The pic's already sparked a volley of critical pans, but somewhere in the midst of the big church-set confrontation 'tween Ben Affleck's Daredevil and Colin Farrell's gleefully psycho Bullseye, I found myself wondering if the reaction against this middling action flick would've been so severe if it'd been released before Sam Raimi's Spider-Man.

It's a moot question, of course, but reading some of the slams delivered by working critics, I can't help coming away with two thoughts: 1.) Raimi's movie raised the bar for superhero movies; and 2.) mainstream movie critics are really getting tired of them comic book rehashes.

Third weighty thought I had was this: anyone wishing to support auteur film criticism (the idea that directors are the primary overseers of movies) could make a good case contrasting Mark Steven Johnson's pic with Raimi's. Same basic story structure, same basic setting, yet the quality gap betwixt the two is wider than Stan Lee's ego. Don't tell me it's the screenplay - when you get down to it, David Koepp's webspinner work was little more than functional - or the acting. It's the whole-hearted enthusiasm with which each director broached their material that makes the difference. Raimi unabashedly buys into it; Johnson doesn't.

You can see this in the way Daredevil bobbles two of its big emotional moments: the seeming death of Elektra (Jennifer Garner) at the hands of Bullseye, plus the final confrontation 'tween our hero and his big nemesis, Wilson Fisk a.k.a. The Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan, coming across much more jovially evil than you'd expect from the comics). In the first, we get hero and heroine flopping about on the rooftops, and we never once believe that the lady is gone for good. The second is so awkwardly staged and dialogued that neither Affleck nor Duncan are able to pull it off.

Yeah, I know: I'm tossing spoilers all over the place. But even if you haven't read the comics that fed this flick - most specifically, the Frank Miller run that introed doomed ninja love Elektra - there are few moments that you won't see coming, anyway. Even the pic's wild card character, Farrell's Bullseye (who, true to Miller's rendition, can turn even an airline peanut into a murderous weapon), is a stiff. Only time he gets to be truly creepy is the post-film mid-credits coda.