Superhero Media: Elektra (2005)

As much as I enjoy Daredevil, I really can't say too much in the defense of Elektra. Following on from the events of Daredevil, a resurrected Elektra is now working as an assassin and, unbeknownst to her, being chased by the Hand. The film opens with Elektra hunting down and killing a man while he extols her virtues and legendary status as an assassin to his bodyguard. After telling her handler she needs a break, Elektra agrees to take a job during her lakeside vacation, meeting Mark Miller (see what they did there?) and his daughter, Abby. In a shock that everyone was expecting, the target is Abby and soon Elektra finds herself defending the Millers from the Hand, with plenty of Ninjas, martial arts and Marvel characters so obscure that even I had to look up which were from the comics and which were original to the film. Probably the highlight of the secondary cast is Terrance Stamp as Stick, who is more well known through Scott Glenn's depiction in the Marvel Netflix series. 

With it's unique (for the period) blend of Wuxia, Comic Books and American Action Cinema, Elektra has pretty lofty and laudable ambitions, much like Daredevil before it, feeling like an early attempt at an MCU film in retrospect. Characters like Typhoid Mary, Stick and Tattoo are really only known to more avid comic readers, plus having the Hand Ninjas explode when killed, something from the comics, is being perhaps a little too faithful and looks crummy on the screen. Speaking of looking crummy, in the finale, in which Elektra battles Kirigi (Will Yun Lee, who would later play the Silver Samurai in The Wolverine), Jennifer Garner is put in an approximation of the classic Elektra costume, which just does not translate well to film. I see a lot of criticism about the Elektra/Kirigi fight, which I put down to lack of familiarity with Wuxia, which the entire film is dripping in. 

Sadly, nothing about Elektra really comes together; the cast is good, but the script is terrible and no amount of good acting can save it. Some brave choices are made, like including Typhoid Mary and the Hand, but an audience craving more of Sam Rami's Spider-Man and Bryan Singer's X-Men just wasn't ready for the broader strokes of the Hand/Chaste conflict and superheroes returning from the dead. In an alternate reality the 20th Century Fox Marvel franchises (X-Men, Daredevil, Fantastic 4) may have been the first "Cinematic Universe", though probably not as good a one as the MCU turned out to be. Unlike Daredevil, I won't be revisiting Elektra all that often, there's just not that much to it. If you haven't seen Elektra, it's worth a look, just to see where things like the Marvel Netflix programmes and the MCU may have ended up in different hands.