Elektra (2005)

Elektra (2005)

 

Release Date: January 14, 2005

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming after the Groot-based silliness of the Guardians of the Galaxy “review”. (It may not have been of any use, but it was spoiler-free…) “From the forces that brought you X-Men!” boasts the DVD cover. That’s a red flag right there that this one’s gonna be a doozy. Remember back in the mid 2000s when every animated film in existence claimed to have some connection to Shrek or The Lion King, in a desperate attempt to convince people that the film in question wasn’t awful? I have to admit that forces is a new one. That could mean anything. Forces could be the tea boy from X-Men working as a caterer for Elektra. I could claim that the forces placed upon my fingers to type this were involved in the creation of Citizen Kane if I wanted to! I have no way of proving such a vague and ultimately useless statement, so let’s just get this over with.

You may remember that Elektra got shanked by Bullseye about an hour into Daredevil. Normally, this would put a bit of a dampener on any potential spin-offs, but luckily for us, Elektra has since been revived by a group of martial artists who can see into the future. Unfortunately, their leader Stick kicks Elektra out because she’s a girl and has cooties, so she has gone back to working as an assassin, who puts too much effort into training and OCD levels of cleaning and not enough into coming up with clever one-liners (When a bad guy asks her how she knows death isn’t so bad, she replies “I died once.” Why not “I’m speaking from experience”? That would have sounded cooler.) Elektra moves house, and Abby, the bratty teenager living next door, introduces herself by breaking into Elektra’s house. Abby narrowly avoids being killed, then goes off to do teenager things like smoke at bus shelters and film herself twerking for Youtube. Her father Mark apologises profusely to Elektra and explains that Abby’s mum died recently. Elektra sympathises because her mum’s dead too. Her dad died onscreen in Daredevil, but who gives a shit about that, right?

Stick’s clan of white ninjas are in a centuries long war with The Hand, an evil clan of black ninjas led by Master Roshi. 

He didn't take it well when Goku surpassed him.

Roshi recognises his limitations in battling Elektra, namely that he can’t look at her without getting a nosebleed, so he delegates to his son Kirigi. Kirigi hires Elektra in secret to assassinate Mark and Abby, but she refuses, having gotten to know them after Abby played matchmaker and invited her to dinner. After the failure of Plan A, Kirigi goes for Plan B, the Quirky Miniboss Squad. This incarnation consists of the nigh-invulnerable Stone (the big tough one), the poisonous Typhoid Mary (the pretty one) and Tattoo, who can bring his tattoos to life and attack people with them (the one with the weird powers). Kirigi has some vaguely defined wind powers and super speed, and there’s also Kinkou. I had to look up his power, but he has perfect balance apparently.

 Kinkou drew the short straw when they were assigning powers.

After an initial wave of ninjas are easily despatched, Elektra drops a tree on Stone’s head, while Kinkou gets fed to Abby to show why the Hand are after her. She is the Treasure, who will end the war between the Hand and Stick’s team, with the side she joins becoming the winner, like a large scale game of Capture the Flag. The Hand are after her for this purpose, but they’ll settle for killing her so that Stick’s guys can’t win. Kirigi challenges Elektra to a one on one battle: whoever wins, their team wins forever. Elektra agrees, but Kirigi cheats and sends in more ninjas. Elektra dispatches them with a gas cooker and a candle, prompting Kirigi to enter the fray himself, though not before quoting Jurassic Park.

 

They fight, and Kirigi is winning, but Abby arrives to help Elektra. Kirigi then calls in his backup, with Tattoo using his snake tattoos to drive Abby into a hedge maze. Elektra kills Tattoo by taking advantage of his weakness- he’s defenceless while controlling his tattoos. Tattoo was merely a distraction though- he served his purpose in separating Elektra and Abby, allowing Typhoid Mary to poison Abby without Elektra there to do anything about it. Kirigi comes back and poses less of a threat in the rematch, super speeding onto Elektra’s outstretched sai. She then throws it away, where it goes through several thick hedges and impales Typhoid Mary. Cheaters have gotten banned from Call of Duty for less! With the bad guys defeated, Elektra finds Abby in the maze and uses Stick’s technique to revive her, before going her own way a better person. Huzzah!

Despite being a spinoff of Daredevil, Elektra is a radical departure from that film. So radical in fact, that it’s hard to believe that they’re both set in the same universe. This could be why the connections to Daredevil are so tenuous, as none of the previous characters are mentioned. On one hand, Daredevil isn’t required watching for this film. On the other hand, anything that involves Elektra left over from Daredevil is forgotten about. Given how she makes such a big deal about her mother’s death when she was a child, she’s awfully chill about Bullseye killing her and her father. The film could have detailed her quest to get even with him, or maybe go after Kingpin for hiring Bullseye. Even if they didn’t want to dedicate a whole film to Bullseye again, they could have had Elektra fight and kill him in the opening scene to show how far she’s come as an assassin. As it is, we’re left to assume that he eventually left hospital and is relaxing on a beach somewhere, sipping cocktails and killing people with the little umbrellas. (Note to Hollywood: I would totally watch Bullseye Goes Hawaiian.)

Having considered that, maybe bringing Bullseye back for one scene wouldn’t have been such a good idea after all. He was the most entertaining character in Daredevil, and even in one scene, he would overshadow the villains here. They’re a one-dimensional bunch to be sure. Master Roshi contributes nothing, and his presence only raises questions over the war’s end. Kirigi did the deal with Elektra without his father’s involvement, so why should Roshi abide by the word of his incompetent and now dead son when he still has ninjas and money to hire a new Quirky Miniboss Squad? Kirigi is a stock martial arts movie villain with nothing to make him stand out from the crowd, and the rest are wasted. Kinkou aside, they’re too powerful for Elektra to beat in a fair fight, so they get knocked out in cheap and unsatisfying ways. Typhoid Mary is particularly troublesome in this regard, as she doesn’t even get a fight scene. Speaking of Typhoid Mary, she opens up another plot hole. She says to Abby before poisoning her that she was the previous Treasure. The film establishes that the team the Treasure joins wins the war. If Typhoid Mary was the Treasure, and she joined the Hand, why didn’t they win forever? That’s a pretty serious oversight if you ask me. Tattoo gets the best showing, since his power is both the coolest and most useful, with his tattoos being used to watch the movements of the good guys several times prior to the climax.

Elektra was a weak point in Daredevil, with the relationship between her and Daredevil taking up a disproportionate amount of screen time that could have been used for better things (and the Director’s Cut did, to be fair.) Unfortunately, this film proves that the character as portrayed in this continuity just isn’t interesting enough to carry her own film. She doesn’t have much of a personality, aside from developing OCD since Daredevil, and the angsty dream sequences, which have Satan in them for some reason, are on loan from Hulk. As for Abby, when you want to make a character sympathetic, introducing them by having them break into the protagonist’s house is not the way to go, unless they’ve got a damn good reason. Abby does not, and therefore ends up fighting a losing battle.

The action scenes seem to be a more martials arts take on Blade. It follows the No Bodies Left Behind rule, with defeated baddies vanishing in a puff of green smoke. It doesn’t work as well here because there’s no real reason for enemies to disappear. There is in Blade because the enemies are vampires, but here it ends up taking away any kind of impact from the fights. The named villains being taken out so cheaply doesn’t help in this regard. The fights are unfortunately lacking in the style of Blade or the grace and elegance of the best martial arts films. A fight between Elektra and Kirigi in a room full of white clothes was humorously described by film critic Roger Ebert thusly: "We're expecting maybe an elegant Zhang Yimou sequence, and it's more like they're fighting with the laundry."

Elektra was a box office disappointment upon release. Following hot on the heels of the disastrous Catwoman, this one-two punch killed the superheroine genre for the foreseeable future. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has come under fire recently from people demanding films headlined by female heroes. If this film hadn’t done so badly at the box office (being better couldn’t have hurt either, while I’m on the subject,) they wouldn’t be asking, because we’d probably still have superheroine movies. Following this logic, Elektra is to blame for the existence of social justice warriors on Tumblr. Thanks a lot, Elektra.

Now was the best chance I'd get to use this, so I am taking advantage of it!

Next Time: Marvel’s First Family are sworn in.

Bonus: There was originally going to be a bit more crossover with Daredevil. The man himself would have had a cameo in one of the dream sequences, with Ben Affleck reprising the role before he started hating it.