bansheevt Reviews

Daredevil (2003)

Way off the bullseye...

[4/10 · 31 August 2004]

This film clearly had potential - respected actors, a fine comic book background, and enough of a budget to produce decent special effects and props. Of course, this all may help, but it's clearly, as this movie only goes to show, insufficient.

I can appreciate a comic-book sense of unreality, where heroes do impossible things, but when a villain with an uncanny knack for skewering olives with ballpoint pens is more comical than frightening, and the action is so unreal that throats are slashed with playing cards and flies impaled with hurled syringes by a man in a full body cast, I'm no longer entertained.

Watching a bad movie can be fun in the right company, and I suspect that this is no exception. Go ahead a watch it if you dare, but I wouldn't expect very much.

In the end, Daredevil resembles nothing so much as a bad joke, leaving the audience waiting for a punchline that's never going to come.

Runaway Jury (2003)

Shallow and one-sided

[1/10 · 19 April 2004]

This movie was neither an exciting thriller, nor a compelling legal drama - the way the director and writers chose to frame the situation makes it the equivalent of a USA Today op-ed column. I thought black and white depictions of morality, especially in the courtroom, were a thing of the past, but "Runaway Jury" has, disappointingly, proven me wrong; the "gun industry", with Gene Hackman as its frontman, is a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a villain out for nothing more than money, indifferent to the harm their products may be put to. The prosecutor, Dustin Hoffman, is a valiant crusader who would never think of representing his client, a woman widowed by a day trader's killing spree, for something as shallow as money. The message is that guns are evil, and that gun manufacturers are responsible for the actions of murderers. Take the premise or not (and I can hardly believe that such a serious issue was treated so lightly), the fact that this drum was beat incessantly throughout the whole movie detracted from the artistic value inherent in the work, which otherwise represents a decent effort on the parts of some very well-known actors and actresses. The slow pace of the film nearly put me to sleep, and I don't think I would have missed very much. If I want a political diatribe, I'll tune in to the news media.