The Grey was one of the better movies of the year...one of the best before the summer season.
A lot of people got Jarhead'd though. They saw the ads and expected a hype movie, got introspective darkness and psychological stuff, and were salty there wasn't really action.
With DareDevil...I watched the R-rated director's cut of the Affleck one a few weeks ago and...there are things it does well: Bullseye, Kingpin, DareDevil vision, some of the imagery...but looking into how the movie turned out the way it did, it just felt like it was too cheesy early aughts. Affleck was a mistake as both roles. The costume looked dumb, Jennifer Garner as Elektra was the worse than Maggie Gyllenhaal in TDK. Apparently, because Spider-man 1 just blew up, FOX threw another 40 mil at the movie, told them to make it PG-13 and add cgi and Spider-man-ny stuff to catch onto the hype and money. That only made things worse. But more than anything...the tone and sets were just wrong. It didn't know if it wanted to be gritty and serious, or corny and plastic.
Joe Carnahan doesn't have that problem. He said he wanted to make the new DareDevil a "Frank Miller-esque, hardcore 70s thriller."
Now I've always heard Frank Miller killed it on DareDevil and made the character relevant back in the 70s-80s. His run on there's been on my list of things to read ever since I checked out Sin City, because people consider one of the best comic book runs. I dunno...that actually got me hyped for a new take.