Movie 426 – Elektra

Elektra – April 30th, 2011

Tonight we follow up the disappointing Daredevil with a movie featuring the best part of that one: Jennifer Garner as Elektra. I’m not terribly familiar with Elektra as a character. I encountered her while reading some of the Daredevil stories but I never looked for more for her so I went into this movie with very little prior exposure. Basically what I came in knowing was that Elektra saw her mother die and has since lost her father. She’s an amazingly skilled fighter who’s been training since childhood. That about does it. Maybe it’s good for me to not know much about some characters so any divergences don’t bother me.

Now, this isn’t a great movie and it’s not trying to be. It’s aiming square at decent and hitting that mark. But I will say this: It’s a movie that knows damn well what it’s doing. This movie had its spine defined right from the outset: Redemption. And with a firm intent in place, well, it follows that the movie will be far less muddled than, say, last night’s movie that couldn’t quite settle on its purpose. We follow the character of Elektra, who’s taken all of her natural talent and years of training and begun using it for contract killing. She is excellent at it and she gets paid well for it and it has become all she knows. Since she’s the heroine of the movie obviously we’ll need to get some sympathetic backstory for her and clearly she can’t remain the coldhearted killer we meet at the outset.

The backstory reveals Elektra’s mother’s death and the mysterious figure responsible. We also see some of her early training through flashbacks Elektra has while living in a large and empty house on an island, waiting for instructions for her next job. I like this set-up because it not only gives us some view of the loneliness and isolation of Elektra’s life, but ties those qualities to her background. It’s done a lot more smoothly than many other background flashbacks I’ve seen. The redemption begins when she receives her assignment and it turns out to be Mark and Abby Miller, the father and daughter living in the cabin down the beach from the mansion she’s in. And she’s met them and spent time with them and allowed herself to become somewhat attached to them. Thanks to the background we have for Elektra we know that she’s got some personal issues with girls losing their mothers. She can’t do it. She switches sides.

It’s a credit both to Garner and the screenwriters that I didn’t ever question Elektra’s about face. She waffles. She questions her decisions and actions. She walks away from the Millers before turning back to them. And I like that. I like that it wasn’t an easy decision on her part. Had it been black and white I would have rolled my eyes. Anyhow, she goes to her associates to find help, first going to her old sensei, Stick, then to her ‘agent’, McCabe. Because there are more assassins coming after Mark and Abby, sent by the sinister Hand organization.

My one huge quibble here is McCabe. He sacrifices himself for Elektra and the Millers and that’s a great thing for him to do but why? The movie doesn’t establish enough of a personal relationship between him and Elektra to make me believe he cares about her enough to do that and he certainly doesn’t know enough about the Millers to care about them. So why? If they’d established more of him caring more about the money then I’d buy it. As it is it threw me out of a tense scene that was meant to establish something meaningful.

Fortunately, once we really get back to Stick the movie gets a needed infusion of awesome, cause Stick is played by Terence Stamp and he is awesome personified. I truly wish that he had been in Daredevil as well, because while I don’t think he could have saved that movie as it was, he certainly would have added some fun scenes. Stick in this movie is really one of my favorite character types: A manipulator. Love him. He gets to deliver sage advice and plot exposition at the same time and it just plain works. Terence Stamp needs to be in more movies. I think that’s pretty much what I’m taking away from this.

I’m not going to go into detail about just why Abby and Mark are on the run from mystical demon assassins who can kill with a touch or pull snakes out of their tattoos. Suffice it to say that they aren’t what they originally claim, which should be obvious, and eventually they figure into the larger plot a lot more. The point here is that Elektra gets back on the path she should have been on to begin with and we get plenty of fun fight scenes with flashy weapons and magical powers and multiple female characters kicking a whole lot of ass. I cannot complain about any of that, let me tell you.

Thanks to the movie’s defined purpose, the addition of a bit of a romance plot as well as some bonding between Elektra and Abby end up working towards the same goal as everything else instead of distracting from it. And I totally buy Elektra and Abby’s relationship, which is nice and I think a lot of that has to do with Kirsten Prout, who played Abby, doing a nice job as a teenager in a situation she would never have chosen. Sure, I wanted to shake her at least once, but that’s a thirteen year old for you.

I think if I was going to point a finger at any one thing in this movie that keeps it only decent instead of higher up on the scale it would have to be the lack of definition to the villains. Sure, we get these fun baddies with powers like impenetrable skin and super speed and all, but we get very little idea of who they are and why they want what they want. It’s a peeve of mine, but villainy for the sake of villainy just doesn’t cut it for me for the vast majority of stories and characters and these ones barely even get names. Sure, the Hand are from the comics and all, but without much in the way of background they’re just a bunch of evil supernatural ninjas.

Overall, however, I had fun with the movie. It was far more engaging to watch than Daredevil and it was certainly clearer in its intent. I do have to say it disappoints me to read about reports that claim Jennifer Garner only reprised her role as Elektra due to contractual obligations and that Ben Affleck was embarrassed to play a costumed superhero. It takes away from the movies and the characters, I admit. Take a look at someone like Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds and their enthusiasm is palpable. Much as I might not think Nic Cage made the perfect Ghost Rider, dude obviously loves the character. And I’d far rather see someone with a love for the character or comic books in general than someone who looks the part but doesn’t give a damn. It ended up working out okay here, but thank goodness for the upcoming super hero movies of this summer.

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