Hey folks, Harry here... I'm seeing ELEKTRA tomorrow night, same as Moriarty - till then it looks like Sheldrake got the drop on us. Now, Shelly here had heard dreadful things about the film going in, and the movie turned it around for him... but it isn't a total over the moon, love and love and lust for the film.... However, that's how giddy I am for ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, we'll see if this changes tomorrow night - we'll see, Shel's enthusiasm is a tad hopeful...
Elektra
directed by Rob Bowman
written by Raven Metzner
2004
Sheldrake reporting from a very wet New York City, four days of rain and more coming. A rolling cold fog is burying the city tonight, a filthy wet mess that seems to be pouring from every open steampipe, manhole and smokestack in New York as well as rolling in from the Harbor and the East River. The streets are rivers in gutters and ponds in potholes. We push through the mess down to Fiorellos across from Lincoln Center and have the tapas, then swim down into midtown for the screening.
Well, this’ll teach me. I was convinced by the reviews coming into AICN and elsewhere that Elektra had to be one of the biggest misfires of the season. I was wrong. While not a perfect movie, this is a movie that strikes deep into the heart of its main character and works for me both as an action movie and as an Elektra movie.
Before we get into this: I go way back with Daredevil and have some original yellow n’blacks from an older cousin’s collection. I’m a big fan of the Frank Miller stuff and of Elektra. DD and Elektra have always been, for me, an interesting parsing of the Batman problem. While Batman lives in hell and is pretty much all fucked up, DD, paradoxically, doesn’t, but in redemption and a vision of true justice. Elektra carries the darkly branded soul for the partnership. It’s Elektra who lives a tortured life, with a ruined childhood behind her a tortured heart. Her coldness and her prowess are her survival mechanisms, because to face the horror of her existence would destroy her, if not lead her to kill herself.
The opening of the movie tells the story of an ancient battle between good and evil. The still drawings and narrative reminded me of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards.
I don’t watch much TV, so I saw Jennifer Garner for the first time in Daredevil and haven’t seen her since. All she is to me is Elektra. I bought her in the first film, but I found myself uncomfortable with her as this film began. She’s too pretty, she reminds me of an Upper West Side ballerina. I don’t buy the toughness. Pretty girls handling knives have to be very good and be in some way really tough if they’re not going to look silly in action movies. Imagine, oh, Jennifer Love Hewitt, if you will, as a tough cookie. Now, Uma Thurman, for example, has some genuine hardass in her that works. Jennifer Garner is different, and at first I thought, she’s just not right. And then, at some point, as the movie went on…Jennifer Garner completely won me over. I got what she was doing with Elektra. She’s a character whose soul has been completely wrecked. She was supposed to be this vulnerable pretty girl, leading that sort of life, and then the unimaginable took her over and transformed her. She’s supposed to be in over her head, but she’s not. Every moment of her life is about the pain of being forced to live this life that she hates. She can’t sleep at night because she always wakes up to the nightmares that she remembers. And the story of the film is about her horror that another young woman is being dragged into that life, and her determination to make sure no one is ever like her…because at bottom she hates herself and who she is. And then the story becomes about how our abilities sometimes determine our fates, what we may want.
On another overt level, the story is about, strangely enough, a kind of neurosis. Elektra is frozen in her idea of her own evil, and part of the story is about her recovering her conscience. I won’t tell you when or how this happens, but I will tell you the following. There’s a screenplay writing teacher named John Truby who pointed out years ago about The Verdict, that, while it’s a great film, the Paul Newman character goes from ambulance chaser to caring human way too early in the film, when he’s taking pictures of the victim lying in her bed. You don’t want your character to redeem her soul too early, because that’s THE BIG MOMENT and you have less for the story to builds towards. The way the Verdict deals with the problem, by concentrating on the court battle, ends up being the way Elektra deals with it, by concentrating on the physical battle. In my opinion, though, the characters performances and Jennifer Garner’s great physical performance, as well as the depth of feeling she brings to the character, make up for the flaw in the gem; for a gem this is.
On a purely ohmigod level, any straight man who sees Jennifer Garner move in that red outfit is going to have feeling very like LOVE haunt him for several hours afterwards. I’m still in it and I don’t want it to end, ever. Hazy rosy feeling of romance, visions of me and Jenn in a cottage and Ben’s ass freezing in the snow outside…
One minor complaint – the patented (and beautiful) JG grin Elektra gives Stick at the end of the movie is out of character. They should get rid of it.
Other notes: The beginning of the movie, the first assassination we see her perform, sets up the character we’re going to deal with through the rest of the movie. We see her not only doing her job, but her sadism and cruelty.
I don’t get a few of the other complaints about this film. Terence Stamp is cool as hell as blind Stick, and as a DD fan I loved seeing the character in appropriate Stick attire in the film. And DD wasn’t needed in the film: this ain’t a DD and Elektra film, it’s an Elektra film. There was no need to refer to him. Would have confused the purity of the story.
The villains were well drawn and memorable from Kirigi, the head villain to Tattoo, Stone and Typhoid--all nicely done, in high comic book style, which is pretty much what I wanted from this movie. Their time onscreen is fairly brief, but that works for me because this movie has to focus a lot on Elekra for it to come together. That it does come together as well it does, which is pretty damn well, is because the villains are put in proper secondary position. Typhoid’s bacio della morte is especially nicely done, but the “dancing sheets” battle between Kirigi and Elektra is beautiful, haunting and terrifying all at once.
Also, Goran Visnjic is fine and Kirsten Prout gives a nice turn as Abby, a thirteen year old girl whose key to the story. She and Jennifer will be sending a lot of young girls into martial arts schools by the time this film finishes its run. Plans for ballerina school will vanish with other dreams of youth.
Found it interesting that the last Big Baddy Standing turned out to be someone other than who you expected. But ‘tis very much a film about women, after all…
Special thanks to the security guards who demonstrated their night vision security cameras for me and my friend. Awesome technology guys!
Mr. Sheldrake
New York, New York
