Elektra (2005)

And so Mark Steven Johnson (writer/director of Daredevil) is out of this follow up to Daredevil, only to be replaced by Zak Penn, a name that now invokes tremendous rage inside of me. This is Zak’s first Marvel Movie as head writer (he helped a bit on X2). It’s sad because before this he wrote PCU, one of my favorite comedies, of course before that he worked on Last Action Hero, but I digress.

Now you don’t have to have seen Daredevil (to be called DD from here on) to understand what’s going on in Elektra, actually Elektra makes less sense if you have seen DD. In fact this movie feels like it was written without any consideration to Elektra’s already established character, where she was very strong willed but at the same time compassionate. Now she’s a killer with an obsessive compulsive disorder and a somewhat Spock like, emotionless speech pattern. Now this could have been explained easily by saying that her being brought back from the dead left her changed, but instead it’s just how she is. This is also a little odd because DD ends with Matt discovering a necklace left for him by Elektra to let him know that she’s alive, which to me is a sign that she’s still compassionate.

On its own merit Elektra can best be described as weak. It’s not horrible, but everything they try to do to make you either care about someone or to surprise you with some sort of twist just doesn’t work at all. In fact I actually rewatched this with my wife and a couple times she thought she missed something because the reveals had such little impact.

However they did do an excellent job of introducing us to the Hand, a centuries old order of evil mystical ninja (and yes, the Foot from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a spin on the Hand). They also introduce Stick and the Chaste, the good version of the Hand. Stick is portrayed perfectly by Terrence “Kneel before, Zod,” Stamp, as the blind bad-ass leader of the Chaste. They even got his outfit spot on which gave me a much needed smile.

They do fall short on the portrayal of the Hand’s elite soldiers, trying a little too hard to give Elektra overwhelming odds to over come. A major disappointment comes in here as they really waste three characters. They have a large man named Stone who as you can guess is really strong and had solid skin. However this character is actually supposed to be a member of the Chaste. Now while that may seem like nitpicking, Stone was actually a significant character so this isn’t something that would go unnoticed. Then there’s Typhoid who was apparently supposed to be Typhoid Mary, a long standing villain in the Marvel Universe. However this Typhoid character has only one thing in common with the comic version; they’re both women. That is it which is tragic because Typhoid Mary is a really interesting character. And lastly there’s Kinkou who isn’t based on anyone, but all he does is get killed in one of those big reveal moments. Apparently he’s supposed to have incredible speed and agility through perfect balance, but they do absolutely nothing to show this and I had to learn that by looking it up online. There were two other elites but the leader was well developed and the other was a guy named Tattoo who had living tattoos and was used as perfectly as a character like that can be.

Also no thirteen year old is as annoying as the girl in this movie, and yes I have met a lot of thirteen year olds in the past years. The question then is, has Zak Penn? The breaking point for me is when Elektra is trying to teach her how to meditate and immediately all the girl does is fidget and wave her hands in front of Elektra’s closed eyes.

Director’s Cut note: I haven’t seen it but there is one out there. The reason being is I don’t know anyone who owns it and finding rental versions of Director’s Cuts is very uncommon but something tells me that this one is more like the Blade Trinity Extended Version than the Daredevil Director’s Cut.

Marvel Movie Score = 1.5

Why That?: Like I said it’s not a terrible movie, but through out the entire thing I just flat out don’t care about any of the characters or any of the plot points they tried to hammer into me. The fact that they seemed to ignore the character already developed in DD just took me out of the movie a bit as well. Plus the inclusion of the Chaste/Hand stuff in this movie just annoyed me that they weren’t used in DD instead, however this same stuff is the main reason to actually see this movie.