Daredevil: Born Again’s first big action scene deserved better

I have to be honest: I was never quite as high on Daredevil’s famous one-take hallway fight scene as everyone else seemed to be. It’s pretty good, and certainly stands out within the superhero subgenre as an example of cogent action design. But it lacks the impact of the fight from Oldboy it’s very clearly imitating, and isn’t nearly as impressive as Tony Jaa’s mind-melting oner in The Protector, or Sam Hargrave’s 21-minute oner across multiple locations in Extraction 2, or James Nunn and Scott Adkins’ stunning work in the One Shot series. 

To be fair, those are some of the best to ever do it. So it’s no surprise that by comparison I always thought Daredevil’s hallway oner was just solid, and mostly appreciated it for the exhaustion depicted by the end of the sequence and how faithful it was in its approach to the comics, which are known for some of the most gorgeous, intricate fight scenes in the Marvel Universe. (My colleague and comics expert Susana Polo quipped a key part of any Daredevil story is “making Matt Murdock getting the shit kicked out of him look like the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”) But I have a renewed appreciation for it after the Daredevil revival Born Again nakedly attempted to recapture that magic with an underwhelming one-take fight sequence in its opening episode.

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the first 10 minutes of Daredevil: Born Again.]

The new sequence starts a little less than nine minutes into the opening episode of Born Again, with an attack by Bullseye on a group gathering at a bar. Bullseye throws a smoke bomb into the bar, setting up a hard-to-follow showdown between Daredevil and Bullseye as the other patrons clear out. 

The fight starts with a great stunt fall — Daredevil swings in, grabbing Bullseye and launching both of them through the bar’s window, bouncing off a table and onto the floor (it looks like it really hurt).

As the smoke fills up the room, the two brawl, Daredevil repeatedly punching Bullseye in the face. And it’s here where the problems really start: Because the images are so undersaturated, it’s hard to follow the nighttime scene through the smoke. Darkly lit scenes can look cool and be legible, but there has to be a contrast between the focal points of the image and what surrounds them (or a clear intent behind the muddy image). Daredevil: Born Again’s opening one-take fight scene mostly lacks this, resulting in a largely obscured mess that hides much of the hard work and choreography that went into the sequence. 

This is especially true as bar patrons continually cross the sight lines of the camera while trying to escape — a choice that was probably meant to sell the chaos those people felt in the moment, but instead just blocks the action and breaks immersion. There’s a slick moment where Daredevil fully twists his body around for a spinning kick, following it up by throwing his baton off of Bullseye’s face, catching it on the rebound. It’s actually quite cool, but took me rewinding three times to fully appreciate it, because in the middle of that approximately five-second sequence, a panicked bystander walks directly between the camera and the fighters, disrupting our ability to track the action.

In one of the better parts of the sequence, the fighting accidentally takes out the bar’s lights, setting up a brief, beautiful moment where there is contrast in image, as the brown and gray tones from the smoke lose out in favor of the darkness, resulting in pronounced silhouettes of Daredevil and Bullseye. 

The camera retreats backward, finding a nice moment of synergy between camera and action as two people close surprisingly ornate sliding glass doors and setting up a fun moment where the fight continues in the shadows before the doors get broken down. We see Bullseye get to flex his unique powers, ricocheting pool balls off walls to knock out unsuspecting targets in another standout mini action beat, before marching up the stairs of the building and murdering some hapless passersby. 

All told, the sequence is a little more than four minutes long, and while it has its moments, it’s ultimately a pale imitation of the modern action style it’s trying to imitate — the long takes, exhausting choreo, and motivated camera movements you see in modern action standouts like the John Wick and Raid franchises. In those movies, those techniques are used in concert with top-notch lighting, editing, sound design, and general spatial awareness, as all elements work together to form a greater violent symphony. In Born Again’s version, it’s like half the orchestra is out of tune. While a lot of the fighting in the sequence successfully matches the current action choreography trend of “complex, but realistic,” it’s hard to follow the action here, and even when we can, it’s not all great: Even at their most exciting, both principal fighters have moments where their movements look unnaturally augmented by CG (Bullseye’s strange arm movements while fighting Daredevil in the bar; Daredevil’s uncannily smooth Spider-Man-style movements while he swings outside).

The original fight, mostly taking place in a hallway, also has a similarly low-saturation visual style. But the original Daredevil relied more on yellow and green tones for this scene rather than the sludgy grays and browns of Born Again, making the silhouettes of Daredevil and his opponents pop more against their background.

Perhaps the biggest difference is how the sequence is set up. The oner starts before Daredevil even arrives, following multiple goons walking through the hallway and the various connected rooms. This is a vitally important part of good action design, giving viewers a sense of the geography of the space before the chaos begins, orienting them in the setting and allowing them to follow the action more easily when it does finally kick off. Born Again does not take that approach at all. Before the fight, the viewers are vaguely aware of the bar’s layout, having seen people sitting both at tables and at the bar. But when the action moves to that ornate sliding glass door or a stairway that leads up to residences and eventually the rooftop, it’s brand-new and makes the action hard to follow. It’s a scramble to keep up with the complicated geography of the space.

The hallway fight in Daredevil also has Matt take on multiple opponents, rather than just the one. Sure, the plot of Born Again necessitates a more one-on-one brawl, and the original’s is basically a cheat code for adding visual variety to the scene, but it adds depth and enjoyment that the new scene can’t quite make up for. More bodies also means more potential distractions to mask cuts or rotate in stunt performers, and helps convincingly sell the exhaustion as all parties involved wheeze and pant their way through the final moments. “One take” sequences are rarely truly filmed in one take, instead finding clever ways to hide cuts seamlessly within the action. Hiding cuts in a oner is an art form, and the original Daredevil sequence does a better job of this, zooming into extreme tight shots of walls to hide a cut rather than the uncanny CGI stitching of shots that appears to be going on with Born Again.

There are a few moments of life in the Born Again sequence, even if they’re hard to make out. The stunt performers are clearly giving their best effort (again: all my respect to the two that crashed through the window onto the table!), and there are a few standout visual ideas that use the characters’ powers well or effectively depict exhaustion through the extended-take concept. 

But ultimately, shooting an action scene in one take is just a gimmick, and in order for it to work well, it needs the fundamentals of good action filmmaking behind it. Otherwise, even the strong moments can get lost in the scene’s lack of spatial awareness or legible lighting. Action was an important part of Daredevil’s vocabulary, giving Matt Murdock an extra avenue to express both his powers and his many feelings. Born Again wants to carry that forward, but this first sequence lacks the focus and attention to detail it needs to make it a real conversation piece. It’s a fight that should be tense and thrilling, but instead it all just gets lost in translation.