Back when I used to read comic books, one of my favourite Marvel titles was Daredevil.

So it pained me greatly when I first went to see the film Daredevil at the cinema, in 2003. Staring Ben Affleck, it was an incoherent mess, a string of bad action sequences without any real story to link them. It was a horrible movie, and what really annoyed me about it was that having made it, no-one else was going to make Daredevil the movie properly.

A couple of years later, the director’s cut came out on DVD, and I (and many others) ignored it, believing that you can’t polish a turd.

However, on seeing it discounted recently in The Works, for 2.99, I thought “what the hell, how bad can it be?”

Not bad at all, is the answer. Stepping forward a bit, I’ll tell you something I didn’t realise when I watched (and enjoyed) this version. Unlike many Director’s Cut versions, this wasn’t the result of a return to the editing room, some years later. It turns out that this is the original Director’s cut that he intended to be released theatrically. Unfortunately, it was felt by the producers that the audience for this kind of movie didn’t need plot, but action, action, action. Anything that slowed the film down was cut, with the exception of an *added* love scene between Daredevil and Electra, which was not in the original script. The 127 minute film was cut to 90 minutes, the violence was toned down to avoid an R rating, and so a decent film was ruined.

So this is truly the original film Mark Steven Johnson set out to make, and very good it is too. The “new” footage makes sense of the whole thing, and fleshes out the characters. Matt Murdoch’s partner, Foggy Nelson, and reporter Ben Urich – both important characters in the comic – now have their cut scenes restored, the Kingpin is now the main villain, rather than just a bogeyman, and the film is all the better for it.

If you get a chance to grab a copy of this, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Sorry it took me so long to get around to it.

Caught the first 10 minutes of this film the other day, and it was so strange that I was compelled to record it, to watch later. I knew nothing of Harvey Pekar or his cult comic American Splendor (which told the story of his life, as he lived it), but by the end of this movie I felt I knew him. Onscreen, Harvey was brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti, although the real Harvey narrated the story, and appeared often throughout the movie as himself, at one point referring to Giamatti as “this guy who’s playing me”. Similarly several other characters were both played by actors during dramatic scenes while appearing as themselves in explaining how they felt at various points.

In addition, at several points the drama cut between acted scenes with Paul Giamatti, and archive footage of the real Harvey on the Letterman show. This sounds like it would be a mess, but it wasn’t – it was extremely well edited, and not confusing at all. What I particularly liked was the attention to detail – when Paul Giamatti is led onstage to be interviewed, he is wearing exactly the same clothes as we then see worn by the real Harvey Pikar when we cut to archive footage on the Green Room TV monitor. Simple, but very effective.

After seeing the film, I was sad to read that Harvey Pekar died earlier this month. He seemed be be a very strange man, but the world could do with a few more strange people, I think.