“Daredevil,” fashioned by writer-director Mark Steven Johnson from the Marvel comic, is an appropriately dark, doom-shrouded affair. Its depiction of the accident that cost 12-year-old Matt (Scott Terra) his sight, and his discovery that his other senses are working on superhuman levels, is both visually sophisticated and emotionally terrifying. But after grabbing our attention with considerable style, the movie proceeds, slowly but surely, to evaporate. The portentous angst of the grown-up Matt doesn’t mesh with the generic plot or the campy, broad-stroke silliness of the other characters: Jennifer Garner’s Elektra Natchios, kung fu expert and billionaire heiress; Colin Farrell’s flamboyantly fiendish Bullseye; Michael Clarke Duncan’s cigar-smoking archvillain Kingpin. Torn between moody grandiosity and cartoonish mayhem, “Daredevil” tries to have it both ways, and succeeds at neither.
