The Big Picture
- Daredevil‘s hallway fight scene from the first season remains the most iconic action moment in Marvel media, thanks to unique stylistic choices and its importance to the series’ narrative.
- The scene highlights Daredevil’s grounded and relatable nature as a superhero, emphasizing his exhaustion, determination, and the realistic challenges he faces in his fights.
- The hallway fight scene has had a significant impact on the action genre, inspiring other films and series to incorporate similar long-take, one-shot sequences, making Daredevil synonymous with this style of action.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has delivered an extensive array of epic action sequences in its fifteen-year history. Films like those in the Avengers and Captain America series feature superhero battles the likes of which comic book fans dreamed of seeing in live-action for decades. But even among stunning brawls like the Battle of New York or Captain America: Civil War’s clash between Avengers, a simpler, more grounded sequence stands out. The hallway fight scene from the first season of the Netflix series Daredevil still stands as the most iconic action moment in the franchise. Although it was proceeded by similarly impressive scenes in other movies and series, Daredevil’s hallway fight still made a striking impression thanks to its unique stylistic choices and context in the series’ narrative. It became one of the most memorable aspects of the series and established a strong legacy that continues to influence action scenes in various media today.
In Daredevil’s first episode “Into the Ring,” Matthew “Matt” Murdock (Charlie Cox) is beginning his one-man vigilante war on crime in New York City. After busting up a human trafficking operation, he attracts the attention of a criminal cabal that includes the Russian mobsters, Vladimir (Nikolai Nikolaeff) and Anatoly Ranskahov (Gideon Emery) behind the plot. At the end of the episode, Matt’s superhuman hearing detects the Russians beating a father in front of his son and kidnapping the young boy. Matt attempted to rescue the boy from being trafficked, only to discover that the Russians had purposely taken him as a trap to lure Matt to them.
In the second episode, “Cut Man,” after narrowly surviving their first encounter, Matt receives medical treatment from nurse Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) and captures a member of the Russian organization. Matt and Claire torture the mobster into revealing the real location where the boy is being kept after which Matt goes to rescue him. Arriving in a darkly lit hallway, he fights his way through several rooms worth of men, many of whom are armed, and rescues the boy. The scene quickly drew attention from viewers and critics for its choreography, brutality, and especially the fact that it was shot in one long, continuous take, leading it to be dubbed a “oner.”
One-Shot Hallway Fight Scenes Before ‘Daredevil,’ From ‘Oldboy’ to ‘Arrow’
As unique as it is, the scene did have some notable predecessors in earlier films and series. The 2003 film Oldboy features a particularly famous one-shot hallway fight, in which the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) battles a group of opponents armed with hammers. Daredevil stunt performer Chris Brewster confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that this scene was an influence on the series’ action.
An earlier season of superhero television also featured its own hallway fight with a similar context. In Season 1, Episode 21 of Arrow, Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) adopts his vigilante identity of the Hood and fights through a hallway full of assailants to rescue his stepfather, Walter Steele (Colin Salmon), who was kidnapped months earlier. And the first season of True Detective, released a year prior to Daredevil, featured its own distinctive oner, in which detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) carried out an undercover operation, with the camera following him through a chaotic trek through multiple buildings and areas of a neighborhood before he managed to capture a suspect and escape with his partner, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson). But the importance of the hallway fight in establishing Daredevil’s story and style still made it a unique and impactful sequence.
‘Daredevil’s Hallway Fight Scene Emphasizes That Matt Murdock Is a Grounded Hero
Prior to the hallway fight, Daredevil had already done a lot of work to establish that it was a different, more grounded type of superhero series — and the scene both emphasized and benefited from this idea. Most of Matt’s earlier scenes in “Cut Man” are spent with Claire hastily tending to the severe wounds he received during his first attempt to rescue the boy. This includes a life-threatening moment in which Matt’s lungs begin to fill with fluid before Claire manages to empty them. These scenes highlighted the fact that even the Russians, who would go on to have only a small role in the season’s larger narrative, posed a serious threat to Matt, a point that came up again in the hallway fight itself. The scene emphasizes both Matt’s exhaustion and the determination of his opponents in ways that are fairly unique for a superhero action scene. Matt’s super-senses may make up for his blindness, but they don’t make fighting any easier. All of Matt’s battles are hard won, a point made by the sight of even the unnamed Russian henchmen getting back up and continuing to go after him after he lands his first few blows, which goes against usual superhero convention. Even Oliver Queen, who doesn’t have powers, tends to cut through unnamed opponents like the men holding Walter in seconds, taking each opponent down with one or two moves while Matt often requires three, four, or even more. This choice makes Daredevil’s action scenes, especially the hallway fight, more realistic and, consequently, more intense. While the viewer is fairly certain Matt will win, given that he is the protagonist, the earlier portions of the episode and the fight itself make it difficult to imagine how he will do so, which in turn makes his eventual victory even more cathartic.
The darker, grounded nature of the threat Matt is fighting against also gets viewers more involved in the scene than in many other superhero fights. Walter was kidnapped as part of an elaborate plot to attack Oliver’s home, Starling City, with a doomsday device. The Avengers and other Marvel heroes routinely save hundreds, if not thousands of lives from outlandish villains like aliens and robots. Matt’s mission to save one child from the horrific, but sadly all too real, threat of trafficking helped solidify his reputation as a more relatable, underdog hero and made viewers desperate to see him succeed.
While he is laser-focused on saving the boy, the fight also highlights another, darker motivation of Matt’s. The first two episodes feature flashbacks depicting his relationship with his father, boxer Jack Murdock (John Patrick Hayden), who is killed after he refuses an order from local mobsters to throw a fight. Matt’s admiration for Jack leads him to love boxing, but his father makes him promise not to be a fighter, urging him towards professions he finds respectable like law or medicine even before Matt loses his sight.
But Matt’s eventual superhero career would show that deep down, he is a fighter like his dad. In some instances, this is shown as a heartwarming connection between the two, while in others it leads to troubling questions about Matt. While he and Claire are interrogating the Russian, Matt says to him, “I need you to know why I’m hurting you. It’s not just the boy. I’m doing this because I enjoy it.” Claire later says she didn’t believe this to be true, but other scenes in the series suggest that it might be. Most tellingly, after discovering Matt’s secret identity, his best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) suggests that his vigilante side “isn’t only about justice, Matt. Maybe it’s about you having an excuse to hit someone. Maybe you just can’t stop yourself,” to which Matt replies, “I don’t want to stop.” This suggests that, unlike some other superheroes, who view their work as some kind of obligation they are forced to do, Matt chooses to fight and gets some kind of satisfaction or even enjoyment out of it. The hallway fight is probably too intense and difficult for Matt to have much fun during it, but these scenes imply that afterward, he probably got quite a thrill. After all, he took on a small army of crooks to rescue an innocent child, while severely injured, and came out on top. How could a born fighter like him not love doing that?
The Action Legacy of Netflix’s ‘Daredevil’
Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, many Hollywood action scenes tried to emulate the style of films like Matt Damon’s Bourne trilogy, using a lot of tight shots and quick cuts to give the viewer a taste of some of the impacts being experienced by the characters. While these techniques created a sense of speed and were effective in many productions, they were also sometimes misused, resulting in scenes that were confusing, even dizzying, to watch. Along with the first John Wick film, Daredevil‘s action, especially the hallway fight, signified a shift in trends, with wider shots and longer takes becoming the more popular choices. Many films and series, including the later seasons of Arrow and other superhero shows as well as Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction films have tried to emulate the hallway fight with their own elaborate oners, including some that are genuinely one shot and others that are edited specifically to disguise cuts that might be needed to facilitate complex choreography.
Daredevil itself expanded on the fight in its subsequent seasons, both of which featured more elaborate one-take fights. In the second season, Matt, who had just escaped captivity at the hands of murderous vigilante Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), fought a large group of bikers whom Frank had shot at. The fight began in a hallway but continued until Matt had fought down several flights of stairs to the building’s ground floor. In the third season, he had to escape a prison in which many of the inmates had been ordered to kill him by Wilson Fisk/The Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). The second season also gave Frank his own more lethal hallway fight while he was in prison, although this one did not even pretend to be one shot. The other oners were themselves delightfully entertaining and were probably more difficult technical achievements, though the first season’s still stands out because of its greater narrative importance.
Still, the others were worthy additions to the show’s action legacy, which has made the Daredevil character synonymous with long-takes and hallways. This was highlighted in a comedic way when Cox reprised the role on the more recent Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. In his first episode in the series, Matt begins infiltrating a criminal hideout, taking on several armed guards in a hallway. Just as he’s preparing to fight a larger group of opponents at the other end of the hall, Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany) smashes in from the ceiling and lands on them, eliminating the need for another long fight for Matt. While this was an amusing way to poke fun at the character’s history and ensure that his guest appearance did not take too much attention away from Jennifer’s story, fans can’t help but hope that the character makes a full return to his one-shot action roots in his future MCU appearances, either in Echo and/or his new series Daredevil: Born Again.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
