Elektra [Unrated Version,,Director's Cut]

---

Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »

---

As fans of the genre know, 2004 and 2005 were banner years for female superhero flops. First, there was Halle Berry's "Catwoman"; then there was Jennifer Garner's "Elecktra," both released within about six months of each other.

Fox's "Elektra" was a spin-off of their "Daredevil" movie, which did not impress me in its theatrical edition but which I liked quite a bit better in its later Director's Cut. The reedited "Daredevil" added more depth to the personality and motivations of the main character and opened up an engaging sub plot. Could the Director's Cut of "Elektra" equal the Director's Cut of "Daredevil" in turning a sow's ear into a silk purse?

Not really.

"Daredevil" added almost half an hour of new material to the mix, strengthening every aspect of the show from story to action to character development. The timing of the "Elektra" Director's Cut is about two minutes longer than the theatrical version, and, as far as I can tell, the new edition strengthens things only marginally. The advantage that comes of the additional footage is that Fox can legitimately call the new edition "unrated," since it was never submitted to the Motion Picture Ratings Board. Every little thing helps a studio in marketing a product.

However, all is not lost because the Director's Cut is, as I say, a tad better than the theatrical version, plus where the first DVD edition had very few extras, this new Director's Cut comes with an audio commentary, a DTS soundtrack (in addition to Dolby Digital), and a second disc of bonus materials. There must be "Elektra" fans for whom this is good news.

The first thing I had to determine, though, was just how much new material was actually in the Director's Cut. Just because the timing indicated that it was only a couple of minutes longer than the theatrical version didn't necessarily mean that only a few minutes had been added. For all I knew, the director could have deleted a full hour of old material and replaced it by sixty-two minutes of new stuff. However, it had been almost a year since I had watched the theatrical version, and unlike Fox's extended version of "Alien Vs. Predator," there is no optional, on-screen marker to indicate where new material had been changed or inserted.

So I relied on the director and the film editor in their Director's Cut commentary track to steer me in the right direction. It was only after listening to them for 102 minutes that I realized there wasn't a whole lot that was new about this new version. The changes the director and editor talk about are exceptionally small, so small as to have been inconsequential to me if the filmmakers hadn't pointed them out. The back of the keep case announces "more eye popping action" and "added visual effects," but you could have fooled me. In any case, the Director's Cut does no harm and very slightly does improve the situation, which surely needed improving.

Let's start with the movie itself. I am not one of those people who subscribes to the notion that "Elektra" failed with critics and the public because it was a male-hating, women's lib picture. That's the kind of nonsense talked up by a relative few insecure, possibly paranoid men. The theatrical version failed simply because it wasn't very good. Like so much that is made in Hollywood these days, "Elektra" was a product created from the misguided notion that movie audiences want a maximum number of fights, chases, quick edits, loud noises, and deaths, with a minimum of plot, characterization, or heart. Yet if you look at the superhero films that have fared best over the years, like "Superman," "Batman," and "Spider-Man," you find stories with plot, characterization, and, above all, heart. In "Elektra" we simply have a character who takes up where she left off in "Daredevil," no matter that she was supposed to have died in that movie, carrying on as an assassin in a totally mechanical, humorless, heartless manner. Attempts to infuse her character with some background flashbacks are largely ineffectual and often confusing, even though the Director's Cut attempts to minimize the damage.

"Elektra" begins with an offscreen narrator, presumably Elektra's wise, old, blind mentor, Stick (Terrence Stamp), telling us that the story we are about to see concerns the forces of good and evil. "The evil," he says, "has taken many forms and used the darkest arts. In our time, they call themselves simply 'The Hand.' The good follow the way of Kimaguri. Its Masters can see the future and perhaps even bring back the dead." Thus was Elektra brought back from the dead to fight evil, although we're also told that both sides seek her out as "a weapon in an ancient war." In other words, she kind of gets thrown around from one side to the other.

Nevertheless, she's certainly in demand. So in demand that she has her own agent. I kid you not. Her business representative, McCabe (Colin Cunningham), arranges assignments to keep her occupied. Evidently, Elektra gets bored really fast unless she's killing somebody, and she is an amazingly efficient killing machine. In fact, she seems to enjoy her work immensely and explains to McCabe that the more she kills, the better it is for her image, her mystique. "You know," says one of the baddies at the beginning of the movie, "the better the assassin, the closer they can get to you before you know they're there." Elektra moves like a ghost.

Elektra doesn't have any superhuman abilities, but she's agile and deadly and very, very quick. She has been taught the art of anticipating her opponent's every move, so she can maneuver from one place to another, be somewhere else, in the blink of an eye. That comes in handy pretty often.

But before the actual plot kicks in, we get a good deal of deadly dull back story, flashbacks and nightmares about Elektra's past, none of which includes even the barest mention of Daredevil, I might add. You'd think that Matt Murdock never existed in her life, despite her supposed love for the poor fellow (and to say nothing of her penchant for blind guys).

So, about a third of the way into the movie the actual story line develops. Elektra is assigned to kill a neighbor of hers, a man named Mark Miller (Goran Visnjic) and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Abby (Kirsten Proust). Naturally, Elektra can't do it and decides to protect them instead. But why, and from whom or from what?

Meanwhile, "The Hand" is trying to find something they refer to cryptically only as the "Treasure," which is somehow connected to the father and daughter. "The Hand's" Master, Roshi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), agrees to let his son, Kirigi (Will Yun Lee), attempt to find the "Treasure" when all else fails. Kirigi heads up a task force that consists of various folks called Typhoid, Kinkou, Tattoo, and Stone, a formidable crew to say the least. Too bad they don't live up to the toughness of their names because when the time comes to wind things up, Elektra makes relatively easy work of them.

From the point where Elektra starts defending the man and girl, the movie becomes almost all run, chase, and fight, with intermittent moments of slow, almost silent mysticism and tedium.

The characters are based on the ones created by Frank Miller for Marvel Comics, and the movie is directed by Rob Bowman, who was known earlier in his career for TV work on projects like "Quantum Leap," "Bay Watch," and "The X Files." Then he branched out into feature films with "The X Files" movie and 2002's Armageddon dragon tale, "Reign of Fire." "Elektra" is a continuation of the same for him, TV-type hocus-pocus and vague occultism, with as much attention to atmosphere as to action. Normally, I would consider this a good thing, except that in this case the atmosphere has little depth; it doesn't create much genuine feeling, much sense of danger or mystery. Like Garner, who embodies an intentionally soulless character, the atmospherics look good and would appear to mean something but are ultimately rather empty.

---

---