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Resurrected ‘Elektra’ attempts — and fails — to win our hearts
Elektra
Doane Gregory/20th Century Fox
Stars: Jennifer Garner, Terence Stamp, Kirsten Prout
MPAA rating: PG-13 for action violence
"But isn't she dead?" one character asks helpfully.
Yeah, dude. As played by Garner in "Daredevil," she did die. But Marvel Comics, ever eager to start new film franchises, trashes the earlier movie's ending to resuscitate her. Fans of these movies supposedly couldn't care less.
Besides, "Catwoman" didn't earn enough to generate a sequel.
Like we need another superhero who inhabits a world bearing no relationship to reality.
The assassin Elektra, who pays her agent a showbiz-like 10 percent commission to get her jobs, is hired to bump off her swell neighbor Mark (Goran Visnjic) and his 13-year-old daughter Abby (Kirsten Prout).
But because both Elektra and Abby have moms who were assassinated, they bond, and while Mark hangs out, they take on the dreaded Hand, a mob of yakuza-like fantasy warriors with yucky skills. Roshi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and Kiriji (Will Yun Lee) are such fiends.
Elektra's special ally is her mentor, Stick (Terence Stamp), a blind martial-arts wiz with impossibly good hearing. You can find a much more intriguing variation on this character in the vastly superior "House of Flying Daggers," also opening today.
Bill Roe's cinematography has moments, but "Elektra," far from being a sleeper is, well, a protracted yawn.
Rob Bowman directed the screenplay by Zak Penn, Stuart Zicherman and Raven Metzner, which includes the now-cliched female-female smooch.
The villains are unusually easily conquered, but not before we're assaulted by sound blasts designed to overcompensate for listless plotting.
Duels are worked out in the editing room, rendering all victories and defeats capricious and neutering the payoffs. How can you be pleased that everything works out hunky-dory when there's no legitimate sense of triumph?
