Daredevil centers around Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), an attorney in Hell’s Kitchen who was raised by a big-hearted, small-time boxer and blinded at a young age by some requisite mysterious chemicals. When Daredevil was created by Stan Lee in 1964, Hell’s Kitchen was the West Side Story-esque bad neighborhood of old Manhattan, not the gentrified place it’s become now, and this Daredevil sticks to the original vibe without getting too hokey. By day, Matt is a do-gooder lawyer trying to set up a practice with his law-school buddy Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson); by night, he battles organized crime in a ninja outfit, taking advantage of his remaining heightened senses and magical radar vision to keep one step ahead of everyone.

As a comic-book character, Daredevil has always felt most evocative when New York is in dire straits. Writer and artist Frank Miller’s brooding take on the character in the late 70s and early 80s, when the city was mired in recession and rising crime, remains the definitive one. Brian Michael Bendis’ four-year run as writer, starting in December 2001, acknowledged New York’s long shadow of post-9/11 paranoia and fear. Those separate arcs clearly serve as the major inspiration for the show’s creator Drew Goddard and its showrunner Steven DeKnight; their Daredevil is pitch-dark and gritty, sometimes to the extent that you can barely tell what’s happening on screen.

While most Marvel movies are bright, cartoonish adventures, being on Netflix gives Daredevil a little more leeway to make its violence more graphic and its ethics a bit more muddled. Murdock doesn’t dispatch foes easily, brutally drawing out even a simple battle with mob minions; and since he doesn’t heal easy, he forms an alliance with a local nurse (Rosario Dawson) who helps sew him up while trying to decode his motivations. There’s a real sense of risk to Murdock’s endeavors, something sorely lacking from many a comic-book property, where future sequels starring the hero in question are already being advertised. It helps that his adversary is the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), a hulking mob boss who manages to be one of the rare Marvel villains who’s actually interesting.

Usually, there’s too much going on in a Marvel movie to devote any time to building up a villain—outside of Tom Hiddleston’s florid, Shakespearean Loki, there’s no memorable adversary in this sprawling superhero world. D’Onofrio is too interesting an actor to let the Kingpin be simply big and scary—he speaks softly and is surrounded by a cloud of indefinable menace long before he does anything truly villainous. So when he does act, it’s seriously chilling, which helps make the case for the longform approach Netflix has taken here. Kingpin doesn’t need to enter a scene and crush someone’s head between his hands to prove he’s a bad guy; he’s allowed to evolve alongside Murdock as they head toward an inevitable showdown.