March Marvel Madness: ELEKTRA

Greetings, True Believers! Welcome to March Marvel Madness! Every day this month, I'll be looking back on a theatrically-released movie based on the characters of Marvel Comics. It's all to commemorate the April 4th release of the next Marvel film adventure, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Today, we look back on the reason Marvel is stand-offish about doing a Black Widow solo movie...

Jennifer Garner returns as Elektra, the warrior woman from 2003's Daredevil. After being resurrected and trained by an old blind man (for reasons never explained), Elektra moonlights as an assassin until she's asked to take out a father and daughter (Gordon Visnjic and Kristen Prout, respectively) whom she got to know while waiting for her assignment. Elektra not only refuses, but she risks her life to protect them from a ruthless organization of mystical ninjas known as The Hand.

Because I thought Jennifer Garner was grossly miscast as Elektra in Daredevil, I blew this movie off when it came out in February of 2005. Now that I have finally seen it nine years later, I can honestly say that, wow, 20th Century Fox really went out of their way to make this work. That was sarcasm.

First off, Elektra is so unimaginative. You've got the assassin-with-a-heart who now has to protect the person they're supposed to knock off, the smart-ass second banana, something someone's not telling, the forced romance, the stock character villians, the "you killed my mother/father" bullshit... It's cliche after cliche.

Second, Elektra is cheap. Her red outfit looks cheap. The effects are cheap. The production design is bland. The score (by TV's Buffy composer, Christophe Beck) is boring. Also, the movie was shot in Vancouver. How do I know that? Every location in Elektra looks like Vancouver. The blind man's training camp: is it supposed to be Japan? Guess what; it looks like Vancouver. The vacation houses on the island? Looks like Vancouver. The Hand's HQ? Tokyo? No, it's probably a building in downtown Vancouver with Japanese architecture CGI'd on top of it. Credit Elektra's shortcomings to director Rob Bowman, who's best known for his work on the television series, The X-Files (Guess where that was shot?... Bingo!). Elektra resembles more of a TV pilot than a theatrical feature.

It's a shame, really. Elektra did have one thing going for it, and that was a very "girl power" vibe that surfaces halfway through the picture. It's too bad that it's only an inadvertent motif, and not a conscious choice by the filmmakers. This picture would have faced an uphill battle anyways because of the mixed response to Daredevil, but with a tired story and cut-rate production values Fox never gave Elektra a real chance to be a winner. It's proof that Hollywood execs think superhero pictures are for boys only. And I'm sure they'll point to Elektra's box-office failure as an excuse to not change that.

Elektra
1 1/2 out of 5 Cap shields