The Woman In Red
Posted on | January 17, 2005 at 12:04 pm | Comments Off
We get Martin Luther King Day off from work this year, so that gives me some time to catch up on things like blog updating and e-mail answering. Yesterday, I saw the first comic book movie of the year…
What’s up with the larger than life figures having an OCD problem? First The Aviator, and now Elektra. I really wanted to like Elektra more than I did, being a fan of the character (at least in her original Frank Miller rendered stories), but the movie was a bit too mild and muddled. First, that OCD thing. There seemed to be no real reason in the movie for her to have an Obsessive Compulsive problem – it didn’t factor into the plot and it really didn’t do anything to help define her character. And I don’t remember her having that affliction in the comics either. There’s a little bit of a plot point with it (recognizing a kindred soul), but it really did seem just thrown in as a useless attempt to define Elektra’s character. I halfway expected her to start saying the same phrase over and over again.
But mostly, the movie is just too dull, mild, and predictable. I think they should’ve gone for the R rating and had Elektra really cut loose. The fight scenes were not intense enough. What’s up with having all the bad guys go up in a puff of green smoke when they die? Oh yeah, they’re all supposed to be demons. Right. Demons with families and everything. And why oh why does every superhero movie have to link the death of a parent (even if it happened a long time ago) to the main villain? That kind of revisionism goes all the way back to the first Tim Burton Batman movie, where suddenly it was the Joker who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents instead of a semi-anonymous mugger. It’s become such a predictable shortcut to a character arc and for Hollywood movie-ending closure (hero gets revenge for death of family), that it almost seems they’re not allowed to have any other sort of origin these days. (Other recent movie examples: Kingpin killing Daredevil’s father, and Hulk’s father being responsible for his mother’s death. At least in Spider-Man 1, it wasn’t the Green Goblin who killed Uncle Ben, though I’m sure if the series goes on long enough, we’ll learn that some supervillain killed his actual parents.) It also would’ve helped if they had made the villain(s) interesting. Why put Typhoid (Mary) in the movie, if you’re not really going to do anything with her? Nothing was done with the split personality that she displayed as a Daredevil villain.
And, as I mentioned, the movie is muddled. There are flashback scenes where Elektra is being trained by Stick, but I never really caught if those scenes were supposed to be from before or after she was brought back to life by him. There’s no real explanation of how she fell in with Stick in the first place. Some background there would’ve been more character-defining than the revenge-for-parent’s-death and OCD shortcuts. Terrance Stamp did make a great Stick, but I wished he had more to do than show up occasionally and impart Great Wisdom.
At times, the stuff with the father and daughter looked like it was going places, but ultimately it was just a way of giving the movie a plot without giving it a real plot, if you know what I mean. It was just a way of getting her into the places she needed to be for other stuff to happen. The filmmakers didn’t really seem all that sure of what they wanted to do with the daughter, as her sudden character and background changes were a bit too out of left field. And don’t even get me started on the near romance with the father, played by Goran Visnjic with his usual Slavic accent, even though it appears the character is supposed to be all-American. That sure didn’t go anywhere. And then there’s the bad attempt at a comic-relief confidant character, as his fate was obvious from the start. Formula, formula, formula. I did like the actor though.
They also inexplicably divorced the movie from the Daredevil movie (aside from one quick flashback of her death), which also contributed to the muddle. Was she a paid assassin back at the time of that movie, or was that something she fell into after it (after her death)? In Daredevil, we just saw that she was a really good fighter, not necessarily that she was a hitwoman. There was nothing in this movie to show how her experiences from that movie affected her.
Jennifer Garner did a good job with what she had to work with, and it’s always nice to see her kick butt, but I can see that every week on Alias. Even though I had a lot of problems with this movie, I was actually able to stay awake for most of it (credit Garner), so Elektra gets a one on the Nod-O-Meter.
The movie also had the trailer for Sin City, which just made me all the more anxious to see that Frank Miller-based adaption than the one I was there for. There was also a trailer for Fantastic Four which didn’t really show much. It simultaneously eased some of my fears and confirmed others. I really think I’m going to hate what they do with Doctor Doom in that movie. And I’m sure in it, he probably killed everyone’s parents.
Latre.