Like its pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe iteration on Netflix, last year’s Daredevil: Born Again was hampered by a lack of action and a general preference for legal drama involving lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) as opposed to his alter ego, vigilante hero Daredevil.
Consequently, it’s extremely surprising to discover that both of those shortcomings are largely rectified by the Disney+ series’ combative second season (Mar. 24), which puts a premium on its protagonist’s tortured rage and the equally furious fascistic tyranny of his archenemy, “Kingpin” Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio).
In the freeport controlled by New York City Mayor Fisk, a ship carrying illegal arms is boarded by blind acrobatic do-gooder Daredevil, who manages to throw a wristwatch into a crate of guns (so he can later locate it via the device’s tick-tocking) before the captain and his first mate, on Fisk’s orders, sink the vessel and block all shipping lanes.
This is a disaster for the politician, who’s supposed to deliver the weapons to a shady government official (Matthew Lillard), and who’s none too pleased to learn that Daredevil is behind it. His first order of business, however, is to find the MIA crew members who might expose his role in this affair. To that end, he employs his Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF), a group of stormtroopers who obey no laws and do his dirty bidding.
The AVTF is part of Fisk’s efforts to vilify vigilantes as the root cause of NYC’s problems, and he’s additionally planning show trials for the masked rogues. First up is the prosecution of Tony Dalton’s Swordsman, who, like the rest of the mayor’s enemies, has been caged in a dungeon cave. Though the AVTF has cleaned up the metropolis’s crime-ridden streets, it’s come at a cost to the population’s freedoms, and their thuggery, along with Fisk’s authoritarian rule—all of which gives Daredevil: Born Again its timely edge.
Fisk’s iron-fist successes are celebrated by independent journalist BB (Genneya Walton) and her official “The BB Report,” an on-the-street program that, strangely, is shot like a 1990s TV newsmagazine. Simultaneously, however, it’s slandered by a satiric viral series that uses leaked material to mock the mayor as a psychopath. Naturally, this rankles him and his administration, be it trusty British assassin Buck (Arty Froushan) or deputy mayor Daniel (Michael Gandolfini), who’s close to BB and torn between making it big and doing the right thing.
The city is on fire in Daredevil: Born Again, and at the center of the conflagration is Cox’s champion of Hell’s Kitchen, who—having gone into hiding as both Daredevil and Matt—is working to bring Fisk down with his partner Karen (Deborah Ann Woll), with whom he’s now in a passionate relationship. Both continue to grieve the loss of their insufferable best friend, Foggy (Elden Henson), whose killer, Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), is on the loose and driven by motivations that complicate his rivalry with Daredevil.
That’s not the only sticky dynamic in Dario Scardapane’s show, as its messy subplots also concern psychologist Heather (Margarita Levieva), who’s traumatized by her run-in with serial killer Muse, and Matt’s trusty ex-cop buddy Cherry (Clark Johnson).
Daredevil: Born Again’s multiple points of interest are of varying quality, and the least rewarding is its focus on Fisk and wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), whose amour is treated with an empathetic earnestness that’s at odds with their repellent ugliness.
The show’s desire to have us care about these villains’ love and devotion is misguided on an emotional level and unnecessary on a narrative one, since Fisk needs little impetus to indulge his monstrous impulses. Nonetheless, it provides D’Onofrio with a few registers to play outside of calm menace and rampaging wrath, and the actor’s scarily committed performance remains a highlight.
Cox is likewise in fine form in Daredevil: Born Again, and he benefits from a story that strikes a more assured balance than before between Matt/Daredevil’s belief in the rule of law, his desire to take matters into his own hands, and his Catholicism-driven struggles with guilt, salvation, repentance, and grace.
Thankfully, busting heads is a frequent element of his mission, with Daredevil—in a spiffy black suit with red lettering—waging brutal hand-to-hand (and billy club-enabled) war against his adversaries in virtually every one of these eight episodes. Even though his fights can be a tad repetitive, they inject the proceedings with a muscularity that, in years past, has been in short supply.
Moreover, in the back half of this tale, Daredevil is joined by Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones, who, despite feeling like a tacked-on participant, adds an extra measure of ferocious personality.
While its dialogue can occasionally veer into clunky speechifying, Daredevil: Born Again routinely foregrounds its superhumans doing superhuman things, such as Bethel’s Bullseye, especially in a diner-set sequence that highlights his sharpshooting abilities. As a result, it’s frustrating when it diverts attention to its least engaging peripheral players—namely Daniel and BB, whose closeness threatens to destroy them both—and on stretched-thin plot threads that have little impact on the outcome.
Fortunately, it’s worth sticking with Daredevil: Born Again to the end, since its conclusion is the sort of slam-bang showstopper that Daredevil has long deserved—and been denied. Like its characters, the series drops its pretenses in its finale and goes for the jugular, pitting good against bad both inside and outside the courtroom with no-holds-barred gusto.
So energized is the closer that it makes up for the early going’s intermittent sluggishness, and it sets up a future for Daredevil and Kingpin that’s exciting precisely because it’s guaranteed to be different from that which preceded it.
Daredevil: Born Again’s cameos and bombshells suggest that the character is ready to break free from the TV formula that has, to date, prevented him from fulfilling his on-screen potential. Whether that happens in an already announced third season or in a future MCU film, it’s clear that the studio has gotten close to cracking the code of The Man Without Fear—and, with a little more daring, may finally do justice to the Marvel stalwart.
