.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

This review courtesy of Zach Montague, a young student who contacted the facilitator of this web site to proclaim his love of film and his desire to one day be a film critic.

This review contains spoilers to 2003's Daredevil.

The perfect movie outing for a teenage boy consists of a large drink, popcorn, well made action scenes, a few memorable one liners and a pretty girl in a skimpy outfit. In a movie which should be built on such things, surprisingly the new super hero film Elektra has none of them.

Elektra, the heroine of the film played with no flare by Jennifer Garner, who we might remember from 2003's Daredevil returns to our surprise. What I mean is that in Daredevil she ended up rather dead. From a series of flashbacks we learn that she was brought back from the grave by a wise blind man who used his Voo Doo powers which consist of breathing into his hands and placing them on her stomach and on her forehead. Why haven't we thought of that! There are no explanations on how he got the body or how he even knows her, personally I believe he steals random corpses from the morgue. The blind man begins to train her and she quickly becomes the best in her class, yet the wise blind man sends her away and refuses to teach her. She has nowhere else to go she says yet somehow ends up as an assassin working for well, the only good character in the film, an agent like man who tells her the information for her next job, cracks jokes and gets a small moment in the spotlight even though he deserved more screentime then any other character.

In the 2003 film, Elektra was an interesting and sexy supporting character who we both liked and cared for yet on her own she becomes an emotionless, straight faced and depressed cardboard cutout. The writing is beyond horrible and it became obvious that the subplot about her having a obsessive compulsive disorder was just an attempt to make the film seem like it had something new to offer, and maybe if they didnt only mention the disorder twice and had more about it and its effects on the character it would have had something going for it! Another subplot, the film is full of them, is about how her life was scarred from witnessing something horrifying as a child which to me seems like another attempt at making the film seem like more then it is. The flashbacks take up half the film, although they are short (running at around 30 seconds each) there are a lot of them, many are the same thing shown over and over throughout the film, shown with bright white lights lots of flashing and woosh noises over the soundtrack.

Rob Bowman, a director who has yet to make something that I have enjoyed, seems to make all his films seem slower and longer then they really are. Elektra clocked at 97 minutes, yet for me it seemed like an eternity. Besides the annoying and constant flashbacks the rest of the film drags with no kind of style in its direction. I was reminded of watching those science class videos where the narrator talks none stop in one tone of voice. If you don*t know what Im talking about, think of Charlie Browns teacher.

The writing is the weakest of the movies many weaknesses. Dialogue such as "Old Man Why Do You Speak In Only Riddles?" "Because It Keeps My Students Prepared." That got a chuckle and the plot isn't any better. Elektra*s newest job pays $2 million and she is told to go to a lakeside house to wait for information on who she is supposed to kill. She then meets her only neighbour, a nice man played by Goran Visnjic and an annoying teenage girl(the ones on film always are) played by Kirsten Prout, who reluctantly begins to grow on Elektra. We begin to expect a relationship between the nice man and Elektra but the film never really builds on it. Hes nice, she's lonely, she saves him and his daughter and later they kiss even though there is no chemistry between them.

Later Elektra discovers that two spiritual groups have waged a war for hundreds of years hidden from the eyes of the rest of the world. One group had hired Elektra. Both groups discover that a secret weapon called "The Treasure" could end the war in their favour. The evil group called "The Hand" sends out a group of assassins who all have unique powers, such as tattoos which spring to life as animals, to kill Elektra and capture the Treasure, and now Elektra must save the treasure from their evil clutches after she fails to bring herself to carry out the job which they hired her for. There are some twists, but they are predictable and rather far fetched.

Elektra should have stayed dead, and the $12 dollar admission should have stayed in my wallet.