Brutal comic strip

Frankly, I don't find this latest comic-strip superhero movie at all right for children of 15. It is excessively brutal, cruel and traumaridden. It has none of Spiderman's light-heartedness or Superman's gallantry.

A child who is blinded by overspill from toxic chemicals, then has hysterics when he comes out of the operation: it's totally harrowing. It gets worse - the kid's father, a boxer, refuses to throw a fight and gets murdered in front of his sightless child.

All of which strikes me as an unnecessarily disturbing preamble to the charmless Ben Affleck taking over as the adult vigilante Daredevil, blind like Justice, but righting injustices in his all-leather jumpsuit with sword-stick and garotting wire accessories, then entering a steel sensory deprivation tank to sleep off the night's murderous exertions like an aquatic Dracula.

From start to finish, the film is death-ridden and employs overamplified sound to pump up its many pornographic images. Chain-sticks and throwing-stars that lodge in a man's gullet are not, I believe, suitable weaponry to demonstrate to those still in the school playground.

Even romance is an affair of violence, not affection, Daredevil's girlfriend Elektra (Jennifer Garner), is a martialarts chick and they f lirt by kicking the living daylights out of each other. Meeting cute? More like meeting brute.

Enter Colin Farrell, unrecognisable as a hired hit man called Bullseye, with shaven head, an impression of rif le-sights incised into his forehead and homely tricks such as choking a talkative old dame beside him in the plane by f licking a peanut into her windpipe, or stabbing a heavy through the neck with three pencils from the big bad boss's office desk.

I know the violence is make-believe, but it's nauseatingly relentless and very nasty in the special effects of bodies skewered, broken, mishandled and mutilated.

The film received a Certificate 15 because the British Board of Film Classification deemed it fantasy, not reality. My own view is that fantasy violence often packs a more horrifying charge of desensitising shock.

What is going on at the BBFC? It is letting this brand of thuggery and imitable harm filter down to ever-younger age groups. Two weeks ago, Love Liza, also Certificate 15, showed the tempting pleasures of petrol sniffing - as if children aren't already exposed to dangerous if less arcane addictions.

The appeal of Daredevil is almost entirely on killing people: it should be Certificate 18. I wouldn't let a child near it. Come to think of it, I wouldn't let many an adult.

Daredevil
Cert: cert15