Originally published 2/7/2005
Elektra
Director: Rob Bowman
Writers: Zak Penn and Stu Zicherman & Raven Metzner, based on the comic book character created by Frank Miller and the movie character created by Mark Steven Johnson
Producers: Arnon Milchan, Gary Foster, Avi Arad
Stars: Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Kirsten Prout, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Terence Stamp
Jennifer Garner has movie star charisma and has put in the time and effort to have a movie star’s career. I hope, after the confusing and inconsequential comic-book adaptation Elektra, that the piper can be considered paid, and she can move on to material more worthy of her charms and skills.
We last saw Elektra (Garner) being killed off in the movie adaptation of Daredevil, where she was sparring partner, lover, and enemy to Ben Affleck’s blind acrobatic avenger. A tycoon’s daughter and an expert in the martial arts, she was consumed by revenge when her father was murdered, Daredevil apparently the culprit.
But killing has an inconvenient way of stopping spinoff opportunities (see Catwoman’s back-from-the-dead emergence at the end of Batman Returns), so as this movie opens she’s in the pink, brought back from the dead by the blind martial arts guru Stick (Terence Stamp).
He did this with Kimagure, which is a kind of all-purpose magic power that lets masters see the future, move with superhuman speed, and revive the dead under the right circumstances. Elektra learned just enough Kimagure before Stick kicked her out of his training group to become the world’s most sought-after assassin. She even has her own assassin’s agent (Colin Cunningham), who is fast-talking and slick and sends her fruit baskets before each job; but lives, we discover to our bewilderment, on a farm.
Her new assignment is to kill a man named Miller (Goran Visnjic) and his rebellious teenage daughter Abby (Kirsten Prout). But, sensing a kinship with the girl, Elektra has a change of heart and decides to protect them from the murderous designs of The Hand.
The Hand is no less than the army of Evil itself, a mix between an old chopsocky pirate gang and a Fortune 500 company. Scheming from their tasteful boardroom, they are pursuing the Millers for reasons having to do with The Treasure, a warrior who is prophesied to tip the balance between Good and Evil. We never actually see them undertake any Evil not directly related to trying to kill our heroes, which makes them not very diversified as Embodiments of Evil go. They do scowl and snarl a lot. And as a bonus, in order to help secure a PG-13 rating, whenever a soldier of The Hand dies, his corpse disappears in a puff of antiseptic green smoke.
So Elektra takes flight and the soldiers of The Hand attack at random intervals using an array of run-of-the-mill computer-generated effects. Along the way we learn a few things about our characters, watch some confusingly-edited action, and root for Elektra to become more than a soulless but sexy killer-for-hire.
Under the guidance of the normally-efficient director Rob Bowan (the X-Files movie, Reign of Fire), Elektra suffers from many of the same flaws as its progenitor. At once too ambitious and too truncated, it sets up more than it can pay off, and treats opportunities to know our characters more as expositional place-holders, dragging the story to a halt but not adding anything to what we’re seeing once it starts up again.
Elektra has dreams about her mother’s murder – was it a warrior from The Hand or a Big Scary Demon that looks like Darkness from Legend? She has OCD, so she scrubs “every trace of DNA” off the floors of her home (this is modern Hollywood’s equivalent to Felix Unger moaning “Footprints, footprints!”) and lines up all her toiletries just so while traveling. Garner plays this with as much sincerity as is possible, so as daffy as it is to cut from her doing one-armed pull-ups to her agonizing over the positioning of her Colgate, it can’t be blamed on her.
OCD is a distracting and potentially paralyzing neurosis – this is coming from a guy who still feels compelled, when he exhales on one hand, to quickly blow with the same intensity on the same spot on his opposite hand. So since we never see it coming into play for our hero in any scene that affects the story, it comes across as existing for the sake of its own interestingness.
This is the vice of the worst of comic books and it infects this movie. There is no pretense that Elektra’s worksuit – a red-leather bustier and hiphuggers – has any use but providing the best possible viewing angles on her sashaying hindquarters. We have no explanation why Stick shows up in scenes alternatively as robed sensei, pool hustling saloon bum, or commando leader, but he does get to nod knowingly on each occasion and explain how everything that has transpired is exactly the way he intended it to. That routine gets more bamboozling as the plot unfurls. We have no idea why The Hand spies on Elektra using a giant animated bird, when hiding around the corner unobtrusively might have been the subtler choice.
Like Garner, the cast does their best to bring some credibility to the whole enterprise, but they seem largely at a loss as to why they are doing what they’re doing at any given moment. It’s unusual to find a big-budget movie err so conclusively on the side of under-explaining the story, but this movie does.
There are some appreciable if less-than-extraordinary fisticuffs, and the cinematography by Bill Roe is noticeably rich and colorful. And Garner has undeniable assets both physical and beyond. Thrown together there is enough to declare this movie not loathsome by far, but it is hardly a laudatory effort. Both its star and the superhero genre which has gained such mainstream appeal in recent years deserve better.