Five of the best throwdowns in Netflix’s Daredevil

Cherokee Seebalack with five of the best throwdowns in Netflix’s Daredevil…There’s one more person you need to be thanking for the awesomeness that is Netflix’s Daredevil and that’s Philip J. Silvera. All the bad-assery that you got in the first season? Silvera’s the guy who brought it to you. As the fight and stunt coordinator, he’s the one that had you watching a far more bloody live-action Marvel project than they’ve ever done before. And it worked. So well.If you haven’t watched Daredevil, please put a pause on your lives for the next 13 hours and get down with some Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk action.In the meantime, if you have seen it – or you want to go and spoil everything for yourself – let’s take a look back at some of the best fight scenes in the show and why they’re so damn good.In episode order. The Man in the Mask vs. Russian mobsters – Cut Man, episode 2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyKdg4blKnoThis is the scene you’ve probably heard most about post-Daredevil’s release. There are 100’s of articles online dedicated to this fight alone and for good reason. It’s a one-take five minute shot (three or so being the actual fight), where Daredevil singlehandedly takes on a gang of Russian mobsters.The technicality of one-take scenes are always impressive, and the Oldboy influences are definitely in there – the colour scheme, the hallway design – but it’s the effect that the punch-up has on Matt that is the most important thing here. He got cuts, bruises and probably broken ribs, and he gets a hell of a lot worse with each episode.When you come to know the Marvel Cinematic Universe to present its characters with a level of invincibility, Daredevil’s beaten-on, bloody face seems a little surreal. The guy could barely even walk after, yet give Black Widow or Hawkeye those bad dudes in The Avengers franchise and they’ll take them out in a second. That’s not because Daredevil’s fighting game doesn’t match against those two – because, it does – but a way for the show to say ‘this isn’t the Marvel universe you’re used to’. What a relief, too.I never feel a sense of danger for MCU heroes, but I did for Matt as this Daredevil fight went on. The camera wasn’t even on Daredevil – or The Man in the Mask, as he is referred to until the last episode – all of the time. It pans away from him when he opens a door, where for a good 30+ seconds, all you hear are screams, punches being thrown and the breaking of furniture.Let me remind you that this all happened in the second episode.Fisk vs. Anatoly – In The Blood, episode 4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVUkz0k3O10Okay, okay. This isn’t exactly a two-sided fight, but it is still a fight, and a super important one at that. So hear me out, here.Wilson Fisk is this season’s Big Bad. He’s the guy we know is going to turn into the Kingpin one day and he’s probably on that path right now. At this stage in the series, we haven’t seen him physically do anything, he’s only given orders to his second in command, Wesley.He’s pleasant when first meeting Vanessa, a local art dealer who later becomes his girlfriend and wife-to-be, and doesn’t’ seem, well, that bad. But you get the feeling that something is off. His transformation into the villain we know from the comics will happen, the question is when.It’s only when he is out with Vanessa and is confronted by Anatoly, one of the Russian mobsters who is trying to warn him about The Man in the Mask, that you see how far he can go. Wesley, with Fisk’s say-so, takes Anatoly to a deserted part of the city. The car they’re in stops, Fisk takes Anatoly out and beats the living daylights out of him. He then smashes his head in with a car door, because, you know, he’s the Kingpin. All because of Vanessa.Both Matt and Fisk, which is later explored in the series, are men driven by their emotions. They can be dangerous, but also predictable if they so obviously make decisions because of their overpowering feelings in a situation (i.e Vanessa being poisoned in a future episode by one of Fisk’s trusted men, Leyland, so he would drop his eye off the ball).Fisk isn’t just the villain, though, he is a complicated character in his own right. You feel for the guy at times, he had a really rough childhood. He doesn’t do things for the sake of it and he has intentions behind his villainy that seem almost commendable to some degree. (Minus the killing part.)We had seen Wilson when he was with Vanessa, and we get Fisk when he is smashes a guy’s brains out.Matt vs. Stick – Stick, episode 7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAKbtL1HyIIYou know I mentioned about that whole invincibility thing with MCU heroes? Well, up until this point, Matt doesn’t lose a fight. He’s roughed up pretty badly, yeah, but he isn’t the loser. Kind of strips away the whole ‘he isn’t invincible’ thing, right? That’s until this episode when he comes across his most difficult rival so far.If they aren’t already, origin stories are well on their way to becoming a trope in film and TV adaptations of superhero comics. The thing is, you don’t need to know the motivations behind a character’s decision from the off, it is fine if it unfolds over a period of time; correlating with what he is going on in the present day. Similar to The CW’s Arrow, Daredevil gets that. When you first meet someone, you don’t immediately know everything about them and their whole life story. Why should a character’s past be told in a linear narrative? You watch the show or the film to get to know them more, not to be told that this, that and the other happened to them when they were younger.The arrival of Matt’s former mentor, Stick, throws him into a completely different headspace, which we hadn’t seen before. The non-linear unravelling of Matt’s history makes scenes like this so much more brutal and emotional. Old wounds are reopened as a complicated relationship resurfaces, and Matt becomes the most vulnerable he has ever been. Basically, it’s personal.Stick is crucial to the way that Matt turned out. You can sense that before the flashback where he first meets him as a child. Their encounter in the present day, after so many years of not seeing each other, is tense and awkward, and, even without them referring to anything that happened, you know it wasn’t pretty.When they get into a fight after Stick admits to killing Black Sky, a little kid who was being used as a weapon by Nobu, the head of Hell’s Kitchen’s Yakuza, all the gloves are off. Matt is fighting his problems out of costume, not the Man in the Mask’s. It was like he was waiting for an excuse to release all of his pent up anger and frustration and feelings of abandonment.The Man in the Mask vs. Nobu – Speak of the Devil, episode 9https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4TJWBT77uAThe Hell’s Kitchen universe isn’t just populated with guns and gangsters. There are supernatural elements sprinkled out in this season as well, with Easter eggs leading up to Marvel’s other Netflix output Iron Fist. One example of this is when Madam Gao, the queen of the heroin ring, is cornered by The Man in the Mask when he takes down her drug empire in the penultimate episode. Before he can even get his hands on her, she pushes him to the other side of the room and makes a getaway. They don’t see each other again for the finale, but it leaves the door wide open for some serious martial arts action.We get a (hopeful) glimpse of what is to come in Iron Fist when Fisk hires a ‘specialist’ to deal with The Man in the Mask. Turns out, it is Nobu who can give as much as he can take in the fighting arena. Matt, for a better word, is screwed. It’s all ninja skills from here on out.The episode starts off with this scene – all ass-kicking points going to Nobu – before it becomes spliced with answers as to how Matt got into a warehouse fighting a ninja in the first place. Then, there is a full 7 minutes of The Man in the Mask getting beaten to near death, before Fisk rolls in and tries to finish off the job. (In between Nobu burning alive. Yup, a lot happens.)Thought Stick was bad? Nobu’s a whole lot worse. Matt was challenged by Stick like he hadn’t been with any other opponent before but he won, in so many other words. Physically, anyway. No arguing that he outright lost this fight. Doesn’t matter that Nobu died, either, Matt couldn’t claim a victory and there were quite a few consequences for him losing, too.Daredevil vs. Fisk – Daredevil, episode 13https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEmjRNHKefYI couldn’t wait for this fight to happen. Just the mention of Fisk alone made me want to watch the inevitable brawl between him and Daredevil. Paired up by the fact that the fighting during the series had been so damn good – and, honestly, everything I could have hoped for – made me even more pumped for this.Although the final fight could have really gone for it and given something much menacing than it turned out to be, it was still a monumental moment. This is what everything had been building up to. Daredevil had been in Matt’s shadow, the Kingpin had been in Fisk’s. Their character journeys were constantly intertwined with one another, and this is where it reached its head, where they truly embodied their alter-egos. Matt, geared up in his Daredevil costume and clutching onto his red billy clubs; Fisk, angry as hell and ready to crush some skulls.“You took everything! I’m going to kill you!” Fisk screamed in an almost too comically way to be taken seriously. But then you remember that guy’s past, the good and the bad and everything in between, and you know he means it. He had killed a lot people before the last episode. This is villain talk.As Daredevil and Kingpin start punching it out, something strange happened – music started playing. Not any kind, though – it was heroic. Heroic music played over Daredevil when he was winning, when he was defeating the bad guy. When he was down, the heroism in the music faded. And that one little thing makes this fight so good.Matt is constantly in two minds about the choices he makes. He is ruled by his own emotions and self-doubt, trying to find solace, somewhere (which, for him, is usually in a church with his priest). Claire, a nurse who helps Matt out, and Karen, his colleague, can call The Man in the Mask a hero, but he won’t see himself in that way. He wasn’t trying to be heroic, he actively denounces the title when anyone calls him that. I mean, the guy dresses up like a devil; his name is Daredevil. He’s got issues.Here, the show did something it hadn’t before – it framed Matt as the hero. Just as much as Matt ignored the heroism qualities of his character, so did the tone of the programme. Any music that scored a fight scene would be rough and bloody, electric and, at times, a bit like Drive.By putting on the costume, Matt has accepted a different path than the only one he thought was available to him. His fight with Fisk was no doubt still part of a personal vendetta, but it was more driven by his want to protect the city and its people.In that moment, he was no longer a vigilante – he became a superhero.Cherokee Seebalackhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&feature=player_embedded&v=pnc360pUDRI

Five of the best throwdowns in Netflix’s Daredevil

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