Tim here, with a palate cleanser. We’re all in hardcore Nominations Eve mode, of course, but the world of movies is broader than the couple dozen films that are about to be granted the right to put the words "Academy Award Nominated" on their DVD cases. Much, much broader. As broad as you can imagine. Nope, broader still.
About as far from Oscar worthiness as it gets – no matter how much or how little sarcasm you layer around the phrase "Oscar worthy" – we find a certain Elektra, which opened ten years ago on this very day. It's not the kind of movie that typically gets fêted on its birthday: it's very, very bad, but not so transfixingly bad that it developed a cult of ironic worship. [More...]
The people who made it have been content to distance themselves from it and move on. But it does represent a historical landmark of the most depressing kind: one decade later, Elektra is still the most recent superhero comic book movie with a woman in the lead role. With Warner's Wonder Woman and Marvel's Captain Marvel still 2.5 and 3.5 years in the future – and that's assuming nothing goes wrong – that's a pretty extravagant drought, especially considering the ubiquity of the genre in the intervening years.
It's an unfortunate record, and it lends Elektra a significance it doesn't deserve. It's a terrible motion picture, spinning off from 2003's already dismal Daredevil and falling short of its predecessor in every way: the action is addicted to distracting, soporific slow-motion, and the dialogue is so full of weird profundity that even a silver-tongued pro like the openly bored Terence Stamp can't manage his way around it, to say nothing of the poor, stranded Goran Visnjic and Jennifer Garner.
The plot is a muddled "guard the chosen one!" fantasy-action-mystery thing, which rather cynically assumes that, if we're going to have to have a lady in the lead of our superhero movie, the only story worth telling is one that involves her mommy instinct kicking in to protect a 13-year-old girl. Though that's still better than the previous year's Catwoman, which revolved around an evil cosmetics company.
As the last female superhero, Garner was miscast, and didn't try to hide it: she's openly admitted that she was contractually obligated to make the film, and if ever a performance hollered "my lawyers said I had to do this", then this one does. Gazing nowhere with a kind of distant confusion in almost every shot, and portraying the character's toughness in the face of enemies as the bored impatience of someone trying to dispose of a telemarketer, Garner exudes nothing but hostile disinterest. Yet she's still the single most worthwhile element of a film that surrounds her with a vacuum of worthwhile screen partners and a befuddling mixture of genres (we're in a Land's End catalogue looking soulfully at Visnjic, and then the man with magical tattoos shows up).
It's altogether as bad as comic book movies get, and that's by the standards of a time when the genre was routinely much worse than it is now. It sets the bar for women-led superhero adventures so comically low that all Wonder Woman will have to do is not kill people while they're watching it to seem like an artistic triumph in comparison. In the meantime, though, it sits there, glaring like an ugly troll, waiting for someone to pick it up and use it as an argument that women-led genre films- No. Absolutely not. Elektra is simply terrible filmmaking, irrespective of genre, gender, or anything else. The blame is solely on a studio that's clumsily trying to make a quick buck off of the comics properties it owns the rights two, with no sense of what makes the characters interesting or how to tell stories with them. They'd never do that again now, right? Ah, well.
