Elektra
**
Directed by Rob Bowman
Written by Raven Metzner, Frank Miller, Zach Penn and Stu Zicherman
Starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic and Kirsten Prout
Classification: PG
For the better part of this movie, Elektra (Jennifer Garner) appears to be a sensible, stylish young superhero. She pads around her rented West Coast beach house in simple black T-shirts and jeans doing yoga and eating fruit. That she is in fact a hired assassin on a $2-million contract killing is charmingly offset by the fact that she wears no makeup and ties her (albeit ridiculously) long brown hair back in a ponytail.
Finally, you might be tempted to think: a female comic-book heroine without the high heels and cleavage. But don't hold your breath. Before you can say "shazam," the baddies have appeared and Elektra is tarted up in a red satin bustier and matching pair of low-rise pedal-pushers that would give Shania Twain's stylist cause for concern.
Maybe it's prudish to ask, but why is it that women in the movies can only kick bad-guy butt if they happen to be dressed up like hookers or house pets? Perhaps the key to female superpower begins with the ability to execute roundhouse kicks while zippered into PVC pants and gland-squashing lingerie.
Elektra, as you will know from your most recent conversation over the holidays with a pimply, geeked-out teenage relative, has no actual superpowers of her own. Her background, as it is recapped in the movie, is suitably tragic: She grew up being pushed around by her father and weakly protected by her mother. After witnessing her mother's murder at the hands of a flying horned demon at an impressionable age, Elektra is forever scarred and ends up with a case of obsessive compulsive disorder that causes her to count when she walks and arrange her toiletries in an overly anal way. During college, she meets Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) and the two fall briefly in love. After Elektra's father is murdered, they part only to meet again years later, he as a bona fide superhero, and she as a trauma-hardened assassin on the wrong side of the law.
At the end of Daredevil, the 2003 precursor to this movie, fans will remember that Elektra fell victim to Bullseye, a sociopath and long-time adversary of Daredevil's. Hollywood, however, has a magical way of resuscitating the dead, especially if it sees signs of a second life at the box office. And so it is that Elektra was made to rise again, this time at the hands of a white-haired martial-arts master who imbues her with cool new Ninja powers (most notably kimagure, an ability to see the future, which she possesses in limited terms).
And that, if you can get your head around it, is the monolithic back-story for this otherwise thinly plotted film. The action picks up with Elektra at the beach house, waiting for word from her superiors. When she discovers her next targets are, in fact, the next-door neighbours, a handsome single father (Goran Visnjic) and his teenage daughter (Kirsten Prout), Elektra has a moral reckoning and abandons the assignment.
She subsequently vows to protect Abbey and her father, and in doing so, takes on a new gang of assassins, led by a malicious Asian Ninja master known only as the Hand. Each one of his gang members is gifted with a power, each one more wildly ludicrous than the next. Tattoo is a hoodlum inked up with wild animals that come to life and attack on command. Typhoid, a tarty goth with electric-blue, porn-star, press-on nails, has the ability to annihilate her enemies by blowing them a contagious kiss of death -- and so on.
Elektra fights off each one of these two-dimensional opponents using her signature method of defence -- an overchoreographed swirl of long hair and gleaming three-pronged daggers called sais.
By the time she learns that her wards have a secret of their own it is too late -- Elektra has broken her vow of non-commitment and become emotionally attached to her new friends. She sees her younger self in Abbey and besides, the dad is hot.
Will Elektra live to see all of her emotional risks pay off? Will she finally get it on with the dad? Will she teach little Abbey the Ninja-mistress's method of dodging bullets in thigh-high stilettos? All these perfectly reasonable questions are left open-ended by the time Elektra limps to its conclusion. Evidently only the box office will decide.