Review: ‘Daredevil’ Bedeviled by Darkness

Superheroes may rule movie screens, but they’ve done a pretty good job of colonizing television too. Netflix has made the biggest bet on the comic-book genre. Jessica Jones and Daredevil–about a blind lawyer, played by Charlie Cox, who uses super senses to fight crime by night–are part of a strategy to combine four different Marvel characters into a team-up series, The Defenders, somewhere down the line.

Resolution can’t come soon enough. The second season of Daredevil, available in full on March 18, compounds the failures of the first. Last year, Daredevil burst onto the scene as a shockingly violent series, but all its gore was in service of a lackluster story; the nihilism was the point. The Season 2 introduction of the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), a brutal vigilante inspired by Daredevil, could have had real charge if it didn’t just feel like a trailer for Bernthal’s own stand-alone series. Eventually, something’s going to have to justify Daredevil’s tonal excesses. Until then, we’re left fumbling in the dark.

–DANIEL D’ADDARIO