When reviewing movies, I try not to be too negative, focus on the positives, or at least find something good in each piece I watch to appreciate the art form, but some just try to test me. I haven’t re-watched Elektra since I recorded an April Fools’ Day podcast for it nearly ten years ago. Now, as it celebrates its twentieth anniversary, I’ve realized I’d just rather watch Daredevil again.
I know a lot of non-comics people aren’t as familiar with the character of Elektra Natchios, but all anyone needs to know for the movie is that she’s an assassin who was dead but is back to protect a young girl from an evil group of highly-trained killers known as The Hand. There is some more stuff in there about Elektra’s past, young martial arts prodigies, and wars between ninja clans, but that shit gets confusing quickly, and the movie doesn’t do a great job of explaining things, even after a cheesy animated intro with narration that’s supposed to catch people up. Director Rob Bowman originally wanted that segment to be longer, feeling like Elektra wasn’t a known commodity, but that was far from the biggest problem with this movie.
“You can’t fight a ghost.“
The first live-action scene is Elektra doing her job, offing the bad guys, while establishing her position as an urban legend in the criminal underworld. This is probably what they should have started and continued with, but after DeMarco (Jason Isaacs) is thoroughly assassinated, the slog begins. One of the problems with this film is that it can be a little hard to follow for people who have no clue about the comics or haven’t seen Daredevil in a while, and it’s boring. That opening scene after the animated intro is cool, there’s one enjoyable part with her mentor Stick (Terence Stamp) playing pool, and the only other real action – save for one character who turns out to be cool and then dies – is in the last ten minutes when all of the bad guys are knocked off in quick succession, just to make sure no one had any real fun. The plot takes its time to get going and doesn’t connect well, even after a couple of exposition dumps that don’t help it make much more sense. There are moments when something interesting happens, but the movie doesn’t treat these events as anything that special and immediately goes back to failing at character development. That also means the tone feels off and it’s unable to snap back or navigate these shifts, likely due to a heavily revised and lackluster script.
There’s a lot of blame to go around in this project and I used to think a good chunk of that fell on the shoulders of the main star, Jennifer Garner. The actress reportedly didn’t want to do the film but was honoring her contract obligations. Once she knew it was a done deal, however, Garner says that she tried to ‘live and breathe’ the character, focusing heavily on training every day. She even bled for the movie, having her knuckles cut open twice in one of the last fight scenes where the actors were using real weapons, as Garner only used stunt doubles when necessary. Even if my opinion of the film hasn’t improved, my research on it this time has me respecting her a lot more. Garner has called the movie “awful” herself, so no one should feel bad for agreeing.
It appears she knew this was the case even during production but still tried to give it her best. The character of Elektra rarely reacts to most things and often seems lost or like she’s zoning out. When the truth about Abby Miller (Kirsten Prout) is revealed, Elektra just stands there, gawking, looking almost comically unimpressed. Bowman apparently asked Garner to withdraw further at times to give Elektra a more stoic persona, but I think it hurt the character more here. If anything else, Garner is a wonderful presence on screen and looks stunning in the red costume, but they also tried to give her some flashy powers, like supernatural speed and precognition, to show how she’s so good at her work. These don’t add much to the story, and her resurrecting someone at the end feels trite.
The biggest detriment Garner seemingly caused the film centers around its schedule. Shooting had to fit in between her commitments to Alias, which impacted the production timeframe, but she wasn’t the only one forcing similar constraints. Mark Miller was played by Goran Višnjić, who was also on break from the hit show ER and caused the filmmakers to rework their plans. It’s a shame, too, because although he seems like a fine actor, these two had almost no chemistry, especially after fans of the character were used to seeing her on-screen alongside her real-life love interest, Ben Affleck. In fact, their chemistry was so bad, that it was Garner and Natassia Malthe, who played Typhoid (a version of Typhoid Mary), that were nominated for Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards that year. Sorry, dude, but your character is useless. In fairness, Abby and Elektra’s bonding is a bit awkward as well, but not as much, because I do like it when the young girl starts imitating her assassin role model and they connect over their OCD. This trio makes for one boring Christmas dinner scene, ensuring this film won’t make anyone’s holiday viewing list.
The villains are almost something. Kinkou is barely noticeable, he kind of just sucks and dies, killed by one of his own daggers, Stone (Bob Sapp) is neat and almost lives up to his name, looking badass when McCabe (Colin Cunningham) shoots him through the door, but I always laugh when Elektra runs up the tree she is dropping on him, because it’s the worst case of paper covers rock, ever. Some people remember Tattoo and his sweet ink-based pets as one of the more awesome parts of this movie, but they use his trick a little too much, and it doesn’t always look great; plus, he dies like a wimp. Speaking of, I can never remember the main bad guy’s name. I always have to look it up. He has some cool moves, but Kirigi (Will Yun Lee) has a dumb reveal of being the one who killed Elektra’s mother, and he bites the dust next to last, dying before Typhoid goes out from the most ridiculous sai throw ever. She probably would have made for a better main antagonist – especially seeing as Malthe auditioned for the role of Elektra in Daredevil – and they almost do something interesting with her, claiming she was a prodigy (Treasure), like Abby, but that goes nowhere, and this whole final sequence leaves most viewers unsatisfied. Hell, he has so little screen time, but Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is wasted in this film as Kirigi’s father, Master Roshi (No DBZ relation), and I’d have loved more of him.
I wanted to say that the one thing I truly like about Elektra was the visuals because the cinematography captures some excellent locations and wonderful shots, but then there are the flashbacks with that soap opera view, sped-up CGI skies, random effects, making some of these scenes look like they were from a different movie. There are moments where it looks as if the action is going to pick up, but it finds a way to quickly go back to being painfully boring. When extensive fights do happen, they’re often hurt by odd lighting effects, editing mistakes, and quick cuts, like someone trying to mimic Tony Scott. I want to like that big fight scene at the end and the flying bed sheets were stylish at first, but it keeps going and looks like a Michael Jackson music video. The director tried to insert some symbolism here and have those linens represent Elektra’s dead mother being present, but that doesn’t come across and just makes that portion easier to laugh at. The soundtrack doesn’t help either and feels like a downgrade from the Daredevil movie, with most of the licensed tracks either being created for the film or debuting with it, but those tunes and the score sometimes take away from the weight of a scene or are just plain distracting. I’m finding it hard to have that one thing to say I like about this film without a “but” following it up immediately.
The production lasted 62 days, and most of the actors and crew didn’t have the time they wanted to prepare. Those workdays were long and sleep was often sacrificed to stay on schedule because they couldn’t afford to go outside that window and lose their actors. There was no time to refine ideas, and the crew had to use all of their filmmaking tricks and tactics to keep the production moving forward. Combine those restraints with a smaller budget, and Bowman knew making something out of this film wasn’t going to be easy, so he sat out to construct a movie that was less of an action-packed feature but rather a project that leaned more on its character, which he hoped critics would notice. They didn’t and neither did the audiences.
Barely getting all of the shots before his deadline, Bowman’s troubles didn’t end with filming, as he was stretched thin during post-production as well. The companies in charge were all determined to meet the release date, meaning that he was handling many additional tasks and wasn’t able to be there for the entire editing process. There was also no time to explore ideas that could have helped improve the movie during this phase, like reshoots or additional mixes. They only had enough time to take a couple of runs at a final cut of the film, and according to Bowman, what was released in theaters wasn’t the completed version, and he wished he could have made it more violent. The producers, however, insisted that the movie be rated PG-13, but the initial submission was returned with an R-rating. Bowman claims that fixing it involved removing 12 frames, mostly from the various death scenes, but to help other parts make more sense and to smooth out certain cuts, around 3 minutes of footage was removed from the total runtime, which can be found in the director’s cut of the film. Some scenes not seen in any version appeared in early promos for the movie. Once a Daredevil sequel was off the table, the idea of having Ben Affleck in Elektra’s movie as Matt Murdock began to materialize, but there simply wasn’t enough time to do anything meaningful, so only one scene was filmed, a dream sequence, which appears as a deleted scene.
The ideas for an Elektra film were being discussed in the late ‘80s after her popularity in the Frank Miller-written comics, and certain things even began to progress in the early ‘90s, but the heroine wouldn’t have her own feature film until 2005, and it was sadly a failure, critically and financially. The truly disappointing part? We were supposed to get a video game out of this deal, one that would have dipped into the movie and comics, but the box office failure and obscurity of the character meant it never saw the light of day, so we were stuck with a mobile game version. Now I want one, something similar to Dishonored or Ninja Gaiden.
I don’t want to say it was brutal, but producer Avi Arad admitted to investors that hurrying the film through production and to release was a mistake that they, “will never do that again.” This was Marvel’s first film featuring a female lead and may have tarnished Garner’s career, as well as hurt superhero movies led by women for a decade. One of the many Sony leaks also seemingly confirmed that Elektra’s failure caused them to greenlight fewer superhero and action movies with women as the stars.
That might be Elektra’s true legacy in the film history books: it was so rushed and undercooked that this attempt harmed other comic book movies and female superheroes for a while, even though the MCU was only three years away. There are some small things someone might be able to like about it, but as anything other than a piece of obscure comic film past, it should follow this ninja’s lead and vanish.