The Matt/Daredevil character was reasonable; you could tell he was just a deeply angry guy, not a split personality like Batman, or a goofball like Spider-Man.
Bullseye was excellent! Absolutely perfect.
Kingpin was acceptable; I'm glad they kept him smarmy. Urich and Foggy were also pretty faithful.
But as predicted, Elektra makes the baby jesus cry. She was just totally wrong in every way: not only physically, but character-wise as well. She should have been built like a T2 Linda Hamilton, instead she looked... completely malnourished. And instead of being a sociopathic spoiled brat who worked as an assassin for kicks, she seemed like she was about to burst into tears at any moment.
The plot seemed rushed; I think the origin story, plus Elektra, plus Bullseye, plus Kingpin was just too much to fit in a single movie. Especially Elektra; they really should have just left her out (but then there wouldn't be a Love Subplot, and every action movie must have a Love Subplot, right? Sigh...)
The Dare-o-vision effect was handled pretty well, though his ability to "see" seemed to fluctuate pretty wildly through the movie without much explanation.
There were a few really bad CGI moments. There was one where DD basically runs up a wall by hopping off window ledges that looked totally fake -- and the thing that struck me most about that was, the fakeness of it made it look like this impossibly ridiculous maneuver, but I've seen Jackie Chan actually do it! Less CGI, more stuntmen, that's what I say.
The Graeme Revell score was cool as always, but the Requisite Corpo-Rock Hits were especially intrusive this time around. Is there a genre name yet for that particular brand of whiny, nasal hard-but-not-too-hard rock that half the radio sounds like these days, you know, all the fucking Perl Jam wannabes? Make it go away.
*spoiler ahead*
I was just happy that the movie had one of the best lines in comic book history, when Bullseye kills Elektra.
"Babe, you're good.....but I'm MAGIC!"
"And for my next trick..."
Egan >:>
I guess it really comes down to this: Is it worth the $16.50 it would cost me to get in? What about the $8.25 to see it alone?
How the fuck is anyone supposed to answer that question?
"You know, this movie was just not efficient enough. It had at at least a thirty cent fun under-run. If there were more breasts, it would have been economical, but by my figures, it's currently in the red."
You had a mixed review, it's a simple matter of: if you knew before going what you know now of the movie, would you still have paid the ridiculously inflated ticket price, or waited for it to come out on video? It's not a bloody to-the-penny science, it's just matter of overall impression.
Well, I basically never "wait for video" if it's a movie I have even the slightest interest in. And I have friends who haven't been to a theatre in years. How am I supposed to calibrate that for a random stranger?
Like I said, it's not a science by any means, just another way of posing the question "how good was it?" in much the same manner as a critic would have to answer it: Definitively good, or definitively bad; thumbs up, or thumbs down; worth it, or not worth it. Your review just left the overall impression at "okay" -- I was looking for a bit more.
I was looking for a bit more, too. This movie was "okay."
I can tell your readers unequivocally, it's not worth the $8 and change. Use the money to go buy some comics instead (they look like little storyboards, so it'll fulfill those needs, and not be so incredibly depressing).
Well, you have 2 basic choices of Genre Name. Since I haven't seen the movie, I'm not precisely sure where its "requisite corpo-rock hits" fall.
1) "Pop-Punk." And it hurts me to say "punk" even with the "pop" before it. Having been to a show where the Sex Pistols played after (about 3 hours after) Blink 182, and the Vandals were taunting Sum 41, I know it hurts other punkers too. This is your basic nasal, whiny guy with "fast" guitars and sloppy-or-timid drums
2) "Nu-Metal." This is the children of Orgy. They may go so far as to have a synth-player in the band. It also covers the "rock" part of the "rock-rap" groups so common these days. (Linkin Park, et. al). Personally, I find this less offensive than the above, but what they are, more than anything, is uninspired.
From the Pearl Jam comment, I'm guessing that you've got #2 on your hands. Hope this helps in the "I didn't really want to know in the first place" kind of way.
No, I'm pretty sure it's neither of those (and I agree that #2 is marginally less offensive than #1 just on general principle.) The stuff I'm talking about has no rap influence at all; I mean the crap where every song sounds like a remake of "Jeremy."
I was going to go watch 30 seconds of MTV2 to come up with some band names, but it's all "theme shows" until 1AM.
Ah, I clicked around on a few clips on some soundtracks: it looks like "Staind" is a perfect example of the kind of nasal whiny wussyrock I'm talking about. Oooh, "Chad Kroeger" (in the Spider Man commercial-slash-music-video.)
Those chumps are definitely not "pop punk" (they don't have the dress code, for one thing) and I don't think they're Nu Metal either, since there's nothing aggro about them in the slightest: it's all plodding-strummer ballads.
In my not-infinite-but-not-far-either cynicism about what I hear on the radio on the way to wor, I had always taken Staind, Fuel, etc. to be shooting for Nu Metal, and not hitting even that target. But I understand the wisdom of seperating music by the actual produced sound rather than intentions. (If for no other reason, in the hope that Creed would get no music industry empowering genre distinctions).
Yeah, bands like Staind are supposedly "metal", and so they get lumped in with Nu-Metal, despite sounding completely different. The sad truth is that they're all that's left of "alternative rock". I think those guys are actually trying to sing like Kurt Cobain and failing horribly.
When I was working on blocking song downloads at Audiogalaxy, Staind was one of the most aggressively blocked bands on the site, because I judged all of my heuristics on how accurately they identified songs by Staind. I also frequently checked against Creed and Nickelback.
<lj user="abiku"> refers to it as nu-blah.