Daredevil Review

The corridor at the end of the second episode did the marketing by itself: a single unbroken take of an exhausted man beating his way through a room of Russians, stopping to breathe, staggering, winning by attrition. It announced that this show would treat violence as work rather than choreography. But the reason it holds up is Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays Wilson Fisk as a man who cannot finish a sentence in company, whose rages are the reflex of a frightened child, and who genuinely believes he loves the place he is destroying.

Charlie Cox carries the harder half, a devout man who confesses to a priest that he does not want forgiveness, he wants permission. Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson are given real lives rather than sidekick duties. The thirteen episode order is the standing flaw across all three seasons, and each one has a mid stretch where a subplot idles for two hours, most visibly in the second, which splits itself between the Punisher and a resurrection cult and serves neither. The third season, built around Bullseye and a broken faith, recovers most of the ground, but across thirty-nine episodes the show is great in scenes more than in seasons: a superb villain, a few landmark fights, and a lot of waiting between them.