ELEKTRA

Things are not looking good for a film when the opening scene has you tapping your watch.

A bad guy sits in a chair in a poorly-lit room, waiting to die. You know he is bad, because he is played by ubiquitous bad guy Jason Isaacs (i.e. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and The Patriot). He narrates his impending death to a useless burly security guard, who watches Elektra (Jennifer Garner) on the security cameras make mincemeat of the various body guards throughout the building. But she takes her time, because in the meantime, the bad guy apparently has to tell a story for what seems like an hour, explaining how really very bad she is. Then... finally... she stabs him in the back, much to our relief.

Our first true visual introduction to Elektra is an ass shot. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But if they were able to pull of this sort of gratuitous camp throughout the film, it actually would have been watchable. Instead, Elektra—bafflingly—seems to take itself rather seriously, despite the fact that her hair always seems to blow behind her, even when she is indoors.

Elektra, apparently, is an assassin. She has an assassin-pimp, who inexplicably wears lots of visible eye makeup, who comes and offers her One Last Job. She begrudgingly takes it, but after lots and lots of meditation and a nice Christmas dinner, decides she can't go through with it. See, her targets are a hot single dad (Goran Visnjic), whom she wants to make out with, and his precocious teen daughter (Kirsten Prout), who might have some fighting talents of her own. Elektra is reminded (over and over) about how her own mom was murdered when she was a child, which caused her to end up in a super-hero fighting school or something. She got booted, and became a bad-seed... but much like the far-superior Xena: Warrior Princess, Elektra might have a shot at redemption if she can help these folks outrun The Hand.

Yes, The Hand.

OK, when I heard that the Evil Conglomerate that was out to get the dad and kid was called The Hand, I kept picturing Michael Caine getting attacked in his shower by his own amputated hand, which could crawl up walls and leap at his throat and such. Or maybe Ash in the Evil Dead movies getting into fist-fights with his amputated hand (is this some sort of movie genre?). But no, The Hand is, I guess, a band of bad guys with laughable, literal bad-guy names like Tattoo and Stone and Stick and Typhoid Mary. They are all offed rather easily, so that Elektra can have a endless showdown with Kirigi (Will Yun Lee), whose hair also has the super-hero feature of being able to blow in the wind pleasingly. ("Nice hair!" you can't help but murmur to yourself during the endless and surprisingly dull climax.)

If Elektra had more skin shots, it would have been better. If the fight scenes weren't so poorly shot and crappily-edited, it would have been better. If it had less distracting CGI tricks, it would have been better. If it took itself less seriously, it would have been a LOT better. But, for a comic book movie, it tries to convince us that the movie has a message, and that we darn better take it into consideration with thoughtful nods. But, C'MON, it is based on a COMIC! Aren't comics supposed to be fun? Note to filmmakers: When the audience laughs AT a movie instead of WITH it, they ARE having fun, but not the way you intended.