Elektra

I recently reviewed Spawn and opined it was the worst superhero movie I'd ever seen. I haven't seen 'em all but it was the worst I had. A very cool person on one of the boards I post these reviews on had a brief list of superhero movies they thought were worse. Elektra was on it. Needless to say, that got me curious. Is Elektra worse than the worst superhero movie I've ever seen?

Not even close. It's frankly boring, and the premise does not interest me, but it's somehow weirdly better than Daredevil, which is like insane to me. I will say this against it: Jennifer Garner is utterly miscast. She was the biggest-named female action star at the time, so I get why she got the job. She was great on Alias, and actually decent in Daredevil. But she does not have the right personality to play a cold-blooded assassin. She's too sunny and that's not believable.

In absolute fairness to Garner, I still like this version of Elektra better than the Netflix one. That one was so bad she ruined Daredevil's entire show (and The Defenders). But that's not exactly a great bar to overcome.

Just so you haters of this movie know, I did give one of my patented Matt Zimmer "This is awful!" exclamations at the end of the film when Elektra is tearfully telling Abby she just found her like a big sap. I seem to find myself uttering that sentence out-loud during EVERY shaky movie and show I watch at least once. Hell, sometimes those words escape me in a bad scene from a project I actually otherwise LIKE. But yes, that scene was awful. I cringed.

I think the biggest reason this was no contest to Spawn being the worst superhero movie I've seen is because the visual effects were decent. Let me be further clear about all of the rest of those movies on that brief list including Mystery Men, Steel, and Catwoman. If those movies' visual effects are better than Spawn's, I will almost certainly like all of those films better. That was literally that movie's dealbreaker. We'll see. And the effects in Elektra were pretty good.

We actually got Stick in this movie, which is silly that we didn't get him for Daredevil. Yeah, he's important to Elektra's origin. But he's equally important to Matt Murdock's.

Didn't see the talked about Ben Affleck cameo. Must be in the Director's Cut. I have it on Blu-Ray, so I'll get around to it eventually.

I'm about done with the review but I do need to mention the thing that bugs me most. Yes, it's referred to in the film that Elektra has died. It strikes me as a pretty huge oversight that's it's not made completely explicit as to how and why she came back. That was pretty much my biggest question after I saw Daredevil but before I saw this, and I was shocked and dismayed they ignored it like it doesn't even matter. Spoiler alert: It does. Especially if we are to understand how and why Elektra's healing mojo actually worked on Abby at the end.

Sigh. I've seen worse. Including Daredevil. Spawn's rep as the worst superhero movie I've ever seen remains uncontested. **1/2.