“How am I going to find you?” Ben Affleck’s blind superhero Matt Murdock wistfully says to his lady love, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, about halfway through 2003’s Daredevil. “I’ll find you,” she says in response. The exchange is a strange one, far more poignant than it has any right to be given the film’s script. At this point in the story, the characters have only known each other for a few weeks at most. And you’re left wondering if the emotion in the scene has much more to do with the off-screen dynamic between Affleck and Garner, who would marry just two years later in 2005.

In a way, the weirdness of this scene is a great summation of Daredevil as a whole. Released well before Iron Man kicked off the modern superhero era in 2008, the film is like many of its time: messy and overstuffed yet also thematically slight and tonally confused. Yet mixed in with all of its flaws, there are real moments that connect. And these, along with an admittedly healthy dose of nostalgia, make the film impossible to completely write off.

Directed by Mark Steven Johnson, who now appears to be sadly relegated to directing streaming schlock like Love in the Villa, Daredevil is the cinematic definition of biting off more than you can chew. Part origin story, the film also attempts to adapt the entirety of Frank Miller’s singular Daredevil run from the 1980s, which personified the genre’s pivot to a grim, gritty tone during the period.

To his credit, Johnson pulls a lot of this off, at least initially. The film begins by showing Daredevil wounded at the top of a church. Blood trickles down the facade, highlighting the character’s deeply Christian beliefs and absurd messiah complex. It’s a striking image, delivered with style and panache that you would NEVER see today in the heavily cookie-cutter superhero films.

The same can be said for when the film flashes back to Daredevil’s origin story, which sees Matt Murdock as a young buck growing up in Hell’s Kitchen. Matt lives with his father, Jack “The Devil” Murdock, a punchy, over-the-hill palooka whose best days in the ring are behind him. When not taking shots to the head, Jack works as muscle for a local crime lord. One day, after Matt sees his pop pulling a Rocky and shaking someone down who “should ‘a planned ahead” he runs eyes first into an ill-placed drum of toxic waste. The resulting accident takes his sight but enhances his four remaining senses, while also equipping him with a special radar sense, which allows him to “see” everything in his vicinity better than a normal person.

Of course, this being a superhero tale, early childhood trauma soon occurs, with Jack being beaten to death for refusing to throw a fight. These factors send Matt down the predictable path of borderline fascistic violence and vigilantism. He adopts the moniker of “Daredevil” to clean up the streets and keep the Kitchen safe.

Johnson and Co. accomplish a lot with this prologue, quickly establishing how Matt’s powers work for the uninitiated, hinting at the origins of his persona’s iconography and even developing a visual language for his powers that, in my opinion, is WAY more interesting than anything shown in the Netflix or Disney+ iteration of the character.

The film keeps its momentum as we pick up with Matt as an adult. Now a lawyer by day and superhero by night, the film stages a strong action scene where Daredevil tracks a low-level criminal across the city and takes him down along with a whole room of biker thugs. The criminal proves to be connected to The Kingpin (the late Michael Clarke Duncan), a crime lord who poses as legitimate businessman Wilson Fisk and is being investigated by reporter Ben Ulrich (an underused Joe Pantoliano).

Johnson and his collaborators really sell the idea of the Daredevil from the comics in this sequence, the blind ninja warrior who can almost fly through the city in pursuit of his enemies. The sequence’s CGI certainly doesn’t hold up, and in my memory, wasn’t particularly convincing a quarter century ago. That aside, after years of being subjected to a “grounded” Daredevil on the small screen, there is something deeply pleasurable about seeing a COMIC BOOK character move like he is appropriately larger than life.

For as strong as the film’s first quarter can be stylistically, Johnson’s script soon proves to be too big an obstacle to overcome. For one thing, the brutal violence Daredevil doles out in his first action set-piece clashes wildly with its following scenes. Matt’s wise-cracking law partner, Foggy Nelson (a pre-MCU and somewhat insufferable Jon Favreau), seems like he belongs in a different movie. The first meeting between Matt and Elektra is similarly jarring. While I found the camp factor charming this go-round, there is no denying that their dance-fight on the playground is one of the goofiest scenes in Marvel’s cinematic history. At the very least, it doesn’t gel with darker action moments like when Matt first hurls his trademark billy club into a criminal’s face and causes a large and quite visible spurt of blood.

These issues are small in comparison to the film’s problems with its plotting. Shortly after Elektra and Matt meet, their budding relationship is threatened by the Kingpin, who targets Elektra and her family for inexplicable reasons. He enlists an assassin with impeccable aim who goes by the alias Bullseye (Colin Farrell). The film then jumps almost right into its climax, which features numerous throwdowns between Elektra and Daredevil, Daredevil and Bullseye and finally Daredevil and Kingpin, without any sufficient buildup of stakes or tension.

There is also almost no character development to speak of aside from vague allusions. Notable themes from the comic such as the conflict between Matt’s strident faith and penchant for rage and violence are raised but never explored, as is Elektra’s duality. Part of this feels like a byproduct of there being simply too much story to tell, which is a common issue with superhero films, especially from this era. The warring between Elektra, Daredevil and Bullseye dominates multiple issues of the Miller run in the comics, so it’s understandable that the film struggles mightily to do it justice.

The film’s actors do a good job with the material they are given. Although he is now compared unfavorably to Charlie Cox’s performance, Affleck is far from a bad Daredevil. He pulls off the physicality of the part, as well as the volcanic rage. I would even say he’s pretty effective at pretending to be blind, although that particular aspect doesn’t measure up to Cox’s singular effort. As mentioned, his dynamic with Garner also feels genuine and surprisingly emotional given that the film doesn’t do enough to make their relationship feel earned. At one point, Matt mentions his love for Elektra, and even though it makes no sense considering their heavily abridged relationship, the emotion is indeed palpable.

Garner is similarly sturdy, although she has a much harder part to play in a sense. Affleck’s Daredevil arrives on the screen pretty much fully formed, while her Elektra has to transform from being basically a normie who knows how to fight to a vengeful, full-on killing machine. The script doesn’t devote nearly enough time to showcasing this transformation, merely giving her one head-scratching training scene where she fights bags of sand that drop from the ceiling and glares daggers at the camera.

Probably the main acting highlights from the film come from the villains. Both Colin Farrell as Bullseye and Duncan as Kingpin make absolute meals out of their parts. Farrell, who had just broken through with American audiences at the time, is having a total blast with his role. With crazy facial expressions and bonkers body poses, he chomps on the scenery with more relish than a lion feasting on a gazelle on the Serengeti. Not to be outdone is Duncan. While Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as the Kingpin is today considered definitive, Duncan exudes charisma in the part and is far more physically appropriate. He makes the role entirely his own, so much so that you wish there would have been a better scripted movie just to see what he would have done with it.

For as talented as the actors are, they can’t fully compensate for the fact that none of them really have arcs. And that lack is part of a larger pattern of scripting problems that are responsible for the film being remembered as a misfire. I agree with this reputation for the most part, even if I can’t entirely discount the movie. There are simply too many fun little moments for me to ever dismiss it outright.

In addition to the strangely affecting chemistry between Affleck and Garner, there are the gloriously campy kill shots from Bullseye, the best one being when he flicks a peanut down the gullet of an overly talkative old lady. Then there are the one-liners, which might make you groan outright even if they secretly warm you to your toes on the inside. Of course, I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention the rocking soundtrack. It features lots of popular post-grunge and alt-metal songs from the period. There are also a couple of Evanescence needle-drops that will fry your brain and put you right back into your early aughts self.

That perhaps more than anything else is why I can’t demonize the film, despite it being objectively not very good in the main ways that matter. Daredevil premiered at a time that was pre-Dark Knight, pre-MCU and pre-superhero film saturation. This was a time when you might get a movie or two a year about superheroes. Despite many of them not being very good, they would be neat novelties that offered light, disposable entertainment filled with outrageously engaging little moments. Quite often, they would also possess glimmers of style free from the exhausting shared universes and studio mandates of today. Nostalgia, of course, is a hell of a drug, but I think Johnson’s film personifies these things. And for that I have to give the devil his due.