the assassination attempt has drawn the attention of the X-Men. While they dismissing that he's a new member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) decides that they should get to him before the police do. Shortly after this decision, none other than Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) arrives back at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. He's immediately greeted by Rogue and her new boyfriend Bobby "Iceman" Drake (Shawn Ashmore), but soon turns his attention to Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). Though she's suffering from painfully bad dreams, a loss of concentration that causes her to hear a cacophony of voices, and an intense dread that something terrible will happen, Jean seems quite happy to see Wolverine.

However, less happy to see him is Jean's boyfriend Cyclops (James Marsden), who doesn't take to kindly to some punk like Wolverine putting the moves on his woman. You can cut the sexual tension with a baseball bat. But Wolverine hasn't come back just to flirt with Jean, he's returned to ask Professor Xavier for more help in unlocking the secrets of his forgotten past. Unfortunately for him, Xavier refuses, telling him that "sometimes, the mind needs to discover things for itself." Wolverine is disappointed, left to stew on the school's night watch as Cyclops takes Xavier out to attend to some business while Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean head to Boston in search of the mutant assassin.

Meanwhile, the assassination attempt has also attracted the attention of Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox), who sees the attack not only as a way for the proposed Mutant Registration Act to gain support, but as a way to seek a personal vendetta against mutantkind. Having made a few discoveries about a supposed "mutant training ground," Colonel Stryker gains permission to attack Xavier's school under the false pretenses of rounding up the students and staff for questioning. What the President doesn't realize, however, is that Colonel Stryker plans to use the information he forced out of the imprisoned Magneto (Ian McKellan) to acquire knowledge of "Cerebro," a giant supercomputer built by Professor Xavier and Magneto that connects its user to every living being — human or mutant — on the planet.

As Professor Xavier visits Magneto in his plastic prison, he's horrified to discover that his old friend was forced to tell Colonel Stryker everything he knows about Cerebro, and even more horrified when knockout gas comes in through the ventilation system and renders them both unconscious. Cyclops attempts to break his way into the cell, only to get incapacitated by Colonel Stryker's assistant Yuriko (Kelly Hu), a mutant with the power to grow long metal talons from her fingernails (who comic fans will recognize as Lady Deathstrike).

Colonel Stryker and his task force siege Xavier's school in the middle of the night, and while many of the mutants into hidden escape tunnels, Wolverine makes a valiant stand. He tears a line through Colonel Stryker's team, introducing soldiers to the business end of his claws. That's something you very rarely see in superhero movies: one of the heroes actually killing people right and left! I don't mean the cartoony "he just knocked them out" kind of thing, he was slicing up guys! I'd expect that kind of thing out of the Punisher, but I guess Wolverine isn't above stabbing a guy in the chest either. But just as Wolverine has a face-to-face encounter with Colonel Stryker, who seems to know something about the clawed wonder's past, they're broken up by Rogue, Iceman, and the flame-manipulating Pyro (Aaron Stanford).

Wolverine has no choice but to leave with the three, allowing Colonel Stryker to find the bowels of the school and retrieve his prize. Meanwhile, Storm and Jean are hot on the trail of the would-be presidential assassin, discovering him at an abandoned cathedral in Boston. The cornered mutant introduces himself as Kurt Wagner (Alan Cumming), whose demon-like appearance is offset by his devout religious faith. A one-time circus acrobat billed as "the amazing Nightcrawler," he welcomes Jean and Storm into his abode, having never met any other mutants and looking for someone to patch up the bullet hole in his arm. They question him about why he would try to kill the President, and he has no idea. The whole event was a total blur. They discover a bizarre scar on the back of his neck (similar to the one Magneto received after being drugged by Colonel Stryker), and convince Nightcrawler to come with them to meet Professor Xavier.

Speeding away in Cyclops's car (which they happened to hotwire on their way out), Wolverine and the X-Teens soon end up arriving at Iceman's house. Bobby introduces Wolverine, Rogue, and Pyro to his parents (Alfred Humphreys and Jill Teed) and brother (James Kirk, no relation), then proceeds to sit them down and essentially come out of the closet about his mutant power. His brother doesn't understand why Bobby has to be a mutant and calls the cops, telling them that Bobby broke into the house and is threatening to kill their family. Storm, Jean, and Nightcrawler are heading back to the school in the X-Jet around the same time, but are unable to find a signal to land.

They contact Wolverine, who informs them of the disaster at the school and tells them where they've fled to. He finishes the phone call, but notices FBI agents sneaking up outside. Wolverine runs to the living room and tells the others that it's time to go, but are met by a veritable horde of cops in the front yard. Wolverine gets shot in the head after being refusing to drop his "knives" (it's kinda hard to drop your knives when they're part of your hands), prompting Pyro to open up his lighter and spread giant fireballs over the immediate area. He destroys all the police cars, but before he can hurt anyone, Rogue is forced to take her glove off and suck the energy out of him.

And right on time, the X-Jet arrives to get them out of Dodge before any backup can arrive. Although reunited, the X-Men are soon corralled and attacked by fighter jets. While Storm utilizes the weather to fight off the jets and Jean tries to hold off the missiles fired at them with her telekinesis, the X-Jet is still struck and goes into a tailspin. But just before they crash, they stop twenty feet from the ground. Lucky for them, Magneto and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) were in the area after staging a violent jailbreak, and Magneto decided to catch the plane. He calls a truce with the X-Men, explaining that Mystique used her shapeshifting ability to do a little spying and discovered Colonel Stryker's ultimate goal: to kill every mutant on the face of the planet. But why, and how?

Y'see, Colonel Stryker's son Jason (Michael Reid MacKay) is a quite powerful mutant with the ability to telepathically cause illusions, in the vein of comic supervillain Mastermind. Jason's parents sent their son to Professor Xavier with the hopes that his mutation could be "cured," but there was really nothing the professor could do in that aspect. Unable to become a regular human and angry at his parents for their refusal to accept him as-is, he tortured his mother by projecting nightmarish hallucinations into her mind. These hallucinations drove her insane, causing her to drill a hole in her head in an attempt to pour them out of her skull.

Mrs. Stryker's forced suicide didn't sit too well with the colonel, who responded by lobotomizing his son and extracting fluid from his brain, which he uses as a drug to control other mutants. It's this drug that Colonel Stryker uses (in conjunction with Jason's power of illusion) to brainwash Professor Xavier into using a homemade version of Cerebro to eliminate the whole of mutantkind. Forced into an uneasy partnership, the X-Men and the Brotherhood storm Colonel Stryker's subterranean base in the Canadian wilderness in a final battle that forges new bonds and strains old ones, sheds light on dark secrets, and sadly requires a sacrifice that wasn't ready to be made. 

X2 succeeds in being a little more fun to watch than its predecessor, but it isn't without flaws. Like the previous movie, X2 suffers from too many characters, and not enough screen time to really get to know any of them. The movie is so overloaded with characters, it gets diluted. Even the cameos from and references to various other X-Men characters just serve to bog things down even more. With so many characters, we barely get to make an emotional connection to any of them, perhaps with the exceptions of Wolverine and Iceman.

I'm not saying I want to see everybody sit down and peacefully talk things out when they could have a wild scene-stealing brawl instead, but come on. This is what separates the X-Men movies from others in the genre. In other superhero movies, we get underneath the skin of our protagonists, whether it be tormented billionaire Bruce Wayne, bumbling reporter Clark Kent, or nerdy student Peter Parker. You get to see what makes them tick. But with a dozen characters to choose from, it's hard for the movie to have any real focus.

I'm also of the opinion that the use of Cerebro as a tool for genocide was actually rather dull. While I applaud them for using the concept to give the always wonderful Patrick Stewart more screen time, the effort just turned me off. Brainwashing a super-powerful telepathic mutant into causing the heads of other mutants to explode by merely thinking really hard seems silly, even by comic book standards. If it were me, I would have switched it around and used the Legacy Virus from the comics instead of Cerebro, but I guess that's why I wasn't hired to write the movie. While I respected what screenwriters Michael Doughterty, Dan Harris, and David Hayter attempted to do with the script, it just ends up being… hollow? Boring in places? In need of a little cast pruning?

But where the movie starts going wrong is trying to give us scenes that feature characters that aren't involved with Wolverine. Wolverine is the only character that most audiences want to see, so trying to shove boring one-dimensional characters like Storm down our throats just because Halle Berry won an Oscar in the time between the two movies makes me resent X2. Anna Paquin is an Oscar winner (albeit that was over a decade ago), so why not give us more Rogue? I'm a Rogue fan, I could handle that. But Wolverine is so obviously the main focus, they might as well drop the other X-Men and make Wolverine: The Movie already. I also thought that the setup for X3 was so blatant, the only way it could be any more obvious is if they put a big flashing sign that said "X-Men 3: Dark Phoenix — Coming Soon" at the end of the movie. I'm not saying I don't want to see the Phoenix in a movie, but come on.

At the very least, the movie has some fantastic action sequences. From Pyro throwing fireballs at cops, to a brawl between Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike, to even the opening scene, the movie is action-packed. Bryan Singer's direction is very fun to watch, and even those who didn't like the movie should be able to respect the effort put into it. The special effects are wonderful, never once detracting from the movie. I dare you to watch the "Nightcrawler vs. the Secret Service" scene and tell me you don't think it's absolutely amazing.

The cast improves over the previous movie, but the lack of character development gives many members of the cast less to work with. Famke Janssen was criminally underused, especially considering the direction they were pushing her character. Also underused was James Marsden, who appears in maybe three scenes prior to the finale. His absence leaves the love triangle involving Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine to fall to the wayside and almost become forgotten about. But the cast isn't always like them. Despite her character having absolutely nothing in the way of depth or development, I really liked Kelly Hu as Lady Deathstrike. The character is so depthless that she's almost flat, but Hu makes Lady Deathstrike fun to watch, almost like a female Darth Maul. You don't really need to know who she is to enjoy the Wolverine/Deathstrike fight at the end.

I also enjoyed Brian Cox's turn as Colonel Stryker, but perhaps the most fun member of the cast is Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Jackman is great in the role, and has an intensity that makes the character very cool. I mean, he actually goes nuts and starts killing all those soldier dudes until they die. He's definitely the star of the movie, and as I said before, I just wish Fox would hurry up and make Wolverine: The Movie. 

X2 is fun to watch, yet still seems to be trying too hard. Maybe doing a little streamlining and not using such a huge cast of characters could help the franchise in the future. I know the comics have a rather large cast, but come on, they're not making a movie adaptation of War and Peace here. In spite of its flaws, X2 is satisfying, and there's always the opportunity to make it bigger and better with the next one.

Final Rating: ****

Daredevil (2003)

From the time of their founding in the 1930s until the early 1960s, Marvel Comics was never a very noteworthy publisher. Outside of characters like the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America, nothing about Marvel really stood out. Bankruptcy even threatened to close their doors in 1957. Luckily for Marvel, everything began to turn around when editor/writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four in 1961.

The success of the Fantastic Four led to an outburst of creativity that boosted them from a small-time publisher to the biggest comic book company in the industry. Characters like the X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk all made their first appearances before the first half of the '60s were out, along with a successful revival of Captain America. But among the gods and goddesses of Marvel superheroes, one is merely a demigod, a B-level hero by the name of Daredevil.

There could be many reasons for Daredevil's second-rate status at the time of his debut. Perhaps because the name "Daredevil" was not only very generic, but also a retread (since there was a boomerang-wielding superhero with the same name in the '40s). Perhaps because Marvel's character creation department was simply running on fumes, since the character's first-issue cover date of April 1964 put him near the end of Marvel's most creative period. Perhaps because many viewed his acrobatic feats over New York City as a knockoff of Spider-Man. Perhaps because Stan Lee's artistic collaborator in creating Daredevil was not Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, but Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett.

Artists and writers came and went, but Daredevil was never a very hot seller until one man changed everything in 1979. Artist/writer Frank Miller was hired to work on the series, and the changes he made in the character's tone, style, and direction made Daredevil a big fat hit. His noir-style stories grew popular with readers, pulling Daredevil out of the cellar and saving the character from cancellation. Miller went on to bigger things (such as The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City), but the dark style he pioneered with the Daredevil comics helped pave the way for the grim and gritty style of the '80s and '90s. With the 21st-century renaissance of superhero movies, it only made sense for Miller's version of Daredevil to get his own movie. But does it live up to the hardboiled stories given to us by Miller and the writers and artists that followed him?

Our story takes us to the New York City neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, where we are introduced to Matt Murdock (Ben Affleck). Left blind as a child following an accident involving a barrel of toxic chemicals, Murdock is an attorney that specializes in pro bono work, much to the chagrin of his materialistic partner Foggy Nelson (Jon Favreau). Though an attorney by day, Murdock spends his nights as the Daredevil, a masked harbinger of justice. Though robbed of his sight by that barrel of chemicals, the accident caused his other four senses to compensate drastically, functioning with superhuman sharpness. And perhaps more importantly, he has also developed a form of sonar that allows him to "see" sound waves, quite similar to echolocation. Armed with these gifts and a billy club that doubles as a grappling hook, he seeks to avenge the downtrodden by any means necessary.

And there's no shortage of criminal activity, much of it controlled by a mysterious crime lord known only as "the Kingpin" (Michael Clarke Duncan). Daredevil has become a thorn in the Kingpin's side, and thus must be eliminated. To accomplish this, he procures the services of a deadly Irish assassin dubbed Bullseye (Colin Farrell). With a crime lord and a hitman breathing down his neck, Matt must also deal with newspaper reporter Ben Urich (Joe Pantoliano), who is on the verge of discovering Daredevil's secret identity. And to top it all off, he's found himself in a whirlwind romance with gorgeous martial artist Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner), who is similarly a target of the Kingpin and Bullseye.

While I found Daredevil to be a well-made movie, I do question its methods. The movie can be viewed as a good adaptation of the Punisher comics, but the problem is that it's a Daredevil movie. Not being a devotee of the comics, I don't really have any anger towards that controversial moment where Daredevil kills a rapist that was erroneously found innocent. That doesn't outrage me or make me hate the movie, or anything like that. I thought it worked for the story the filmmakers wanted to tell. But it still feels out of place. Murdering a criminal doesn't make him any better than his foes.

But where I feel the movie succeeds is presenting a superhero who is still just a man. Despite his sonar and other enhanced senses, Daredevil's heroism takes a toll on him. He gets teeth knocked out and receives nasty lumps and bruises, the road map of scars that cover his body revealing him as a man whose chosen life is harder than it seems. It also pushes him to the edge of sanity, continually questioning if what he's doing is right and fearful that he won't be able to make a difference.

On the negative side, Daredevil seems very derivative. The relationship between Ben Urich and the New York cops seems an awfully lot like the relationship between the Gotham City Police Department and Robert Wuhl's character in Tim Burton's Batman. The reporter tracks a superhero and asks the cops about their file on him, the cops deny the superhero exists, the reporter ends up knowing better. There's also a strong visual resemblance to The Crow, from the fiery "DD" logo in the subway to Daredevil's jumps from rooftop to rooftop in one particular scene. But I guess if you're gonna steal a movie's visual style, you couldn't do much better than The Crow.

I also bring into question the decision to tinker with Daredevil's backstory. Normally, I wouldn't mind if a character's origin is altered a little for dramatic purposes. Take, for example, the Punisher movie in 2004. There, Frank Castle's family is massacred at a family reunion in Puerto Rico after he accidentally caused the death of a mobster's son, as opposed to the comics origin, where his wife and kids are killed in Central Park after witnessing some Mafia business take place. Though the Punisher's cinematic origin strays somewhat from the comics, the difference does not alter the character in any significant way, and the character remains fundamentally unchanged. But in Daredevil, one little alteration is enough to change the entire tone of the movie. For those not into comics, the original Daredevil origin saw a young Matt Murdock getting doused with chemicals after pushing an old man out of the way of an oncoming truck. But in the movie, he acquires his powers not by being heroic, but by being a victim of circumstance. The only allusion the movie gives to the old man is when an already blinded teenage Matt (played by Scott Terra) stops Stan Lee from stepping in front of a truck.

The movie also suffers from a real overuse of the sonar effect. It's sort of like the "bullet time" shots from The Matrix, where it starts out being very cool, but ends up becoming rather ho-hum by the end of the movie. While the effect is very neat and quite intriguing, we're almost beaten over the head with it after a while. And where did that love scene come from? Matt and Elektra get into a fistfight right out of the Matrix movies, then he takes her up to the roof of his apartment building before they get rained on and head to bed. Not only does it make Elektra look trampy (what self-respecting woman puts out on her second date with a man she barely knows?), but their whirlwind romance makes no sense. It's not for a lack of chemistry, it's just that the spark between them has only started developing. It's like the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes relationship, only not as fake. The love scene has been excised from the R-rated director's cut of the movie, which I feel is a wise move because it just stinks of unwanted studio involvement.

I don't know whether to blame Mark Steven Johnson's script or the choppy editing, but the movie seemingly has little character development at all. Any depth the characters have is brought to the table not by the script, but by the actors portraying them. Though I enjoyed Ben Affleck in the Matt Murdock half of the role, his performance in the Daredevil half left me feeling hollow. I thought Affleck did a respectable job conveying the conflict in Matt's psyche, but when he's in the Daredevil attire, he's perhaps mediocre at best. I'm not saying that Affleck is bad in the role, it's just that he isn't exactly great either.

Michael Clarke Duncan obviously had fun as Kingpin, but I simply didn't find him to be all that intimidating until the movie's finale. However, that's probably more due to the writing and editing than Duncan's actual performance. I did like Joe Pantoliano as Ben Urich, though I must point out that he's playing a flat, uninspiring character. The character of Ben Urich is written as generically as possible, with nothing that really makes him stand out from any other character like this. Like I said earlier, the character isn't that much different from Robert Wuhl's character in Batman. I think if they could have gotten Wuhl to play the part, they would have.

But perhaps the brightest stars in the cast are Jennifer Garner, Jon Favreau, and Colin Farrell. While I felt Elektra was lacking depth, Garner's performance made the character feel a little less one-dimensional. She adds a lot to the character, and her mannerisms and facial expressions from the funeral scene on show a character who has died inside, and has nothing left but thoughts of vengeance. Favreau, meanwhile, does a great job as the movie's token comic relief. He and Affleck are quite funny together, and their scenes together are some of the most entertaining parts of the movie. And Farrell's portrayal of Bullseye is just so over the top, you can't help but like him a little. Even as a villain, he's just so much fun to watch that he made the whole movie for me. Plus how can you hate a charismatic Irish hitman with a target carved into his forehead?

If Johnson's script fails, his direction soars. As I said before, the movie is quite well made, and features some really great camera work that harmonizes with the eponymous character of Daredevil. When Matt Murdock is in his lawyer persona, the camera rarely moves, as a way to show the character's vulnerabilities and emphasize his handicap. But when he's Daredevil, we get flashy camera angles and movements to show Daredevil's strength. While the characters seemingly pay no attention to Newton's law of gravity and the CGI is too glaring at times, the movie looks like a million bucks.

The movie also has a very engaging score by Graeme Revell that is befitting of the superhero film noir that the filmmakers are aiming for. While other superhero movies have better scores (Danny Elfman's Batman and Spider-Man music, John Williams's Superman music), I do like Revell's work here. However, the score is eclipsed by the musical soundtrack, with great songs by House of Pain, N.E.R.D., Fuel, and The Calling being among the standout songs in the movie. And if the movie can be given one compliment, and only one, it's that the soundtrack brought Evanescence into the mainstream spotlight. Both "Bring Me To Life" and "My Immortal" are featured in the movie to wonderful effect, and both ended up becoming big hits following the release of both the Daredevil soundtrack and their debut album Fallen.

Fans of the comic will probably nitpick until the cows come home, but Daredevil serves its purpose as being a 103-minute superhero action movie that serves as fine disposable entertainment. The movie is also a case of history repeating itself. Daredevil was the "little brother" that was second rate compared to his big brothers Spider-Man and the X-Men, and the movie he inspired is second rate compared to the cinematic offerings of the aforementioned big brothers. After the huge Daredevil/Bullseye fight near the end, the movie just runs out of gas and ends with a whimper. While it's still better than other superhero movies like Superman IV or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, it's merely adequate when compared to others. Three stars for Daredevil.

Final Rating: ***