With its eloquent chiaroscuro and inky-black silhouettes, Netflix’s upcoming Daredevil series appears to be channeling Frank Miller’s Clinton-era miniseries Man Without Fear as much as it does Christopher Nolan’s Ãœber-popular Batman movies. Eschewing the histrionic fun of NBC’s The Flash, the two newest trailers for Daredevil are dour and moody, with Scott Glenn barking, “Time to stop taking a beating and start giving one. Now get up.â€
In the first new trailer, Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock, the blind vigilante who becomes a crime-fighter, pummels bad guys under a veil of rain, telling us, “I just want to make my city a better place.†Later, Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays the Kingpin, intones, “The city needs to die before it can be reborn.â€
New Yorkers may laugh a bit at the setting, Hell’s Kitchen, which is depicted as the considerably grittier neighborhood it was years ago (complete with whorls of smoke writhing from manholes and ubiquitous garbage mottling the streets), when it now harbors craft coffee shops and artisanal pizzerias, but whatever.