(I have to ask: how long would it take Daredevil to make a design that intricate and well-angled with gasoline? I'd guage it at around five hours of solid work with a large waterproof stencil, and that's being generous. All that work? Just for the off-chance that someone tosses a lit match or a cigarette away in precisely the right direction? God Jesus. It's a wonder Daredevil even has the time to fight crime, given these anal little hobbies of his. I picture his base of operations as having endless amounts of arts and crafts -- maybe a macaroni-and-glue drawing of him and Spider-Man holding hands or something.)

Right from the opening scene, before all the thumping dance beats and wire-fu fights start, Daredevil manages to get the audience fish flopping in their seats like hooked trout. DD? Daredevil? What the hell's going on? Questions flow back and forth in the theater:

"Daredevil? Who is that?"

"Is he some sort of superhero?"

"Is it Satan? It's Satan, isn't it! Who is this Satan guy, some kind of superhero or something?"

"Superhero?"

A trailer hasn't asked us to be this flabbergasted by a comic book movie since Jim Carrey chewed buffet-size chunks of scenery with the line "Who eees........ Bahtman?!" (And, given the timeline of Carrey's appearance in the Batman films, one can only imagine how crushing it would have been for him to receive the anti-climactic answer: "Um, Val Kilmer, why?")

As with most trailers involving men and women jumping around in tights sleuthing crimes, the intent here seems to be to show us just enough neat action to interest us, while simultaneously distracting us from how silly-looking these characters would look gallivanting around in real life. Luckily enough for the trailer, the action sequences -- presented as they are in a blistering montage of jump-cut images -- do look pretty interesting. Take, for example, our first introduction to the titular Daredevil (Ben Affleck). In one early scene, our burgundy-beleathered hero is seen hopping from one rusting fire escape to another with ease. The scene looks undeniably cool.

Unfortunately, we also see that the full weight of Daredevil landing on these fire escapes is bending them and trashing them all out of shape. It makes him look pretty bad-ass, sure, but the question remains: what happens if any of these buildings catch fire? It'd be poetic if Daredevil were there to get people to safety, of course, while the fire department waited on the ground, mumbling: "Who busted up those fire escapes so badly?" However, a more likely scenario would have Daredevil matching wits with a big-league villain at the time (this activity topping any self-respecting superhero's to-do list), leaving all those apartment-dwellers in a pretty bad spot. You'd think a superhero would have a little more consideration for things like that, and maybe invest in a used car when getting around the city, so as not to burn to death a considerable number of the people he's supposed to be protecting.

Elsewhere in the trailer, Daredevil rides bodies down handrails like an extreme skateboarder. Hollywood seems genuinely incapable of making an action film lately without shoe-horning some sort of extreme sport into it. I'm reminded of the tender and multi-layered "dinner-tray surfing scene" in XXX, or the touching "parachuting out of helicopters to catch a dragon" scene in Reign of Fire -- a sequence that served no purpose at all (the dragon didn't get caught, anyway) other than to have the majority of the parachutists splat into the ground. That's just good screenwriting, to my thinking. "Here's a character, here's another one, here's another one! Here're their backgrounds and motivations! Now push all of 'em out of a helicopter! Haw haw! This movie's great!"

Anyway, the trailer wants to, and does, get across that this Daredevil fellow can kick some ass when ass-kicking is called for -- whether kicking a loaded gun out of some bar-thug's hands, or kicking a hired hitman named "Bullseye" off his motorcycle, Daredevil makes it abundantly clear: he kicks people often. (Incidentally, you can tell the villain is Bullseye, because he's the one with the giant bulls-eye carved into his forehead. God dammit! Are people so un-invested in their movie-going experience that we need to carve the names of the film's characters into the actors' foreheads? It's a ninety minute movie, people! Stay with the group!)

According to the trailer, Daredevil can pull off all this fighting fantasticness because, get this, he can hear things before they make a sound, then vanish before you know he's there! He's also, it is explained, the last person you'd expect! This seems presumptuous. The last person I'd expect would be Chris Farley, since, even if he weren't dead, they'd never in a million years have gotten him into a suit that form-fitting without tranq guns and vast amounts of shortening. In actuality, the last person we'd expect is apparently a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock. The trailer doesn't actually come out and say that he can't see, though, so you're left to deduce that he's either blind or -- with his sunglasses and cane -- a really white pimp.

Designed to capitalize on the visual style pioneered by other successful Marvel characters' films (Blade, X-Men and that alley scene in Spider-Man where you can see through Kirsten Dunst's top, and probably other stuff happens too), the world of Daredevil is presented as two distinct halves in the trailer. The first half is Daredevil's world during the day, where he drinks coffee in a warmly-lit shop with his friend Foggy and meets future love interest Elektra (played by Jennifer Garner). Before you can say Alias, Matt is trying to pick up the amazingly attractive Garner, proving that while he can't see, he certainly isn't blind. Elektra responds by beating the absolute bejesus out of him -- a normal enough occurence, if my many pick-up attempts are any judge. We are asked to believe that the sight of an attractive model pummeling a blind man is an everyday occurrence in the city, since about twelve guys playing basketball in the court behind them simply go about their business while she wails on him.

The other distinct half of the trailer is a bleak city underworld, where guys with guns regularly congregate to be menacing, and where a towering criminal overlord named Kingpin (Michael Clark Duncan) walks through futuristic hallways, undoubtedly in order to plan troubles for our hero. And wait, what's this? Elektra in leather pants and a halter top, waving swords around and jumping off walls? Ah ha! I guess this explains why she was trying to kick Matt's ass earlier! I -- well... no it doesn't, I suppose. Hmm. Guess you'd better go see the movie to find out what's going on!

For actually making me want to go see this movie -- unlike the abysmal first "teaser" trailer, which ironically involved even MORE dead-body surfing and wire-fu but looked far sillier -- I give Daredevil a big handful of Billy Crystals.

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