Elektra: Critic Reviews

Elektra girds her loins with less intensity of purpose than if she were scanning the darkness for signs of copyright infringement.

The latest Hollywood movie to give comic books a bad name, Elektra stars Jennifer Garner as a superheroine who dons fetish-wear the color of blood before laying waste to every man in sight.

Garner, adept as she is at physical stunts and action moves, is far more appealing when she's playing charming and adorable, as she did so winningly in 13 Going on 30.

What it suffers from most is the sense of offhand storytelling that lies halfway between creative laziness and cost-cutting sloppiness.

[Garner] does all the stuff you can see her do on Wednesday nights -- namely, some of her own stunt work in outrageous costumes -- but without an ounce of zeal, charisma, or purpose.

Offers no surprises, and whether or not you'll appreciate its modest charms depends entirely on whether you too have been anticipating Garner's new outfit.

Elektra is stripped of the unrepentant ferocity that made her a crossover hit in the first place. Here, she quickly succumbs to her gooey, maternal side -- which means if ever there's a sequel, she'll have no edge.

It's listless, lame and sloppy enough to make last year's Catwoman seem agile.

Plays like a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories.

Devotees of awful filmmaking can't go wrong with this one.

This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or Kill Bill-style wisecracks.

Kill Bill without irony, and without Quentin Tarantino's flair for cool dialogue and chop-socky action (and without Uma Thurman, for that matter).

What might have been at best a silly Xena-style martial-arts adventure meanders listlessly through swaths of relationship drama.

Hmmm, where have I seen this before? Oh, yes, I saw it Wednesday night on television. Except her hair was pink. And I had eight more bucks in my wallet.

Garner's one-note performance isn't the only thing crippling this undercooked comic-book adventure. There's a patchy script that bumps along in fits and starts, but never comes to life.

Alternately too talky to triumph as an action vehicle and too frenetic to be fleshed out to succeed as a drama.

Resembles nothing so much as a dumbed-down, PG-13 version of Kill Bill, put together by a team tone-deaf to bad dialogue, atrocious acting, cheesy special effects and clumsily staged action sequences.

The film's multi-writer screenplay struggles vainly to hide its plagiarized themes and action beats.

The constant talk and tease of Elektra is sure to cause even more male frustration than Catwoman and Tomb Raider, where the femmes were similarly dolled up and then sexed down to appease the nanny censors.

That she is in fact a hired assassin on a $2-million contract killing is charmingly offset by the fact that she wears no makeup and ties her (albeit ridiculously) long brown hair back in a ponytail.

The sad thing about Elektra is that it reveals that for all the millions of dollars now spent on them, comic-book movies are being made with no more distinction than the cheapest old Saturday-afternoon serials.

Without a viable screenplay, there's nowhere for the character to go, and no way to avoid making her look silly.

A ponderously inert, disjointed drag that's anything but live action.

Everything comes back to Garner, though -- and even when the movie takes itself too seriously, thankfully she never does.

Breathlessly boring spinoff of Daredevil.