I have to be honest: I was never quite as high on Daredevil’s famous one-take hallway fight scene as everyone else seemed to be. It’s pretty good, and certainly stands out within the superhero subgenre as an example of cogent action design. But it lacks the impact of the fight from Oldboy it’s very clearly imitating, and isn’t nearly as impressive as Tony Jaa’s mind-melting oner in The Protector, or Sam Hargrave’s 21-minute oner across multiple locations in Extraction 2, or James Nunn and Scott Adkins’ stunning work in the One Shot series.

To be fair, those are some of the best to ever do it. So it’s no surprise that by comparison I always thought Daredevil’s hallway oner was just solid, and mostly appreciated it for the exhaustion depicted by the end of the sequence and how faithful it was in its approach to the comics, which are known for some of the most gorgeous, intricate fight scenes in the Marvel Universe. (My colleague and comics expert Susana Polo quipped a key part of any Daredevil story is “making Matt Murdock getting the shit kicked out of him look like the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”) But I have a renewed appreciation for it after the Daredevil revival Born Again nakedly attempted to recapture that magic with an underwhelming one-take fight sequence in its opening episode.

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the first 10 minutes of Daredevil: Born Again.]

The new sequence starts a little less than nine minutes into the opening episode of Born Again, with an attack by Bullseye on a group gathering at a bar. Bullseye throws a smoke bomb into the bar, setting up a hard-to-follow showdown between Daredevil and Bullseye as the other patrons clear out.

The fight starts with a great stunt fall — Daredevil........

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