Movie Review: Elektra (2005)

Elektra (2005)

So I watched this movie at last! A spinoff to 2003's Daredevil starring Ben Affleck, Elektra brings back Jennifer Garner as Elektra in her own spinoff movie. It's often derided as one of the worst superhero movies out there, and... well, clearly that was before they watched 2015's dire Fantastic Four reboot, but it's... it's pretty close. 

And I think a good chunk of what made this movie kind of not really work is that... it just tries to do so much and ends up feeling confused? Let's not even get into the honestly very eye-rolling over-the-top mystification of East Asian martial arts, which is honestly pretty terrible even by the standards of the superhero genre. Let's not get into the fact that despite being billed as a spinoff-sequel to Daredevil and even referencing Elektra's death in that movie, we barely deal with anything from that movie -- you'd think that Elektra would be hunting Bullseye, right? Or that we'll have a story revolving her resurrection? No, no such thing. Elektra returning from the dead is handwaved with the utterly silly and fictional art of Kimagure, which allows Elektra to 'see into the future'. Okay, pretty standard martial arts style... and also her master Stick is able to 'reverse time' and bring her back from the dead by touching her head and belly. Yeah, that plot point is so casually shoehorned in as a handwave to bring Elektra back to life, and... I don't know. Maybe if the secret martial art was given some oomph, some actual substance and event to show how epic of an achievement it would be, then it would mean something. But no. It's just an excuse, and even in terms of comic-book excuses, it's a pretty damn terrible one. 

And then the plot kind of... vacillates between having Elektra as this cold-blooded hired murder by having her kill Lucius Malfoy in the pretty cool opening sequence, and introducing her side-kick and contract-guy McCabe. We also, in very quick succession, get a flashback to her resurrection, her being expelled by Stick's ninja dojo (it's actually not clear if this bit happened before or after Daredevil until like halfway through the movie), and a flashback to young Elektra being bullied by her high-achieving abusive dad (which really doesn't have too much of a bearing to the movie's story). Oh, and we get the ominous pre-movie-title bit about the Hand and the forces of good and evil and all that. None of these are bad comic-book storylines on paper, but the fact that they're just randomly tossed at us with minimal payoff makes the first one-third of the movie a huge slog. 

Not to mention that the setup for the plot of the movie has Elektra being hired by an anonymous client to kill a pair of targets -- a father-and-daughter pair called Mark Millar and Abby -- but Elektra befriends them before she knows that they're her targets! Oh no! Abby is... she's all right as far as these kid sidekicks go, but she's more 'tolerable' than 'likable'. We kind of go through the typical plot expected for these sort of action movies -- badass hero befriends the side characters, shows some vulnerability, there's some awkwardly-written ship tease, yadda yadda. Then we get a fight scene and... okay, I get that it's a low-budget movie made in 2005, but the Hand ninjas exploding into green mist just looks ridiculous. 

Actually, one of the better parts of the movie might be the structure of the Hand, where we get to see the ultimate leader, Master Roshi (Dragon Ball Z joke, ha!) is just watching some of his potential successors vie for the role to obtain the enigmatic "The Treasure", which is obviously Abby. After the failure of whoever sent the original batch of ninjas, our main villain Kirigi show up with a group of superpowered minions -- the decay-inducing Typhoid Mary, the indestructible Stone, the guy with the magical tattoos called Tattoo, and... and Kinkou, who's... does he even have a power? I think he's just a random ninja, or the movie ran out of budget for him. 

And this second act of the movie is reasonably thrilling and well-paced, actually, as far as a mindless popcorn flick goes. Tattoo's ink eagles following our heroes, Elektra finding help with McCabe; McCabe's heroic sacrifice; Typhoid causing plants to decay; Elektra dropping a tree on Stone; Abby showing that she can use her little whip-necklace to fight and take out Kinkou... yes, the CGI for Tattoo's weird meteor-fireball-wolf-thing is bizarre and the showcases of Elektra's future sight is kind of whatever, but it's more or less pretty well-done action movie fare.

And then Stick shows up, rescues our heroes from Kirigi, and gives us some exposition about the 'Treasure', which is apparently a martial arts prodigy. Apparently, these girls that are 'Treasures' are just born... and can fight and shit? It's a bit of a random plot point thrown in that doesn't really make sense, beyond forcibly drawing comparisons between Elektra and Abby, as well as making Elektra's backstory tie to the Hand/Chaste war -- because Kirigi is the assassin that killed Elektra's parents! ...a plot point that doesn't really make sense since the Hand should want to claim 'the Treasure' but he just kind of leaves young Elektra behind? Okay?

And then because the runtime of the movie is about to finish, Elektra somehow is able to make use of her mystic Jedi arts to contact Kirigi and we get a huge fight in Elektra's childhood home between Elektra against Kirigi, Typhoid Mary and Tattoo. There are some shots that are admittedly cool -- like the massive amounts of cloths that drop down from the ceiling when Elektra and Kirigi first face off; or Tattoo enveloping the hedge maze with his snake tattoos, but... but ultimately it's kind of a generic 'final battle' that is nowhere as exciting as the second act fight in this movie. Kirigi himself never really develops much of a personality so I really don't feel much when Elektra kills him. Typhoid is fun, but her personality never goes beyond 'fun sadist', and the random bit of her being a former Treasure feels out of nowhere. 

And after Elektra finally takes care of the villains, we get a bunch more scenes of Elektra resurrecting Abby after she dies from Typhoid's decay powers, because of kimagure. The Millars get a normal life (wouldn't the Hand just send more assassins after them), Stick is revealed to have set up the first half of the movie to let Elektra know that she has a good heart (a dick, but totally in-character to his comic counterpart) and the movie closes. 

And... yeah, yeah. There are parts of this movie that is nice, and I wouldn't say that it's entirely incomprehensible. It's just that the movie had such a nonsensical bunch of storylines and it ends up feeling like a ripoff Kill Bill with some X-Men powers and a child sidekick thrown in, y'know? I think I would defend the 2003 Daredevil movie for being a fair adaptation of its source material, but this one... really isn't.