Daredevil (2003)

Was Ben Affleck blind? Didn't he notice that the script for this comic-book adaptation of ''the man without fear'' — sightless superhero Daredevil — was little more than a hodgepodge of Spider-Man-derivative skyscraper swinging, corny dialogue, and villains (like Colin Farrell's Bullseye and Michael Clarke Duncan's Kingpin) who are all too easily vanquished? Sure, there's Jennifer Garner as fan-fave martial-arty ''assassin'' Elektra, but she's just as sexy and much more articulate in any given ''Alias.''

Writer-director Mark Steven Johnson obviously loved Daredevil's source material...too much. He's made a tentative action film, as though he'd never decided whether he was aiming it at geeks, a mass audience, or both. The commentary track, by Johnson and producer Gary Foster, is bland self-hype (''You really feel you're in Hell's Kitchen!''), and the two discs are stuffed with filler. Exceptions to the fluff: the interviews with comics writer-artists Frank Miller, who speaks eloquently of the operatic drama he achieved during his Daredevil run, and Brian Michael Bendis, whose rhapsodic description of Miller's death-of-Elektra issue No. 181 makes you want to run to a comic shop, not the DVD store.

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