director
Rob Bowman
screenwriters
Raven Metzner
Zak Penn
Stu Zicherman
story by
Zak Penn
based on
characters created by
Frank Miller
Klaus Janson
Ann Nocenti
producers
Avi Arad
Gary Foster
Mark Steven Johnson
cinematographer
Bill Roe
music
Christophe Beck
editor
Kevin Stitt
cast
Jennifer Garner (Elektra)
Goran Visnjic (Mark Miller)
Kirsten Prout (Abby Miller)
Will Yun Lee (Kirigi)
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Roshi)
Terence Stamp (Stick)
Natassia Malthe (Typhoid)
Bob Sapp (Stone)
Chris Ackerman (Tattoo)
Jason Isaacs (DeMarco)
Laura Ward (Young Elektra)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: 1/14/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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Mourning may become Elektra,
the angry and traumatized assassin from 2002's Daredevil
who's now getting her own movie, but it doesn't really become
Jennifer Garner. As she showed in last spring's charming 13
Going on 30, Garner is a gifted, unself-conscious
comedienne, effortlessly likable and endearingly klutzy -- notes
she doesn't get to play that often on her show Alias,
and never at all in Elektra. Unquestionably, Garner
has the physicality and focus to play Elektra Natchios, who kills
seasoned ninjas as if swatting flies. But it's kind of like watching
Bruce Willis when he shuts down his personality for one of those
brooding action things he does for the money every couple of
years: You know he has the range, but you wouldn't know it from
those movies. Garner is simply too friendly a presence to look
comfortable as an ice-hearted hired killer.
That said, Elektra --
a better movie than the majority of critics would have you believe
-- makes Garner's repressed humanity work for the film. At the
start, Elektra is polishing off bad men for big money (the movie,
like all movies about sympathetic assassins, subscribes to Martin
Blank's dictum "If I show up at your door, chances are you
did something to bring me there"). She's not happy about
it, or about anything else: she seems to spend her blood money
on fresh brushes to scrub her floor. The movie devotes a surprising
amount of time to Elektra's psyche, including a domineering dad
who made her do swimming exercises, a murdered mom, and a bad
case of OCD that compels her to count her steps and line up her
fruits and vegetables just so. Between Elektra, Howard
Hughes in The
Aviator, and Tony Shalhoub on TV's Monk,
obsessive-compulsives sure are getting an attractive face forward
lately.
In any event, a movie like
this demands that Elektra have a change of heart, and when she
meets a family next door -- widower dad Goran Visnjic and his
spunky daughter Kirsten Prout -- we may guess correctly that
they are her next assignment, and that she, seeing herself in
the girl, will balk at killing them and incur the wrath of whoever
wants them dead. Soon enough, Elektra is protecting dad and daughter
from The Hand, a group of martial-arts supervillains with neato-keen
powers: Tattoo (Chris Ackerman), for instance, sends animals
out from his skin art to spy for him, and Typhoid (the half-Norwegian
half-Malaysian model Natassia Malthe, an exotic mix if ever there
was one) can kill things just by gesturing in their general direction.
Elektra is the first of two comic-book creations
this year to be fitted for the screen from the work of Frank
Miller; April's Sin City is the other. Miller created
Elektra as an old flame and sometime enemy of the blind superhero
Daredevil, and she grew from there into Miller's satire of bad-ass
ninja babes in Elektra: Assassin (which, if adapted by
Oliver Stone in his splintered Natural
Born Killers/JFK mode as he was reportedly considering
about ten years ago, would've been one hell of a ride). What's
missing in this Elektra is a certain sense of play and
imagination; if you're going to devise such outrageous villains
for Elektra to battle, why can't she do away with them by more
colorful methods than throwing a sai at them or dropping
a tree on them?
My favorite character from
Miller's older Elektra stories was always Stick, the blind, crotchety
guru who trained her and then cast her out because she needed
an anger-management course or two. Terence Stamp embodies Stick
as well as anyone I can imagine, and if anyone deserves a spin-off
from this spin-off it's Stamp, who bizarrely seems to have aged
from the androgynous Billy Budd in his film debut 33 years ago
into someone who's perfectly credible as a gnashing Cockney killer
in The Limey and, here, a guy who seems equally at ease
knocking pool balls around and pinning the muscular Jennifer
Garner to the same pool table. It's Stick who brings the once-dead
Elektra back to life (since she died in Daredevil), and
it's Stamp who brings Elektra to life when it flags. As
for Garner, once Elektra thaws out a bit and is allowed to show
emotion towards the girl, Garner is on firmer ground and can
safely drop her dead-affect assassin voice and act. But
I'd still like to see her in as many romantic comedies as she
has the stomach for.
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