Daredevil and the Kingpin of Overacting

I admit from the start that I am a bit of a comic book nerd.  I still read them, but I don't go to conventions.  Nor do I wear Hulk t-shirts or particularly like superhero movies.  The Avengers movies basically kinda sucked.  Or maybe that has to do with my own expectations.  All the way back to the Spider-man cartoons of my childhood, I have been pretty disappointed with the onscreen adaptations of comics.

So when Netflix came out with Daredevil, I was sceptical.   I watched the first episode a couple of months ago and thought it was okay.  I wasn't ready to commit to watching it, but my wife watched the second episode with me and she liked it.  Admittedly, she may have liked it because Charlie Cox, the guy playing Daredevil, is pretty hot.  Anyway, since she liked it, I decided to watch the rest of it and just finished this past week.  All in all, it's pretty good - good tension, good relationships, good action sequences (though maybe a few too many flippy kicks).

The villain in this season is Kingpin, one of Daredevil's perennial foes.  Casting this part must have been incredibly difficult as the Kingpin from the comic book pages is a behemoth of incredible strength.  Finding someone in real life with the right size wouldn't be that hard, but he wouldn't have the necessary muscle under the fancy suits.  When I initially saw Vincent D'Onofrio in the role, it just looked like regular old Vincent D'Onofrio - just bald.  As the season continued, however, he seemed to look more and more like the Kingpin from the pages of the comic.  It was an eery transformation. O perhaps it was a trick of the brain altering my memory of what Kingpin should look like.

Anyway like I said, it turned out to be a really good season, but as the battle for Hell's Kitchen wore on, and Kingpin's plans to run New York teetered in the balance, D'Onofrio pulled out all the acting stops.  It was something like the U.S.S. Enterprise going to warp 12 while Scotty yelled at Kirk that 'she couldn't take it anymore'.  Or a rollercoaster without brakes.  Or Donald Trump giving a speech on the campaign trail.

Over the top doesn't even begin to describe it.  Now, I always remember the Kingpin as a scheming, violent mastermind, not a maniacal, ranting lunatic.  Vincent D'Onofrio always had kind of a, shall we say, signature style in shows like Law and Order, but in Daredevil we saw a whole new set of acting chops.  He certainly brought the character to life, and for that I shall always remember him as the Kingpin of Overacting.