Elektra

In western culture women generally have two coming of age periods: the first happens when a girl, hopefully a young woman, reaches her sexual maturity; the second happens when that same woman realizes that she is responsible for her own self-definition and begins to piece together an identity from the roles that have been thrust upon her (woman, girlfriend, daughter) simply because of her sex. For some women these life changes happen in close temporal proximity, and for some they are separated by decades. While Hollywood has tackled both these important times in a woman’s life, it has never managed to make the latter about anything except a woman’s search for her father’s love. It’s appropriate, then, that this is the essential theme of Elektra.

Reprising the role of the deceased Elektra Natchios (you remember, she died in Daredevil. What you didn’t see it? Consider yourself both lucky and warned: it’s not even a rental and I like Matt Murdock as a comic book hero.), Jennifer Garner emotes with all the warmth of a hunk of granite, and I honestly do not believe this is her fault. The script, long on fetish and short on depth or feeling for the mythology it attempts to create, saddles a returned-from-the-dead Elektra with an assassin’s singled minded purpose as well as a raging case of obsessive compulsive disorder. True, having all your stuff arranged just so can be for the professional assassin, which is what Elektra has become, an aid in home defense: it’s easy to know if someone’s been snooping around. But this precision borders on the pathological.

Brought back to life by Stick (Terence Stamp slumming it for, one can only imagine, the pay check), Elektra has never completed her training in the art of kamigori, the manipulation of time. Brought into contact by an anonymous client with Mark Miller (Goran Visnjic) and his daughter Abby (Kirsten Prout), Elektra finds herself in a fight to the death with The Hand, a mysterious group of Asian gentlemen willing to utilize a freakazoid force consisting of a woman whose touch and breath both kill (god how lonely must that be?), a guy who seems to be made of rock, some guy we see constantly balancing coin on his hand and doing not much else even after we first see him, and a guy who has taken the tattoo of your totem animal concept way too far, to secure “the prize.” (Why am I not naming them? Because they don’t get names in the film.)

It could have been a good film. It really could have. There’s mythology; there’s that slightly dark edge that seems so desperately needed in these shiny, happy, fabulously evangelical times; there’s a not hard on the eyes woman who isn’t afraid to kick some serious ass; and there are some interesting stunts. So why doesn’t work? Part of it is pacing: the viewer is never given time to absorb all the information, nor is the viewer even allowed the luxury of the visual appreciation of form. Maybe I’m getting old but this film as released into the theater looks like it was cut by a crystal meth addict who drinks nothing but Jolt cola (twice the caffeine and sugar…say goodbye to your pancreas!). Part of it is lack of depth: the actors in this film, including the always fabulous Will Yun Lee as Kirigi, the leader of The Hand’s retrieval/assassination freak squad, are all operating in about two inches of the ranges they’ve previously exhibited. It’s as if they were directed not to use their craft.

For this, for depriving me of any sort of visual enjoyment, and for wasting a perfectly good myth, I’m giving this film 1 popcorn out of 5.

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