So some years back I wrote a positive review about the much-reviled comic book movie Daredevil. I didn’t make any friends with the fanboys for it, I’m sure, and nobody’s gonna hire me as professional prognosticator – I said that its director had written his meal ticket with the picture. (To whatever bunker you’ve burrowed into, Mark Steven Johnson, I send you a half-hearted shrug.***)
All that said, there’s something in the Daredevil review that I’d like to reference.
Copping to my utter lack of comic book knowledge, I said that all I was looking for in a comic book movie was “a good yarn, punchy action sequences, and a couple of forbidden kisses.”
And that’s still, more or less, my criteria for comic book movies – and most other pop entertainments of the action ilk. The best of the bunch – the first two X-Men movies, I would argue – transcend their pop trappings to achieve something more profound. Scratch “transcend” – that suggests that they have to dig themselves out of a genre ghetto. But in these movies, the ones I would argue are art, not simply entertainment, they speak to something about the human condition in a way that is unique to the superhuman.
So that’s it for now – I cede the soapbox to you, Josh. I’m curious to hear how you defend writing off an entire genre of film.
Seriously: What gives?
*** Re: Daredevil:
Honestly, I rewatched it recently and was mostly bored by it. This isn’t the time or place to discuss the unavoidable – even laudable — subjectivity of the film critic’s moviegoing experience – but I will say that time and place play a factor, both in the sense of, say, a Tuesday night sneak screening where we have to make on the fly judgments and turn around a review in 12 hours’ time; not to mention the variables of who we – as critics – are in that particular time in our life – which is to say, there’s no telling what will speak to us in a night, a year, whatever. This isn’t a disavowal, merely an attempt to inject a little context. Okay maybe a smallish disavowal. There’s definitely some reviews from circa 2000, 2001 that make me cringe, but then, I was 22, and my 22nd year makes me cringe altogether. That said, I’m sticking by my Bubble Boy review – now and forever.
This article appears in July 4 • 2008.
