When I hear John Paesano and Braden Kimball’s “Daredevil” theme, I’m instantly transported.
“Marvel‘s Daredevil” premiered 10 years ago on Netflix, when everything about the violent, tortured series was refreshing. Blood dripped from our hero’s wounds and from the images in the title sequence, depicted against a haunting piano melody. The word “gritty” was run into the ground for good reason, and I had that damn theme music on a loop.
The Disney+ incarnation from Dario Scardapane, Matt Corman, and Chris Ord knows exactly what worked about the Netflix series, and wastes little time delivering on all of that. The first episode alone contains a visceral fight in a dark hallway, filmed as one take; constant and gratuitous mentions of Hell’s Kitchen; and of course, the return of Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) who has allegedly left behind his criminal past — as surely as Matt (Charlie Cox) parted ways with Daredevil’s mask.
Unlike so much of recent Marvel, there are actual stakes with “Daredevil: Born Again” right from the beginning. This was always a hero whose wounds left scars, and whose commitment to — or dependence on — his masked mission both opposed and aided his beliefs. As much as the nine-episode series follows an overall adventure-of-the-week structure (highlights include a courtroom drama and holiday heist), Matt’s pain and persona are never far from the surface, just as his predators lurk around every corner.
Cox slides back into playing the “really good lawyer” like he never left (in fairness, he didn’t have too much time off before a cameo in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” followed by a guest role on “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” in 2022), from his soft-spoken exterior (the real mask!) to the sharp physicality of stunt work. Even in Matt’s signature tinted glasses, you can tell when the character switches from compassion to ferocity, a functional teaser for the next scene or sequence. In a multiverse of new and often uninteresting heroes, Cox is a life raft.
Where the original series had a core cast including Deborah Ann Woll as Karen and Elden Henson as Foggy, “Born Again” is mostly the two-hander of Cox and D’Onofrio, living conspicuously mirrored and dissatisfying lives that call them back to their old vocations. That parallel is usually illustrated through intercut scenes held together by propulsive string music from The Newton Brothers — blunt, maybe, but also extremely satisfying (and right out of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy playbook). Fisk’s own arc is notably slower, and both are fairly obvious, but they intertwine while making engaging detours with White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes), Punisher (Jon Bernthal), Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), and the mysterious killer known as Muse.
With the Marvel machine being what it is today, it’s not fair to task “Born Again” with saving a cinematic universe. Showrunner Scardapane and his team only need to convince us that Daredevil fits into the current Phase and make a case for him to stick around — and for that, they have a really good lawyer.
The first two episodes of “Daredevil: Born Again” are now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes weekly.
