Good old Marvel. Somewhere in, what I imagine is, their imposing monolithic headquarters, someone must have had an original thought. Startled, they jump from their seat as their heart beats an irregular tune to accompany the irregular occurance of this day, rushing out the door of their office to the Head Honcho, the Big Cheese, the Kingpin (as it were). The doors fly open, and cigar smoke wafts out the room, which doesn't help our breathless office worker one bit.

His (or her, as we are, after all, living in equally opportune times) idea is, whilst quite flat on the whole, something that hasn't been done before. A blind man, who struggles to cope with life; yet portrayed in a darkly humorous fashion. The big sell is astounding - as befits the manner in which one's only big concept should - forcing The Man to take notice. You can just imagine him taking a long draw from the cigar as he ponders for a minute, before responding "Nice idea, kid. I like it. But instead of coping with life, we'll give the blind man SUPER-HUMAN POWERS (except the sight thing, natch), and instead of dark humour, we'll have him FIGHTING VILLAINS from the rooftops! All the while, he'll wrestle with inner demons, which could arise due to some childhood incident where his father dies! You've made the company millions! However, you'll see none of it. Get back to work!"

Such crushing disappointment. Oh, well. At least it has spawned a film.

Now, it would be easy to compare this to Spiderman straight off and denounce it for the mere copycat that it is; and while that is the usual way of how I do things around here, something has irked me enough to deride it on another level.

Daredevil is "not the bad guy", as he so often points out in the course of the film - and it's this lack of imagination that runs rampant throughout the film. It is a rare thing indeed when I'm querying like a mad man : "But, why is that guy getting killed?" and "Okay, what's happening here?" (internally, of course. It's just not the done thing to ask these questions any other way). However, it is the only way you can construct some semblance of a story around the scaffold. I'm an intelligent person, like yourself, but there is one unforgivable trigger when it comes to setting me off into spasms of seemingly unprovoked rage: laziness when it comes to the art of story-telling on film.

It happens in all films to varying degrees - perhaps parts get left on the cutting floor on the overseer's orders - but to have a film where the finalé essentially boils down to "Daredevil's at the door! Send him up then." and a rather dull fight, it is torpitude of criminal proportions.

Ben Affleck said recently "Spiderman has all the money", and he was bang on there. Daredevil was made as an after-thought, merely a cheap money-making enterprise to capitalise on the success of Spiderman whilst the public are still relatively intrigued on super-hero films again. Afterthought or not, it still is a means of entertainment and pervesely, after all my complaints, I was entertained. It so happens that, after the frantic questioning of plot devices, Daredevil bestowed a feeling of numbness that I only get from watching crap films and it is a feeling that I thoroughly enjoy.

If I was somebody else, however, I'd be pissed off. One to avoid.