A little over a decade after Ben Affleck’s Daredevil had stumbled through Hell’s Kitchen on the big screen, Netflix finally did the Man Without Fear justice in a TV adaptation. Drew Goddard, Steven S. DeKnight, and their merry band of writers ripped the Daredevil of Frank Miller’s comics — the brooding, nuanced, complicated antihero, brutal to New York’s criminal population and wracked with Catholic guilt — right off the page. Charlie Cox brought Matt Murdock to life, capturing not only his badassery and irresistible rizz, but also his deeper insecurities and vulnerabilities, and he was perfectly matched with Vincent D’Onofrio’s chilling turn as Wilson Fisk.
Over the course of three near-flawless seasons on Netflix, Daredevil satisfied as both a comic book adaptation and a prestige TV drama; it was both a bloody, action-packed superhero show like The Boys or Invincible, and a complicated crime drama like The Wire or The Shield, rolled into one. Part of what made that blend of action and drama work so well was how the series used its action. Daredevil didn’t just use its action to break up the talky scenes with some spectacle; it used its action to enhance the drama by bringing out new sides of the characters.
Daredevil wasted no time establishing itself as one of the best action shows on TV. In just its second episode, it set a new gold standard for fight scenes on television with the iconic hallway melee.
Daredevil Used Action To Amplify Its Drama & Characters
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The best action scenes aren’t just action scenes; they visualize the drama, or tell us something we didn’t know about the characters, or serve a key role in the narrative. Everyone remembers the terrifying rat-a-tat of the gunfire in Heat‘s iconic shootout sequence, but that scene serves an important story function, too: it’s when Al Pacino’s relentless cat-and-mouse pursuit of Robert De Niro finally comes to a boil and has real-world consequences.
Daredevil‘s action set-pieces are pure visual storytelling, touching on the audience’s nerves. When Bullseye is dressed up as Daredevil, doing very un-Daredevil things, it makes our blood boil, because it’s sacrilege to desecrate that iconography. Even that iconic hallway fight is all about Matt’s rage, and the brutality of his burgeoning vigilante crusade.
Breaking Down Daredevil’s Famous Hallway Scene
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In Daredevil season 1, episode 2, “Cut Man,” Matt takes on a hallway full of Russian mobsters in one long, continuous take to save a kidnapped boy. This sequence brought the ruthless intensity of Oldboy‘s infamous hallway fight into the Marvel universe. It set the tone for the series’ action going forward. Daredevil‘s action wouldn’t be weightless, sanitized superhero spectacle like we see in the mainline MCU; it would have the bloodiness and the brutality and the pedal-to-the-metal severity of The Raid movies.
This is one of the greatest fight scenes ever put on film — it’s perfectly choreographed, the stunt performers really throw themselves into the savagery, and it doesn’t slow down for a millisecond — but that’s not why it works so well; it goes even deeper than that. There’s an emotional hook to the scene, with Matt fighting tooth and nail to save an innocent kid, and it highlights just how much Matt hates injustice. Even under a mask, Cox captured the rage surging through Matt as he takes out his demons on these henchmen.
This hallway beatdown highlights what Daredevil is all about. Matt puts on a mask and beats up criminals so that the frightened citizens of Hell’s Kitchen can hold onto some semblance of hope. Criminals strike fear into the people, so Matt dons a pair of devil horns to strike fear into them (although, when he got to that hallway, he hadn’t fashioned the horns yet).
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