While superheroes may have special powers making them different from everyone else, they are remarkably similar to each other, as Mark Steven Johnson's 'DareDevil' demonstrates all too well.

Matt Murdock is a mild-mannered pillar of the community by day, but a crime-fighting vigilante by night. He has a 'secret origins' backstory involving both an accident with biohazard materials, and the violent death of a close relative. He wears a fetishistic costume and mask, and has trouble letting women get too close. He sits brooding amongst the gargoyles on top of a gothic tower, before leaping athletically from building to building. He questions the ethics of his own activities and is tormented by how much he has in common with his criminal foes, but not enough to stop him kicking ass on a regular basis. He confronts a mortal enemy in a church.

If all this seems eerily familiar, it's because it has all been seen before in 'Superman', 'The Crow', 'Batman', 'Dark Angel' and 'Spiderman'. Even Murdock's special powers - the chemicals which blinded him made his remaining senses and his reflexes super-sensitive, so that he can fight blind with great prowess - are not much of an advance on Rutger Hauer's in 'Blind Fury'. And the dialogue and voice-over in Johnson's script barely ever manage to rise above the level of cliche (e.g. 'I had set out to save the city but..I found myself instead.')

There are two things in this film which are original and (I hesitate to say) interesting. First there is the hero's unusual vulnerability: the film's fight-sequences are oddly punctuated by the amplified sound of Murdock's heaving, agitated breath, and almost the entire narrative is told by Murdock in flashback as he lies wounded and dying. Second, there is his all-round nastiness: when Murdock kills for the first time in the film, it is an act of gratuitous, cold-blooded murder, thoroughly disproportionate to the circumstances, and accompanied by his sadistic taunting. For a blind man, Murdock sure takes the principle of an-eye-for-an-eye seriously, although one suspects that the director would like his audience to revel in Murdock's special brand of retributive 'justice'.

As Murdock, Ben Affleck is as free from personality as ever, but this perhaps suits a character in a mask. As love interest and 'Catwoman' wannabe Elektra Natchios, Jennifer Garner gets to show off the fighting skills she has developed in 'Alias', as well as her good looks (strangely out of place in a film with a blind protagonist). Colin Farrell is right on target as Bullseye, a ridiculously over-the-top Irish assassin who makes an art of using the most unlikely objects (safety clips, peanuts, pencils, holy water bowls) as deadly projectiles, and who seems to be alone in his mission to take the royal piss out of the film. There are also cameos from the original comic's creator, Stan Lee, as an old man who almost gets run over by a bus (symbolic, one might think, of the way he has been treated by the Hollywood machine); and from Kevin Smith (director of 'Clerks', 'Chasing Amy' etc.), as a morgue geek.

For Murdock, it is not necessary to see; unfortuately the same is true for this film.

Anton Bitel