Daredevil turned out to be a big surprise for me, or rather the rating did, when I was done with the first season. I watched the whole season in disbelief knowing that the series was rated just shy of 9 out of 10, intrigued by what it is that people find so amazing about this show. Unfortunately, reading through the first couple of pages of reviews did not give me the answer; they are all shallow and hardly critical.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Daredevil is a complete garbage. Keeping that in mind, I'll start with the positives. I was beginning to feel tired of the superhero movies with all the fancy sci-fi stuff, a lot of shooting and big explosions, so Daredevil was a welcome change in this aspect. Its dark mood and gritty look at the life in Hell's Kitchen was what pulled me in.

The highlight of the show are the remarkable choreography and the wonderful cinematography of the fight scenes. You finally get to see whole sequences of impressive fighting, in contrast to the fight scenes that are prevalent in most movies these days - having a cut twice a second and being zoomed in so much that it's actually left for your imagination to conceive what is going on. But that amazement also wears off, and the action scenes become repetitive and inevitably boring. We also see the hero failing and getting beaten up badly, which makes him more real and relatable.

On another note, I appreciate there were no gratuitous sex scenes, which are also painfully common in all genres of movies nowadays. But then the male-female relationships were really laughable. And to conclude the list of things I liked about the series, the episode intro was well done and I liked the theme music, otherwise there was nothing memorable about the soundtrack.

Now let me get to what I think is wrong with the series. I'm not going to say the story is unoriginal because I know it's hard to come up with something new and compelling at the same time, plus the majority of the storyline was probably determined by the comic book it was based on anyway. The plot really is uninteresting though. It reminded me of countless crime movies that I had seen before, there was lack of suspense, and it was overall highly predictable.

Moreover, the story flows incredibly slowly. It picks up the pace and becomes somewhat thrilling in about two thirds of the season. By then you might get tired of the lame antagonist though, who elicits no fear nor respect. That's perhaps because we aren't given the background on how he actually became the kingpin and what exactly it is he does (besides selling a few buildings for drug business purposes and thus evicting their inhabitants). He merely keeps claiming that it is his dream to do something good for the city, which the public applauds for some reason, although we never learn what the dream is.

I couldn't help but think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson every time I saw Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson, only they had a much worse chemistry between them. In fact, there were no likable characters there who I'd actually care for (I know this is somewhat subjective), except for maybe Claire, who only appeared in three or four episodes. I couldn't even bring myself to root for the hero - I'm not sure whether it was due to bad acting or poor scripting/direction. Either way, most of the characters were extremely dull and their development was almost non-existent.

As for the hero, it took me some time to get over the incredibility of what he could do despite being blind. His merely enhanced senses and hard training would hardly suffice; he would need at least some kind of sonar to perform parkour and fighting as he does. Nevertheless, it's a superhero show, so I swallowed that down. However, it gets really irritating when the hero has no problem hearing voices on police radios in their cars halfway across the city (yeah, among all the other noise that his enhanced hearing would inevitably yield), but doesn't hear the sirens of the police cars just around the corner closing in on him, and seems surprised a moment later when there are a dozen cops aiming their guns at him after beating up a man. Oh, and did I mention that the hero always appears just in time to save the day?

One last thing before I wrap it up, I have nothing against graphic realism, but there is some really gratuitous violence in this series, such as a guy having his head smashed with a car door for 25 seconds until it was separated from the rest of his body... Seriously?

I guess I watched the season to the end hoping for a thrilling and unexpected ending that would at least partially justify the high rating of the series. Well, that was foolish of me. It makes me sad that shows like this get all the popularity while others, such as Jessica Jones (which I think was a significantly more suspenseful, consistent and thought-provoking noir series from the Marvel universe with an extraordinary villain), have an uncertain future.