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This will go into a few spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Elektra, or Daredevil, then you might as well just watch Daredevil.

Must all female superheroes fail when it comes to their big screen adaptations? Catwoman? Barb Wire? Supergirl!? Damn, I’ve already run out of films to list.

After being killed by Bullseye (in Daredevil), Elektra (Jennifer Garner) is brought back from the dead by martial artist teacher Stick (Terrence Stamp). Her revival comes across like some sort of normal everyday thing, but then again this does loosely follow the Marvel comics. Elektra is now a hired assassin, and is offered $2 million to occupy a rented home on an island for a few days and take out Mark Miller (Goran Visnjic) and his daughter Abby (Kirsten Prout). From getting to know them, Elektra refuses to kill. So in comes a bunch of supernatural assassins to finish the job, sent by the evil crime syndicate The Hand. Elektra steps in to protect Mark and his daughter, but also questions why anyone would go to such lengths to kill them.

Mainly working on TV series, director Rob Bowman had previously directed two reasonably okay feature films – The X Files Movie and Reign of Fire. To take on a spin-off to a film that wasn’t all that well received to begin with makes for quite a perilous undertaking (though I personally enjoyed Daredevil).

The main issue with Elektra is the story itself, which is as weak as public toilet tissue paper. It feels like it was hastily put together, as if 20th Century Fox thought, “Oh, we’ve got a superhero, but we don’t know what to do with her.” Saving the lives of two strangers would normally be a side-story in any other blockbuster, yet it’s been stretched into a feature film here. It doesn’t quite beat the likes of stopping a criminal mastermind or protecting a city, as is often the case in most comic book movies. At the end, Elektra does beat the bad guys, but she doesn’t quite get rid of The Hand, probably so that the film has somewhere to go in a sequel.

I’m not exactly fluent with the history of Elektra in the comic books, but I’ll take it that she’s quite the badass. This comes across through some parts of the film, especially the opening sequence. The film even tries to explain a bit of history about the character through flashbacks. She has a bit of a maternal instinct here, probably seeing herself in Abby and so takes it upon herself to protect her and her father. She’s also not as physically strong as expected, making some mistakes and also appears to be suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. She’s also taking Zolpidem Tartrate for her insomnia. Although I would see it as a plus that the film shows the character as humanly flawed, most audiences probably don’t want their superheroes like that. It doesn’t make her all that "super."
Christophe Beck’s intrusive musical score makes the sight of Elektra assembling a bow, sorting out cosmetics and arranging fruit far more epic than it has any right to be. I’m also fed up of fighting sequences with a multitude of crazy edits, which restricts us from seeing the whole action. Elektra’s final fight is mostly sped up, with a few moments of slow motion thrown in for creative futility.

Elektra was made at a cost of $43 million, nearly half as much compared to Daredevil, which had a production budget of $78 million. Opening on January 14, 2005, the film reached #5 with a low $12.8 million. It then dropped a spectacular 69% in its second week, earning $3.9 million. Its US gross came up to $24.4 million, with a total worldwide gross of $56.6 million. Reviews for the film were toxic, with some critics finding the film clichéd and boring, with the odd few even failing to buy Garner as an action star (probably hadn’t seen her in Alias). Many cited the poor story.

Garner indirectly slated the film herself a few weeks after it opened. US Weekly interviewed her ex-boyfriend, Michael Vartan, where he told them that he was still friends with Garner and that she called him, letting him know that she was not happy with the film. “[Jennifer] called me and told me it was awful,” said Vartan. “She had to do it because of Daredevil. It was in her contract.” Obviously not a good sign when the film’s main star trashes the film, but it didn’t matter so much for Elektra was already out of the US top ten by this point.

I remember when Elektra opened and had considered watching it, but in the end opted for Million Dollar Baby. Having now seen it, it’s a film where everything fell below par and plays more like an extended trailer to a sequel that will never materialize. I’m sure a strong female superhero movie can work, but it would mean getting a more reputable screenwriter and director behind it. However, the damage caused by the one-two punch of Catwoman and Elektra means having to wait much longer.