Series Review – Daredevil: Born Again
Creator: Matt Corman, Chris Ord
Starring: Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jon Bernthal
Year: 2025
The Netflix Daredevil was the best thing to come out of the Marvel TV experiment. Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock. Vincent D’Onofrio as Kingpin. That hallway fight in episode two of the first season. It was genuinely adult. Dark. Violent. The kind of superhero content that took itself seriously without being pompous.
Disney brought it back. Disney Plus. New showrunners. Same cast. And.
Look. It’s fine. It’s FINE.
Cox and D’Onofrio slip back into their roles like no time has passed. The chemistry — that push and pull between Murdock’s idealism and Fisk’s ruthlessness — remains compelling. When they share scenes together the show comes alive.
Jon Bernthal returns as The Punisher and he’s. I mean. He’s Jon Bernthal as The Punisher. That’s all you need. His presence immediately raises the stakes of any scene he’s in.
The problem is everything around them.
Disney has sanitized it. The violence is still there but it’s less impactful. The hallway fights exist but they feel choreographed rather than desperate. The moral ambiguity that made the original series interesting — Matt Murdock as a man of faith struggling with his own capacity for violence — has been sanded down into something safer.
The pacing is weird. There are nine episodes and it feels like they have material for six. Subplots meander. Supporting characters get arcs that don’t connect to anything. The Wilson Fisk mayoral storyline from the end of Hawkeye gets resolved in a way that’s. Unsatisfying.
The legal stuff — Matt Murdock as lawyer, the courtroom drama element that differentiated Daredevil from other superheroes — is almost completely absent. He’s just Daredevil now. A vigilante who punches people. Any lawyer could be under that mask.
I wanted to love this. I was excited when they announced it. The Netflix series meant something to me. But Born Again is a pale imitation of what came before. The ingredients are there. The execution is corporate content.
Charlie Cox deserves better. Vincent D’Onofrio deserves better. The characters deserve better.
Disney looked at something special and made it ordinary.
My rating: ★★★☆☆
Daredevil: Born Again on IMDb | Daredevil: Born Again on Rotten Tomatoes
