First film this year is bound to be its worst

Elektra (2005)
20th Century Fox presents a Rob Bowman film, starring Jennifer Garner. Written by Raven Metzner, Frank Miller, Zak Penn and Stu Zicherman. 96m. PG-13 for action violence.

0 stars

A giant sucking sound that I heard at my local movie house Sunday night wasn’t just the overtaxed heating system. It was also coming from the screen.

While I admitted in my original review of “Daredevil” that comic books were never a youthful curiosity, the onslaught of comics-turned-film post “Spider-Man” has not escaped me. I’ve seen them all - from “X-Men” to “The Punisher” with “Hellboy” in between - and yet, “Elektra” is easily the worst of them all.

Where do I begin with the list of egregious offenses this movie punishes its audience with? Perhaps with Jennifer Garner, whose “eye candy” status has somehow been parlayed into having her own film. Since she died soon after her introduction as Matt Murdock’s love interest in “Daredevil,” I wondered how this movie would explain that inconsistency.

It seems Elektra was raised from the dead through the ancient practice of kimagure (insert collective “huh?” here), which is the ancient art of placing your hands on a dead woman’s stomach and head and meditating on her being alive. The art form also allows an individual to see into the future. No word on if it can be used for practical tasks, like stopping a Pop Tart from burning in a toaster, however.

Apparently, the gruesome death of her mother and her overbearing father have made Elektra a bit withdrawn, which the film demonstrates by resisting any semblance of forward momentum in its first 35 minutes. We’re “treated” to Elektra scrubbing her floors and staring plaintively at a vast ocean, but I came to see bloodsport in tight-fitting outfits. There is some indication that Ms. Natchios is obsessive compulsive, but the defect isn’t given due attention.

Eventually, Elektra is given her first real assignment: Eliminate her seemingly strait-laced next door neighbors. And although she has known no stable employment in her life except to be a trained assassin, she just can’t bring herself to kill cuddly, small-potatoes burglar, Abby (Kirsten Prout) and father/potential love interest Mark (Goran Visnjic).

Her intuition is right, now dazed audiences learn, because Abby is “the chosen one,” a moniker given to any child with superhero tendencies in comic book adaptations. Abby is being targeted by The Hand - an Asian Mafia with no stipulated modus operandi - and being chased by baddies Typhoid (Natassia Malthe), Stone (Bob Sapp), Tattoo (Chris Ackerman) and Kinkou (Edson T. Ribeiro). Although my own bad-movie induced paralysis prevents me from confirming it, I don’t think Kinkou’s finishing move is to lay enemies out across a Xerox and hit “copy.”

The final duel is between the tsai-equipped Elektra and swordsman/martial artist Kirigi (Will Yun Lee), or, as people from my generation like to call it, Raphael versus Leonardo. There’s a lot of big blankets that sort of drift in and out of the final fight sequence, and I kept wondering, What kind of dryer sheets resulted in all of this unnecessary static cling? Couldn’t they rob a little from the special effects budget to take care of this unsightly attraction between protons and electrons?

I don’t feel bad in telling you that Elektra eventually wins, but with eventual costs. There’s some tween-friendly lip-locking between superheroine/assassin and wait, what does Mark do again exactly? And wooden characters continue to trade wooden dialogue, trying to feign emotion while saying nothing at all.

By now, I’ve come to accept that January is the dumping ground for the most toxic films studios can manage. So I’m hoping “Elektra” is not a harbinger of a poor year ahead but merely another film not appropriate for consumption that has been passed off as “entertainment.”